Andrey Zimin is a Senior Product Manager for Observability (internal) at Asana with over 8 years of Big Tech and Startup experience in Silicon Valley.

Every day, product managers (PMs) help their businesses build better tools, develop happier users, and drive serious business wins. However, when people think about who a PM is and what they do, they only see half the picture.

The role of outside famous product manager. These teams work together to build and release products and features that customers (external users) find valuable, and are aligned to deliver business wins on key metrics.

Internal PMs do almost all the same work—but the products and experiences they focus on are aimed at employees, and their coworkers are, essentially, their customers.

What differentiates an internal PM

The tricky thing about identifying internal PMs is that businesses don’t always define the role as “product manager.” But anyone who is truly focused on the well-being and productivity of internal users, and who treats internal tools and processes as products and interacts widely across various business functions to improve them, acts as an internal PM.

There is a lot of overlap in the work done by internal and external PMs. Both focus on leveraging the user’s voice to improve the product experience. Both are successful if they adopt a product evangelist mindset. And both have their own roadmaps, which turn user problems into strategic initiatives.

One factor that differentiates internal PMs, besides their focus on employees vs. customers, relating to the organization’s support of their importance to the business. While the value of external PMs is clear to most organizations, the same is not always true for their internal counterparts.

Often, leadership must drive the addition or creation of internal PM roles from the top down. Other times, this will be done from the bottom up, with the product or IT team taking the lead and making the business case for adding the role.

Another factor is the nature of their work. External PMs tend to focus on new and improved deliverables feature in the products their company sells. In contrast, internal PMs tend to focus on cross-application processes.

Whether for sales, engineering, or marketing, most workflows are performed across multiple applications, so internal PMs look at the process framework and look to make improvements to improve outcomes such as productivity, efficiency, and employee satisfaction.

Why data is critical to internal PM success

The unique role of internal PM has unique challenges. Compared to external PMs, they have a greater scope of responsibilities such as working on optimizations across multiple applications to simplify workflows. And because the value of their role is not universally recognized, they often face a lack of support resources compared to external PMs. Internal PMs often get a vote of support for the initiatives they work on, unlike external PMs, who can rely on functions like Customer Success.

For these and other reasons, having the right data and insights, and being able to take meaningful action based on those data and insights, is critical to the success of internal PMs.

Too many people in that position are stuck in the status quo and rely on infrequent user surveys (annual or semi-annual) or one-off interviews that don’t shed light on systemic issues. What’s needed is a tool to make internal telemetry (continuous visibility into internal application and workflow behavior) easy to set up and maintain.

Many individual tools come with basic usage insights, but they are usually limited to a single application. And we know most workflows don’t start and end in one tool. It’s critical for internal PMs to understand behavior across workflow applications, something that typically requires a lot of manual wiring and development work. Unless you really keep an eye on your users, it’s very difficult to see how the jumps to and from different tools happen.

Move from insight to action to drive internal business wins

Gaining powerful insights and taking immediate action is what makes the right digital adoption platform groundbreaking.

With powerful cross-application analytics that doesn’t require intensive engineering resources to build, internal PMs are suddenly empowered with a wealth of insight into how work gets done. Having a clear view of user pain points and frustrations helps them inform their internal roadmap and prioritize appropriate improvements to workflow and support.

Internal PMs can provide enormous value to their organizations. Equipping them with a strong digital adoption platform will help them drive clear business wins at scale and maximize their impact.

–

Andrey Zimin is a Senior Product Manager for Observability (internal) at Asana with over 8 years of Big Tech and Startup experience in Silicon Valley. Asana is a leading enterprise work management platform that connects work to purpose. More than 150,000 customers like Amazon, Accenture, and Suzuki rely on Asana to manage and automate everything from goal setting and tracking to capacity planning to product launches. To learn more, visit asana.com.