Creating Successful Internal Tools as Product Manager

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Product Managers create a variety of products. Consumer vs Enterprise products is a board category under which most products fall. But lately we can see a third type of product — internal tools. A consumer product manager is creating products for user to solve their problem. This product is monetized by usage or ads. Enterprise products are created to make users / customers work better. These require extensive sales, support and integrations teams. Managing both of these products is a different ball game. And along with domain expertise the product manager needs to have a good grip on the target users, completive analysis and market trends. Now comes the third type of product — internal tools. These products are created to make internal employee’s work efficient. The purpose is to remove friction for internal employees in their day to day work and drive productivity.

Assigning metrics to determine success of these tools is challenging. With other products you can track acquisition / adoption / DAU / Revenue / user growth and you can quantify it. But internal tools which help employees communicate within the team or submit travel expenses cannot directly translate into company’s vision or objectives. For example, if a manual process is automated to save employees time and improve productivity then you can downsize as a direct metric of the tool to automate the process.

Managing internal tool is a tricky game. In-house products are first used to improve productivity of the employees but sometimes they turn out to be an addition to the company’s product offering. For example, Hangout was started as a collaborative tool for Google employees, but it eventually became a part of Google suit.

Let’s see some drivers to create internal tools. These can be used as metric to measure the success of the tool as well.

1. Cost Saving — Nothing drives decisions faster than $$. Consumer / enterprise products can impact the revenue but to evaluate direct financial impact for internal tools is difficult. One area where the internal tools can create massive savings is when you save of buying / licensing ready solutions. Cost saving can be justified in multiple ways. Retiring old legacy systems, discarding needs to support legacy systems, licensing or purchasing of new solution all of it could result in huge savings. When you build something in-house you are saving thousands on licensing, support and maintenance. For example, large enterprises like Symantec, Cisco are investing in licensee management systems to save on licensing software like Flexera.
2. Data Security — Data security is another important reason to invest on internal tools. Companies are tracking more data on products, users and partners for analysis. Data security laws are constantly evolving. Even after ensuring complete data security organizations are still facing data loss and attacks, risking compliance and customer trust. A lot of third-party tools and services expose organizations sensitive data. Facebook, even with its best talent and resources has been struggling with data security issues for a long time. Building an internal tool for business sensitive data is a way controlling end to end security for the data.
3. Speed of Development — When you want to ‘Move fast’ you want to control the speed of development at the same time roadmap of the tool. Any customization on a third-party tool is costly also if you want the solution fast then you pay even more for it. Internal tools can be developed at the pace of your business needs. You can use resources as needed and support multiple tools as needed to optimize your resources.
4. Frictionless Work for Employees — This is a qualitative driver to build in-souse tools. Automating day to day manual operations will improve productivity and improve feel good factor by reducing manual work. These tools could some shell scripts, internal platform to deploy code, test automation or just a tool to submit travel expenses. This can be measured through interviews and surveys.
5. Adoption Effort — For internal tools, user adoption is a very important metric to measure the success of the tool. No company will spend resources on tool which is not used by anyone. The true sentiment of the users will reflect from user adoption. Find influencers within your stakeholders and user teams. Involve them in the design and UAT phase. Create easy product tutorials and have active communication on the impact of the tool. Have fun launch events or incentives for early adopters. Actively collect feedback and publish improvements regularly.

In the end, as a PM it shouldn’t matter if it is an internal tool. You will have your set of users and their problems. You have to ensure that the tool will impact the users at the same time it falls true to company’s values.

Additional good read on the topic -https://www.mironov.com/pmskills2/