 Hi, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. My name is Terrence Acby and today I want to talk to you about the power behind internal products and platforms. Let's dig in. So first let me tell you a little bit about myself. I am a senior product manager at Forbes on their platform team and today I want to talk to you about internal products, why are they important, what are some examples of their impact and a few key takeaways at the very end. So first I want to talk about you. When it comes to internal products, I want you to understand that this is a perfect opportunity and a perfect area for junior aspiring or even experienced product managers to jump into because of three core reasons that you see here. First, you get the opportunity to master the business. Unlike other products, internal products focus very much at the core of the business so you need to understand how the business operates in order to be good at managing internal products. Next, you get to master the product, you get to master product management. You have opportunities to work very closely with your users, you get to work very closely with the people who create the product and you don't have the same barriers of access and entry as you would with traditional product management because you're focused on internal employees so you can do user research. You can do user testing, prototyping, measuring impact, etc. Which brings me to my last part, mastering the impact. Because internal products are at the heart of any business, everything that you do impacts the business directly whether it's cost savings or improving productivity or turbo charging revenue. Everything you do brings an impact that's tied directly back to the business. I want to talk a little bit more about what are internal product managers, aka platform PMs. Essentially, we are product managers that focus on internal products. We're very much like traditional product managers with a slight twist. I like to think about it like the difference between a Jay-Z and a Dr. Dre. On one hand, you have a traditional product manager, someone who is a hustler and is customer facing, market driven and focuses on some very specific business metrics like adoption, engagement and revenue. You're simply the face of the business. You're trying to get people to buy into your service and you want to beat out your competitors. That's a lot different from an internal product manager, which is more like a Dr. Dre. They want to focus on making sure you sound or you are at the best of your game. Like Dr. Dre, we're internal facing, we're employee facing, operations driven. We focus on other metrics like productivity, satisfaction, cost savings. No matter how you slice it, we both do the same thing of creating valuable experiences. You might be wondering what are internal products? Essentially internal products are any solution or software that is in-house whether built or bought. It's meant to support business activities. It's not typically sold to consumers outside of the business or customers outside of the business. It's meant to be for the employees. But that said, there are some few edge cases where that isn't the case. I'll talk about that at the end. At its very core, again, internal products are business tools. It's meant to help the business move forward and operate efficiently and promote productivity amongst its employees. Internal products come in a lot of different shapes and forms. Here's a list provided by Retool. They did a beautiful study on the state of internal tools for this year. Here's a list of a couple examples of internal products. You have dashboards and admin portals or panels and other different types of apps that are usually built on top of a database. What I would also want to include are content management systems or other spoke tools to help you manage the layout of sites or moderation tools, et cetera. Anything that allows the business to move forward or allows employees to get their job done would be considered an internal application. With that, like I mentioned earlier, we focus on different measurements. Our number one focus is productivity, as I said repeatedly. But beyond that, we also care about supporting business goals and reducing costs. Because when you look at someone's workflow, there's so many tools that they may use to get their job done. Our job is to try to find ways to bring more value and help people complete their job using less. How do we reduce cost? How do we reduce the amount of different tools you have to use? How do we reduce the need to customize existing tools? Ultimately, how do we increase employee satisfaction? Nobody likes to use tools that makes your life more difficult. We will use a tool if it's too hard to use, too hard to understand, and doesn't help you get your job done better than some other tools. All of these metrics are very important to different scales, depending on what tool you manage, which brings us to my next point. Bad tools hurt business. I like to think of this as, I mean, at the end of the day, no one wants to use a tool that they can't. That doesn't bring them joy, and there's no difference when it comes to internal tools. One example I like to use is, imagine if you were working in an ice cream truck, and you had all the worst tools to get your job done. It is 100 degrees outside in the middle of July. Your freezer doesn't work, your ice cream scoop doesn't work, you don't have AC. Think about how miserable of an experience that would be for you as the ice cream truck guy to get your job done, versus you have state-of-the-art appliances, you have the best ice cream scoop on the planet, and you have delicious ice cream, you'd be selling out every five minutes. One example of tools hurting a business, I want to look at Twitter. Last year, they experienced a massive hack, which was tied to their internal tools. Not because their tools are bad, I don't want that to be a message here, but the security around the tools was compromised. One of the challenges with managing internal tools is that it doesn't get the same focus and attention as consumer-facing tools. At the end of the day, you need to give the same love and attention and priority to your internal tools as you would front-facing our revenue-generating product, because if you don't, it will hurt your bottom line and your brand and your reputation. When you think about it, good tools transform business. A lot of the largest companies spend 25% of their time focused on managing their internal tools because it's how you create a competitive advantage and how you keep your advantage in the market. If all your competitors are using the same tools, the best thing you can do is come up with your own that gives you just that little bit of edge that keeps your competition at bay because you can do more that they can't do. They're limited to the confines of a third-party service versus managing your own tool set. One example I'd like to point to is a tool that we use at Forbes. It's called Birdie. This is our content management system. It allows our writers and contributors to write content, publish content, promote content, and manage that entire experience and workflow. I believe that this is what makes Forbes so great is that we have these tools to better measure our stories and our reach and the performance of our content in ways that other content management systems like WordPress or Wix or whatever just simply can't do, at least not for our business and our needs. This is an article that I've written. One of my favorite parts about working with Birdie is that it's just so simple to use. It's so intuitive and unlike our legacy CMS, it's really easy to manage. We don't have to worry about interfacing with third parties or trying to figure out contracts, et cetera. If we want something, we simply build it. This brings me to my last point, great tools, transform industry. When you think about the analogy I mentioned earlier, you have Dr. Dre and Jay-Z, but then you also have the Kanye West of the world where any tool that starts behind the scenes can be so good that it can't stay there for very long. If it brings tremendous value internally to the business, it would only make sense at some point to consider spinning it out and turning it into its own business line so that it can be a market leader in a cash cow. A perfect example of this is AWS. In the early 2000s, Amazon recognized that they were not hitting their deadlines for whatever reason and recognized it's because every time they had a new project, they had to spin everything up from scratch. This led them to looking at their internal infrastructures and how they spin up their databases and decided, hey, we can figure this out and build a tool that makes our life a lot easier by having some standard set of services that everybody in the company would use. That was the foundations for AWS after, I'm going to say, about five, six years. They maturized that internal tool that they created and recognized that not only was it supercharging productivity internally at Amazon, but now it's a core competency that they can spin out on its own. In 2006, they did exactly that and they were the first to market with cloud computing and now they're a market leader servicing hundreds of thousands of programs and clients and some of the favorite apps that we all know and love. The key takeaways here are essentially that internal products are a great place to start and launch your career and take it to the next level. Cloud tools are essentially business tools that help drive the company forward and bring value to its employees. Bad tools hurt businesses like we saw with Twitter. Good tools transform businesses like we've seen with Forbes and great tools transform industries like we've seen with AWS and Amazon. Again, my name is Terrence Agbee. I work at Forbes as Senior Product Manager there. A couple of great resources that you can look into to learn more about internal tools and how to become a better internal product manager. Please take a look at Forbes Digital Group as well. We have, it's our internal blog that we talk about how we handle product management. One of the articles I posted is here, I got to product ownership and branded media. Again, this is Terrence Agbee and if you would like to reach me, you can follow me on LinkedIn. Thank you again.