Building Well-Loved Products: Product Management for Internal Tools

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Internal products play an important role in the success of a company. Managing an internal product comes with its own set of advantages and challenges. This article aims to provide some clarity on what it’s like to manage an internal product and to offer a practical perspective on how to bring value to the company and to the people who use the product.

What are internal-facing products?

Internal-facing products are used to support the company and its various business activities. In other words, these types of products are usually built to simplify and optimize the day-to-day work of internal teams. Think of: HR tools, internal communication tools, customer support platform, admin panels, and so on.

Main features:

• Built as part of a larger digital transformation process that a company undergoes, with the goal of enhancing how it operates
• Help the company to be more efficient, drive innovation, and gain a competitive advantage
• Address the needs of users internal to the company or enable the company to satisfy the needs of their customers
• Not sold directly to customers

To clarify, here are some examples:

Example 1: An internal tool that assists the sales team to properly manage deals with customers. This product would streamline activities for the sales team, make them more efficient, give them more time to focus on other tasks, and do more client-focused work. As a result, client retention and satisfaction will increase. While the product doesn’t generate revenue, it’s still tied to the company’s profits.

It’s important to note, however, that there might be cases where an internal product is marketed outside the company, if it has proven to solve a more general problem.

Example 2: A project management tool that was built initially as an internal tool to manage a company’s work with the clients. It was then made available for people outside their company because the product was a solution to a problem shared by many.

Internal-facing vs. customer-facing products

Similarities:

• All of the principles for great product management still apply to internal products.
• Product management for internal tools also means starting with identifying customer problems and then building solutions that are loved by the users and good for the business.
• Both customer and internal facing products can provide long-term value for the companies, thus building an internal product can be just as rewarding as working on a customer-facing product.
• For both types of products, fostering a close relationship with the stakeholders is the proven way to success.

Differences:

• Customers of internal-facing products are the “internal users,” aka the employees that work for the company.
• Interaction with the users is easier and getting meaningful feedback from them can be much faster. People with whom you have a working relationship are more likely to want to participate in a user interview or usability session and provide honest feedback without any further incentive.
• Internal-facing products don’t generate direct revenue, but save time and money for companies by increasing efficiency.
• Internal products can have more stakeholders and thus more complex relationships to manage.
• Internal products are used by internal users and can have a direct impact on their lives. This means that internal products are a part of the company’s culture and can influence it.

Focus on what matters

Now that you have a better understanding of internal-facing products, here are 5 tips that can help you succeed in your day-to-day work:

Have a clear vision and strategy

• Determine how your internal product will support the business strategy towards the company vision

Identify where the product stand in the organization value stream

• Be crystal clear on what success means for the business and how the product will contribute to this
• Some questions you can ask: How will the product benefit the company and why should the company invest in the product? For whom is this product created? Why would people want to use it? What is the main problem the product solves or the primary benefit it provides? What success means for the product?

Understand your stakeholders

• Start by finding out who you need to engage with to get a good understanding of the business context. Then find out what’s important to them, what are their business priorities and how each of their teams uses your internal tool. You can then use this information along with the business and product strategy to set the wider context with your team and manage the roadmap of initiatives.
• Meet regularly with your stakeholders and seek feedback for your roadmap, keep your product backlog transparent and make sure it incorporates client feedback or changes in priorities.

Monitor your product performance to demonstrate value.

• Keep in mind that it may be difficult to demonstrate business value since internal products are not directly involved with revenue generation.
• Adoption rate, how happy your users are, and how the product is being used all provide important insights.
• With this information you can map the product performance with business impact, show how well the product is solving problems, and discover ways to improve it.

Don’t lose sight on what the product should accomplish

• Always refer back to the business goal your product needs to reach. E.g.: if the goal is to reduce the amount of time that an internal process takes by 10% within 3 months after the launch of the product, then your efforts should be focused in this direction and you need to continuously measure results to know if you’re on the right path or you need to course-correct.

Avoid common mistakes

Let’s now go through some traps you can run into when building internal products and some ways to avoid these:

Saying ‘yes’ to all internal requests coming from stakeholders

• Try to maintain a bird’s eye view over your entire product ecosystem so that you avoid being overwhelmed with problems or requests.
• Stakeholders for internal products usually expect to have more influence in the decision making process. Keep the strategy in mind when deciding what to build and when. Overly communicate the product strategy to stakeholders to build and maintain a shared understanding.

Skipping the product discovery stage

• You need to constantly balance product discovery and product delivery. If you skip product discovery you’ll fall victim to building the wrong product in a beautiful way.
• Take advantage of having easy access to your users and work with them to understand their problems and match their needs with solutions.
• Continue to interact with them as the product is developed, employ constant hypothesis testing and continue to learn as more is revealed to you.
• Stakes are usually lower for internal products compared with customer-facing products, so experiment with small bets and use the continuous cycles of building-measuring-learning to decide what to do next.

Jumping to suggested solutions

• Focus on the problem identified through interaction with users and not on their proposed solution.
• You want to understand what pain points are behind any specific product requests you are given.
• Spend enough time in the problem space to make sure you fully understand the underlying problem.
• Work with your team to craft solutions that you can validate fast with your users, to make sure you’re solving genuine problems.

Become the evangelist for your product

Internal products don’t benefit from marketing efforts to promote them, at least not to the same extent as for a product that is made available for customers to purchase. Usually there is little or no communication about a product’s features or benefits. You need to take on this role and develop a strategy to educate your stakeholders and users. See below some ideas on how to do this properly:

1. Outline how the product can increase efficiency, bring costs savings or improve employee retention/attraction. Show that what you’re doing matters to the company.
2. Focus on describing what the teams/departments will be able to achieve by using the product. E.g.: how they would be able to improve relation with the clients or improve internal processes and overall efficiency.
3. Find creative ways to support internal teams. Some ideas:

• Create and share materials with them (newsletters, blog posts, product documentation, release notes, FAQs, video tutorials)
• Run regular training sessions and product demos
• Build an online community
• Find product champions and ambassadors

Build products that users love

Keep these three tips in mind to build products that are well-loved:

Treat internal users as paying customers

• Give the same level of caring and attention, users of internal products are still users.
• Always be open to listen to your users and adapt as you learn more.
• Keep people informed about what’s to come next and mention how the changes will benefit them and why they should care.
• Involve them in all stages of building the product, e.g.: testing a feature before launch.

Get to know your users:

• Spend time with teams or departments that will benefit from your product and shadow their work, so you can get a first-hand view of their situation or context.
• Get deep into their problems and needs, practice active listening and try to empathize with them.

Make sure you’re building the right product, not the product right

• Conduct weekly user interviews and validate solutions early on with prototypes. This helps to discover the optimal UX for a flow and expose any gaps in requirements.
• Continuously gather feedback from your stakeholders and users. Find different ways to capture feedback (while using the product or outside the product, organic feedback: monitor team slack channel, create a flow through which your stakeholders and users can request a feature or raise a bug)
• Involve your engineers in the problem analysis and definition stages. It’s important that the people building the product actually understand users’ problems. This way you ensure 2 things: shared understanding among the team and that what gets built will be right for the user.

Key takeaways

• The main goal of internal product management is to build products that improve the company.
• A clear business objective for your product is the best way to align everyone on the journey.
• The most valuable insights will come from those who use the product.
• You must have an in-depth knowledge of the existing users and their challenges.
• Listen carefully and don’t jump to conclusions. Test and validate often.
• You are solving internal user problems and can positively impact their lives.

Follow these tips to ensure your success in building internal products that are well loved. I wish you good luck on your path to greatness!

Resources and further readings:

Product Management for Internal Tools: the Secret Weapon to Great Business Operations | Next Matter

An Introduction to Internal Product Management

Product management for Internal Products | DronaHQ