This research was conducted in partnership with Censuswide, who surveyed 1,350 EPD (engineering, product management, and design) leaders and team members at Commercial, Mid-Market, and Enterprise organizations across the USA, UK, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, Austria, and Switzerland. Fieldwork ran from July 16–25, 2025.
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Bottom Line Up Front
Summary: Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) teams are caught in the Context Gap: Only 33% feel aligned with cross-functional partners, and teams waste hours updating multiple systems instead of building products. AI can help—and while 91% claim good AI adoption, tools and workflows are still too fragmented for AI to truly help.
Solution: A three-phase approach that starts with centralizing company knowledge, then connecting workflows, and finally applying embedded AI that works with complete context.
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Product development has never been more important—or more challenging. Teams have access to more powerful tools than ever, but manual processes and misaligned teams still slow everything down. The promise is that AI will unlock unprecedented speed and innovation. The reality is that most teams are running below potential.
EPD teams drive company growth but face mounting pressure to continue to ship faster with higher quality. The gap between AI hype and real productivity gains is widening, so the companies that overcome this gap now will have a significant competitive advantage.
To learn more, we surveyed 1,350 Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) leaders and team members across 10 countries to understand the real barriers to EPD productivity and AI impact. Turns out, teams are caught in the Context Gap: While teams burn time updating tools and chasing information, they're increasingly misaligned on the work that actually matters.
The solution isn't more tools. It's bridging gaps by centralizing knowledge, connecting workflows, and making AI accessible to everyone.
Here’s an example: A product manager thinks their team is aligned on requirements for a new feature they’re building. The engineering lead is confident everyone understands the technical constraints. The designer believes the user flow is crystal clear to all stakeholders.
Yet only 33% of EPD teams actually feel fully aligned with their core product development team and cross-functional partners.
Just 37% of Engineering teams reported feeling “fully aligned” with their development team and cross-functional partners, compared to just 27% of Designers.
The problem is, leadership thinks everything is fine. 85% of executives believe teams are aligned, compared to just 72% of individual contributors (ICs). This shows that the people actually building the products see a different reality than those setting the strategy.