 Hi everyone, thank you for joining this session on creating impact as an internal product manager. I'm really happy to get this opportunity to talk about my experience and to share any insights that I have gained from it. So let's get started. Before we begin, I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Zareena Ashraf. I am currently a senior product manager at booking.com. And I drive the design system team there. Now a design system is a product that helps designers and developers build consistent user experiences efficiently. I've been an IT for about 12 years now, out of which six years have or the six of the past years have been in product management. I really enjoy the challenge of delivering beautiful user experiences in complex cross-functional products. I have an MBA in marketing and I also hold a bachelor's in electrical engineering. I'm currently based in Amsterdam with my family. So nice to meet all of you. For some of those who have joined the session today, the term internal product manager might be something new. So let's spend some time to understand that better. Internal product managers build products that help businesses be more efficient, grow at scale and gain a competitive edge. Ultimately, they support teams and departments to be more efficient and deliver more value. Internal PMs not only help customer-facing teams, but also any other business department. Think of an automation of recurring operational tasks and workflows in an organization, or a tool that displays customer information and performance metrics, or even a system that integrates work streams and data flows between marketing, operations and finance. They are all examples of internal products. Now, the terminology of the role can vary hard to work. Some refer to them as technical product managers, some even call them non-revenue product managers, internal PMs or platform PMs. For the sake of this presentation, I will refer to this role as internal product manager. If you use the Pragmatic Institute's framework as a reference and you take away the blocks relating to pricing and sales, you do see that all the remaining blocks are very much relevant to what an internal PM would do for the products that they own. Even though internal PMs work on products that don't directly generate revenue, their work does ultimately contribute to the company's growth and success. Now, we have established who internal product managers are. Let's see how this position can deliver impactful change. Internal PMs can be seen sometimes as the slightly less glamorous sibling of feature PMs, but my experience has taught me that it can be a very satisfying role if you operate keeping a few things in mind. This session is focused on delivering impact, but what does impact look like for an internal product? In this context, impact refers to the effect or influence that the product has on the organization and its operations. This impact could take different forms like increased efficiency, cost savings, improved collaboration among its teams, increased employee satisfaction or even the achievement of business goals. Now, as a PM, you want to create products that meet the needs of the users and provide value to the organization all the time, minimizing any negative effects. And so the success of the product is determined by how much value it brings to the organization. And here, its impact is a crucial metric for assessing this. Now, if only delivering impact was so easy, we would not need this session, right? But there are some challenges internal PMs face. Understanding user needs. It can be challenging to gather and understand the needs of users that are so often diverse. And because of that, there may not be a clear way to prioritize them. Balancing conflicting priorities. As internal PMs, you will receive multiple requests from different departments or stakeholders, each with conflicting priorities. So now, which one do you pick up first? Limited resources. You often have to work with limited resources like time, budget and team members because most companies want to focus their firepower on customer raising products. Complex stakeholder management. This one is tricky because you have to manage multiple stakeholders across various functions and varying management levels. It can be challenging to balance the needs of each group by keeping the product vision intact. Organizational alignment. You need to ensure that the products you develop align with the company's overall strategy and goals. Now, this can be challenging considering that some departments might have completely different priorities and objectives. Lack of user feedback. Unlike external customer products, internal products may not have mechanisms established to obtain user feedback. And even if they do, the number of users that are many that exist are many times not large enough for us to get significant insights. This can make it really difficult to understand user needs and preferences. Resistance to change. Introducing new products or features within a company can be met with a lot of resistance, especially from users who are comfortable with the status quo. You need to navigate this resistance and build support for your ideas. Finding that balance between innovation and practicality. The sky is the limit as far as what you can achieve. But let's get a bit realistic about what actually is doable with given the constraints of people and time. So you must ensure that the products you develop are feasible, scalable and profitable. Ensuring adoption. Even the best design products will fail if they're not adopted by users. In some cases, processes or the company might mandate that each employee use your product. But what happens if it's an option or an alternative that employees have and you really need to drive adoption? Okay, that is a huge list. Now, what will it take for us to go from this chaotic mesh of challenges on the left to reach a point on the right where we gain control of the product and start reflecting the intended outcomes? Okay, this list might look familiar. You're right. There's the same list of issues that we looked at a second back. Let's see how we can handle each group of these challenges. One, direct. Direct the product and the team to better align with the organization. Two, focus. Focus on the user and build customer-centered products. Three, engage with your customers to bring down barriers to adopt. And four, measure outcomes. And that is going to help in each of these above points that I mentioned earlier. Let's deep dive a little bit more. Direct. As a product manager for an internal product, you need to be in the driver's seat and give the team and the product the direction to ensure continued positive progress. Use your skills to guide the product and the team towards delivering impactful outcomes while maintaining alignment with the organization. Now, while you can explore more methods, what I would recommend is these three key steps. Build a business case, define a product vision and strategy, and have effective stakeholder management. Why do we need to build a business case? Because what is your reason to exist? Why should the company invest in your team? Why should a group of people put time and effort into the solution that you propose? There's so many ways. So, crafting a concise and well-defined business case is crucial for the future prosperity of the product. It helps articulate the pain points that the product seeks to address. So, make sure you describe the problem statement, the approaches that you have considered, and the alternatives that you have evaluated. Describe the risk of not doing anything and even the risk of each approach. Based on all the factors, what is the solution that you recommend? Outline the business value the solution provides. Describe the scale of a solution in a language that makes sense for senior stakeholders. For example, the business benefit could be the cost savings of doing things right once and consistently across the company. Define the product vision and strategy. Now, this is where we go deeper into the value the product will provide and how you will go about it. Some internal products are borne out of hackathons or a solution to urgent problem statements that existed at the time. By building a product vision and strategy, you use the opportunity to describe how this tool goes beyond that one automation it delivered or how it's a solution that will benefit users beyond the current fiscal year. It will force you to outline and discuss your assumptions and push you to think more deeply about it. Take a team through your product's vision and strategy, review the actions you are taking now and how they contribute to that vision. Be open to feedback and feel comfortable to incorporate it into your strategy. The product vision can provide a clear direction for the team to focus on and prioritize their efforts towards achieving a specific common outcome. It also helps to align stakeholders around a common objective and ensure that everyone is on the same page. We also use this opportunity to tie the product with the company's objectives, outline how it aligns with and contributes to each objective. As most feature or customer facing teams work on products or business capabilities, it is important to decode how your product complements their goals. One thing I like to do towards the beginning of the year when everybody is setting objectives is to be observant of the objectives of the more customer facing teams. I identify the opportunities for our product team to support and enable them in order to achieve their objectives. In this way, my product not only will increase efficiency, bring in cost savings and improve employee satisfaction, but it will also result in contributing to improving revenue for the business. It's important to highlight here that your vision will provide a benchmark for measuring progress and evaluating whether the team is moving in the right direction. Much of what product leadership entails even for an internal product is creating alignment and enthusiasm for an idea, so use your product vision to get that conversation started. Internal products are slightly harder when it comes to stakeholder management and this is why. One, you have multiple stakeholders and they exist across the company, they exist across crafts and functions and different management levels. Each group has different priorities, needs and interests and it can become challenging to manage all of them effectively. You own a product that is not customer facing, which means that it can become challenging to demonstrate the value of the product and gain support from stakeholders who may not understand its importance. Resistance to change. Nobody likes to disturb status quo. So it can make it challenging to gain buy-in and support for your products, especially if they require significant changes to existing workflows or processes. These are the strategies that I feel can help. One, identify your stakeholders. Start by identifying all the key people who will be impacted by your product. This includes employees, managers, leaders and any other groups of individuals. Make sure you consider the needs, expectations and their priorities. Establish clear communication channels. Keep stakeholders informed about the progress of the product, its benefits and any potential challenges. This can include regular status updates, progress reports, feedback sessions, be proactive and highlight dependencies that might need unblocking. Build relationships. Build relationships with your stakeholders by engaging with them regularly and seeking their input and feedback. This will help create a sense of ownership and involvement amongst the stakeholders and increase their support for the product. Also identify key stakeholders who hold slightly more influence because of their position and can help better communicate with other decision makers. Set realistic expectations. Be transparent about what the product can do, cannot do and set realistic expectations for its impact and timeline. Now this will help manage stakeholder expectations and avoid disappointment or frustration. Prioritize feedback and address those concerns. Prioritize feedback from your stakeholders and use it to inform the development of your product. So you are slowly making sure that you are moving in a direction that is amplifying benefits. Address concerns or issues that stakeholders have, react to them promptly and effectively. This will help to build trust and credibility and demonstrate your commitment to their needs. The next step we now talk about users. Customer centricity is as important for internal products because just like external customers, internal users have specific needs and requirements that must be met for the product to be successful. Once you do this, you now create products that are more efficient, effective and user friendly. And that in turn can lead to increased adoption, improved productivity and a better overall experience for the users. My recommendations to do this are to firstly leverage the user base, chase outcomes and maintain your captive audience. How can you leverage a user base? For an external product manager, users are people outside of the company like customers, sellers or other third parties who use the product. Whereas for an internal PM, your customers are your colleagues and your peers, which will of course include employees within the company and departments. Now, while being the main source of requirements, internal users can sometimes be harder to manage. Imagine having to justify your latest feature that you released in the last quarter over your lunch break or deal with clarifications about how to use a feature while you run to get some coffee. Not really, really fun, huh? Now on the flip side, you have easy access to your customers. Take opportunities to understand the needs and goals of your users. This involves conducting customer research, analyzing customer feedback and identifying pain points or areas for improvement. Involve users in the process. By involving them in the development process, they feel more invested in the product and they feel seen. You can do this by user testing or conducting focus groups. This will ensure that the product is designed with their needs in mind. Now, when I'm in conversations with other PMs, I like to give them a heads up on a feature or initiative we feel will be relevant to them. And this feature could be coming up in the next few months. So this gives them a feeling that not only am I as a PM sensitive to their needs, but I'm also working towards addressing and prioritizing them. Chase outcomes over milestones. Prioritize features based on customer value. Focus on product features based on the value they provide to the end user. This will help you ensure that the product is aligned with their needs and their goals. Instead of milestones like in project plans, focus on initiatives that contribute to the outcomes that you want to see. It can be easy to slip into a mode of funding or prioritizing features based on milestones like in a project plan. But in all likelihood that would lead to fragmented features that shift the product further and further away from the company's objectives. Now, this step becomes easier when you have done the due diligence of identifying what the core value of a product is. And like you would with any product, use your vision and mission as a compass to prioritize what makes the most impact to your company and to your users. This has been a learning for me in my current role considering how I used to operate in my past positions. But what I've learned is that it takes some gumption and some bravery to take an outcome based approach. Why? Because now at the end of the quarter or the year, you have to demonstrate the outcomes you have achieved. The best part though is it gives you, the PM, so much flexibility to adjust the roadmap as needed to achieve the desired outcome. Maintain your captive audience. In most companies, users will be recommended to use your tool or protocols will mandate that they use your product. Now, in case they are unhappy with their experience, you now have not a captive but a fugitive user group who is so frustrated because they don't have an alternative. Now, this might not result in a loss of revenue, but it will definitely impact how your product is perceived and used in the future. So acknowledge user frustration. Establish feedback loops and provide excellent customer support to ensure that users have a positive experience with the product. This includes providing support resources and responding promptly to feedback and issues. Maintain current documentation of your features and give users the tools to learn and explore the product by themselves. Use all this as a mechanism to build trust. Additionally, you never know where your next best idea comes from. We get many feature requests from our users that provide us with new perspectives and insights into the product. Engage. Engage with users and build relationships that will foster trust and loyalty. The following two points will get the ball rolling for you. First, market your product to your users. And second, stay current in your area of operation. Let me tell you more about it. Market the product. Now, most PMs would have worn the marketer hat at least once. Now, let your talent shine here too. By now, you would have had a better understanding of who your users are, what are the groups or the cohorts that they form. Use it to develop a strategy focusing on individual user groups because one size may not fit all. For example, the design system that I work with services developers, designers, and product managers. We realized that we had to communicate in varying degrees of technical details. In order for the information to seem relevant to each of these user groups. Market your product. Take opportunities to educate and build awareness to its benefit. For example, in large companies, you have a constant stream of new joiners or employees who have recently switched departments. Identify them and hold a training or an introduction session of the product for them. This is a great way to get them on board and start exploring your product. Leverage blogs, workplace, forums, and company events. Take these as chances to generate interest in what you offer and to amplify its impact. Staying current. This is important because you need to stay current with what is happening both externally and internally. If your product does not stay current, it can become outdated, less effective, and potentially even obsolete. You don't want that. In addition to decreased user satisfaction, this can also lead to a variety of other negative consequences for the organization. Such as decreased productivity, decreased efficiency, higher costs, and a decreased competitive edge. So first, periodically evaluate and benchmark against external competitors. The company might have decided three, four years back not to use an external tool, but to build the solution in-house. Time has passed and the market has so much more evolved products out there. And if your product has not kept up with the times, it is possible that solution is not providing the benefits to the company like it did before. You may be reaching a point of obsolete product. We'll do this slide again. Staying current in your area of operation is really, really important. And this applies to... Sorry, I'll do this slide again. Stay current in your area of operation is really critical. So keep be aware of what is happening both externally and internally. If your product does not stay current, it can become outdated, less effective, and potentially even obsolete. In addition to decreased user satisfaction, this can also lead to a variety of other negative consequences. Like decreased productivity, decreased efficiency, higher costs, and a decreased competitive edge. So how do you go about doing that? First, periodically evaluate and benchmark against external competitors. The company might have decided three years back to not use an external tool, but to build the solution in-house. Now time has passed and the market has much more evolved products out there. If your product does not keep up with the time, it is possible that the solution you build is not providing the benefits to the company like before. This can lead to decreased productivity and increased frustration amongst the users. Listen to and observe your users to improve user satisfaction. Be vigilant to whether touch points with your product are overburdening your users at any point. Engage with them to understand their evolving needs, wants, and pain points. And use that information to guide the development of your product to service, ensuring that it meets their needs at all times. Stay updated on processes. If there are changes in processes or protocols intern and even in the company, introspect on how your product can adapt to it. Staying aligned with processes will ensure that your product stays relevant to its users. Make sure you stay aligned with the company direction and are working to contribute to it. A company that maintains a portfolio of internal products that are aligned with its direction can gain a really strong competitive advantage. But that's on the PMs to ensure that continued alignment. We come to the last part of our solutions or strategies, measuring. Measure the impact of your product to drive direction and ensure its continued relevance within the organization. This can be done by monitoring smartly and demonstrating value. Without good monitoring mechanisms, your product will suffer due to lack of accountability, inefficient use of resources and missed opportunities. So to maintain the health of your product, you need to define clear metrics. Metrics used by external and internal products are very different. For an external product, their metrics are customer driven, like revenue, growth, retention rate. But for an internal product, we can't use something like retention rate because in all likelihood, users will not stop using our product as long as they are in the organization. Before launching the product or before reaching a key milestone, define clear metrics that will be used to measure its impact. These metrics should be tied to the goals and objectives of the product, like increasing efficiency, productivity or employee satisfaction. Metrics should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and tie-bound. Make them smart. Collect feedback. Collect feedback from users of the product to understand how it is being used and identify areas of improvement. This can be done through surveys, focus groups or user testing. Analyze usage data. Analyze usage data. Analyze usage data to determine how often the product is being used, which features are being used the most and which features probably aren't being used as much. This can help identify areas of improvement or you make sure that there are some features that can be removed. Track performance. This is really important to see if the product is meeting the defined benchmarks or performance. So put in place mechanisms to track that as part of the product code or its implementation. Now make the process of gathering the data points as frictionless as possible. To do that, forge relationships with the teams using the product. So you have the collaboration in getting the inputs you need. And the second point is really important, automate as much as possible. We can all agree that having to chase down 20-30 stakeholders every quarter to update a Google Sheet is really not fun for anybody involved. The second step, demonstrate the value. Take opportunities to demonstrate value. This is a chance to engage with your stakeholders and it helps to tie your product vision with how you are building a customer-centric product. See what I did there. I connected all the blocks together. Many times, internal product teams almost operate in the shadows or they choose to communicate only to the stakeholders directly involved with them. Take space in the company and remind your organization about the business problem that your team is working on and solving and its current progress. So share the success metrics. Whether it be user satisfaction or performance metrics, let users see in quantifiable ways what is the value you have delivered. Share positive feedback from users and their success stories. As humans, we relate to personal experiences very intrinsically. Display and celebrate outcomes and important milestones. Announce that recent feature that you all worked on or call out the start of the latest experiment. Establish a team's presence and reaffirm that progress is being made in the right direction. The future looks bright for internal PMs. As companies continue to focus on innovation and digital transformation, the need for internal PMs will only increase. Here are some key trends that will shape the future internal PMs in the industry. Agile methodologies. Now agile methodology has become the norm in all types of product development internal as well. So as an internal PM you need to be proficient in it to ensure that you're working on products efficiently. Increased focus on user-centric design. Internal PMs will need to focus more on the user experience and develop products that meets the needs of the users. So we go back to the reason that we need to gather feedback, listen to our users and make informed product development decisions. Integration of emerging technologies. As emerging technologies such as AI, blockchain, IoT become just mainstream, internal PMs will now need to understand these technologies and try to think ahead of how they can bring it into their workspace. Cross-functional collaboration. Internal PMs will need to work closely with other teams including development design, marketing that to ensure that products are developed and launched successfully. Increased importance of data analytics. You will need to be proficient somewhat in data analytics to gather insights and make informed decisions that will drive your team. Emergence of no code and low code. Now this has created a new techno-functional space in business operations which is perfect for our product managers. Overall the future of internal PMs in the industry looks promising and they can be pivotal to empowering teams and setting them up with success. With that I come to the end of my presentation. I really hope you found the session informative and useful. If you have any further questions or you would like to continue the conversation I invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn. You can just type in my name and you'll see my face. Thank you for your time and attention today. Bye.