Product Roadshows: Promoting your Internal Products

How to build relationships with your customers and increase the impact of your internal products.

Although the vast majority of product examples are always about consumer-facing products like Netflix or Uber, a lot of us Product Managers are working on internal products. Products that are built for fellow colleagues. I have done so myself as well and I found that promoting your product is just as important as working on an external-facing product.

In this article, I write about the nature of an internal product, and how doing Product Roadshows helped me to build relationships with customers. Building better products and more importantly — making sure that we were indeed making an impact. I end the article by sharing some learnings and tips that could hopefully help you in starting these initiatives yourself.

Internal Products: a Blessing and a Curse

I think it is underestimated how many teams are actually working on products for internal use only. Very often it's to build certain tools for operational departments, or for example to build and improve development tools for engineers. In general, the goal is to create solutions to make your colleagues more productive.