Building Internal Products
The word ‘intranet’ comes with a huge amount of well-deserved baggage. Many (most?) of us have experience of badly designed, difficult-to-use internal platforms which are widely ignored, worked around or actively disliked.
Evergreen problems contribute to this; under-resourced teams, working with inflexible software products and cultural challenges around governance/ownership. But there is also the broader issue of approach.
For the last 4 years, we have applied a user-led approach to the intranet at Wellcome. With a dedicated multi-disciplinary product team, we work in an agile way to iterate and improve the site, responding to organisational needs pro-actively to create a product that is both widely loved and incredibly valuable.
There are many good reasons for organisations to buy an intranet rather than build one, but here’s why we believe a product approach can be key to avoiding many of the pitfalls traditionally associated with intranet design and management.
Trustnet
Trustnet, Wellcome’s intranet, has many of the features you would expect from a mature internal platform.
The homepage collates a personalised selection of news and events, covering the huge diversity of work and interests for the organisation.
Org charts and personal profiles are populated with data from our HR system and the site integrates with many of our other internal tools (Slack / O365 / our meeting room booking software etc). This aims to provide a single, consistent interface for employees to get stuff done quickly.
There is a robust search function to surface key information and contacts. This search is bolstered by an editorially-managed taxonomy to collate content and people around themes of work or interest.
Our Groups functionality supports the creation and management of staff networks as well as providing a context for staff to talk about their work.
Commenting and “giving Kudos” are actively encouraged to increase organisational transparency and allow staff to talk directly and openly to the senior leadership about the issues they are passionate about.
But Trustnet isn’t different because of what it does, but how it’s made.
A Digital Approach
4 years ago Trustnet was a fairly typical, fairly terrible intranet. It was ugly, engagement was poor, it didn’t really do anything very well (apart from a really popular noticeboard!). Our in-house digital team was given the job to rebuild it, developing the new site using an approach which has since developed into this set of overarching principles;
- We create experiences that help users achieve their goals
- We work in the open
- We focus on the users
- We work together using inclusive processes
- We build products that solve real problems
- We create accessible products
This approach is, of course, commonly applied and accepted methodology for building digital products, but is rarely applied to internal tools. As a product manager, my role is to balance these competing drivers;
The most important differentiator for our intranet is in the unerring focus on understanding user need and designing with this as an integral, primary part of our process. The best way to build a successful product is to understand the user and to get better and better at meeting their needs.
The reward of this approach is seen most clearly in engagement.
Engagement and value
High-levels of engagement are the holy grail for all products and by far the biggest barrier to a successful intranet. Without engagement, new features and amazing content lose much of their potential impact. A user-led approach mitigates much of this risk by including the audience as co-author. Put simply, if you build the thing that users want (and help to define), they are far more likely to use it.
For Trustnet the impact of this approach on engagement has been profound;
- 98% of employees visit the site over any 2 week period
- On average 11 news articles are read per employee per week
- 45% of employees have posted an article in the last 12 months
This level of interaction brings enormous benefits. Wellcome is able to communicate internally incredibly effectively. For departments across the organisation, Trustnet is the primary platform for sharing strategic goals, key events and project updates. Trustnet has become embedded in key processes with teams, departments and staff networks able to leverage this audience to organically build and develop community. to share knowledge and insights.
In the most recent staff survey 92% of employees say they “have a clear understanding of Wellcome’s mission”
From a product perspective, the team is able to build and release new features confident of sufficient buy-in. This creates a virtuous loop in development with each iterative improvement increasing the product’s usefulness *and* more importantly the sense of shared ownership for staff. Rather than having an intranet they have to use, Wellcome staff have a product which feels like it belongs to them and for which, in many cases, there is a strong emotional attachment. Here are some comments we received in a recent staff survey;
“I’m still relatively new and have to say that Trustnet is fantastic, like nothing else I’ve ever used! Appreciate how content is always being kept fresh and how easy & quick it is to find info.”
“I loooooove Trustnet. It’s really easy to use. And pretty.”
If you build it they will come
This approach isn’t a cure-all for the (many) intranet woes referenced above and I’ll be writing about some of the challenges we have experienced in a future article. But despite these challenges and the inherent risks (especially around upfront cost and ongoing resource), there are clear benefits in committing to create an internal product, rather than buying an intranet-as-service.
At it’s best, an internal product can become not only a useful part of the employee experience but also an expression of how effective the organisation is at listening and responding to the voices and opinions of staff. As with so many things, ‘the how’ you do something is just as important as ‘the what’ you do, the impact may take longer to achieve but the potential for that impact is far greater.
