This document discusses building internal products and the opportunities and challenges for product managers. It provides an overview of internal products and their benefits for companies, including cost savings, increased efficiency, and employee satisfaction. It outlines four key opportunities for PMs working on internal products: influencing company culture, getting the quickest customer feedback loops, leveraging users to improve products, and taking more risks. Three main challenges are also covered: measuring impact, deciding when to build internally vs. externally, and balancing needs of multiple user groups. The document encourages PM growth through internal products and notes some unique advantages they provide.

1. www.productschool.com
Building Awesome Internal Products
by Shopify Product Leader

2. CERTIFICATES
Your Product Management Certificate Path
Product Leadership
Certificate™
Full Stack Product
Management Certificate™
Product Management
Certificate™

3. Corporate
Training
Level up your team’s Product
Management skills

4. Free Product Management Resources
BOOKS
EVENTS
JOB PORTAL
COMMUNITIES
bit.ly/product_resources
COURSES

5. Building awesome internal
products
Laura Moldovan
Product Manager @ Shopify

6. Hello!

7. Agenda
1. Intro to internal products
2. Opportunities for PMs
3. Challenges to consider

8. Intro to internal products

9. You’re a Product Manager? What product do
you work on?

10. Internal products may be less known outside
of a company’s walls, but this doesn’t make
them any less valuable.

11. The internal product I support is called
the Vault. It’s Shopify’s internal
platform for capturing, organizing and
sharing the information Shopify
employees need to work together and
thrive at Shopify.
TL;DR: The tools that help Shopify
build Shopify.

12. Internal products help you power up
your organization
And drive better outcomes for your
external customers.

13. Cost savings Increased
efficiency
Employee satisfaction
& retention
Key benefits of internal products

14. Internal products
can be so good
that they
eventually become
external products.

15. Key opportunities for
Product Managers

16. A Product Manager’s
role is “to discover a
product that is
valuable, usable and
feasible.”
- Marty Cagan
Set vision for
your product
Problem
discovery & user
research
Roadmap
development &
prioritization
Build product /
features
Measure, learn &
iterate
External PM Internal PM

17. Opportunity #1
Influencing and evolving your
company culture

18. Building a culture of feedback at Shopify
Problem: lack of feedback and alignment during key points of project. With
COVID, this became even more important with teams working remotely.
Solution: adding mechanism and reinforcements for leaders to provide
feedback at critical points in a project
Results: Shopify focused on solving the right problems and building better
solutions for our merchants.
PROBLEM
DISCOVERY
EXPLORE SOLUTIONS BUILD & RELEASE

19. Helping Shopify transition to being a remote company
Problem: teams struggled with async communications with transition
to remote work.
Solution: building secure platform to record, caption and share video
content, and promoting addition of video in key areas of the product.
Results: high adoption of new video format and increased visibility of
what is happening in the organization.

20. Influencing your company culture
1. Identify the strategic needs of the
organization that your internal products
can support.
2. Get input from key stakeholder groups
on what key behaviours will have the
most impact to create or shift.
3. Great internal products can be a
retention and recruiting tool. Find ways
to meaningfully measure their impact.

21. Opportunity #2
Quickest customer feedback
loops, ever

22. Maximizing user feedback
1. Have the right mechanisms in place to
make this easy as possible.
2. Find ways to engage with users on a
weekly basis.
3. Build structured research as part of your
process.
4. Have a process in place to prioritize
improvements based on feedback.

23. Opportunity # 3
Leveraging your users to contribute to
improving your product

24. Leveraging your users to improve your product
1. Have clear guidelines in place to set
expectations around how employees can
contribute to improving your product.
2. Have a process to ensure contributions
align with your overall product strategy.
3. Positively reinforce and recognize the
solving of internal problems and improving
your internal products!

25. Opportunity # 4
Wiggle room to be bold & take more
risks

26. Being bold and taking risks
1. Identify where shipping to learn makes
sense for your product.
2. Set expectations that your product is
always in beta.
3. Process in place to learn and iterate
quickly from what you’ve shipped.
4. Know when features are no longer
serving and retire them.

27. Challenges to internal
products

28. Challenge # 1
Measuring your impact

29. Measuring your impact
1. Identify your measurement constraints.
2. Find ways to tie back to impact to your
external customers or strategic value.
3. Direct access to your customers can
also help identify if your products are
having their intended impact.

30. Challenge # 2
Deciding when to build internally vs.
externally

31. Is building internally the best option?
Building internal products or features is not
always the only option. Key questions to ask:
1. How unique are my user’s needs?
2. Do we have clarity of how those needs will
evolve in the long-term?
3. What’s the cost to build internally vs.
buy/partner?
4. What’s the urgency to solve this need?
5. What do we trade-off or deprioritize if we
build this internally?

32. Challenge # 3
Balancing needs of multiple users

33. Balancing the needs of multiple users
Serving internal users doesn’t mean their
problems are the same.
1. Identify your key user personas.
2. Size the impact of solving problems for your different
personas as part of your prioritization criteria.
3. If prioritizing the needs of one user group over another,
transparently communicate this within your org.
4. Consider keeping one smaller workstream to address
critical issues affecting your non-primary audience.

34. Takeways
PM growth: Internal products unlock the same core
competency growth opportunities for PMs as external
products.
Unique opportunities: Influencing your company culture
and being tightly looped into your customers’ needs can
be an exciting space for PMs.
Challenges: measuring impact of internal products,
balancing multiple user needs and deciding when it
makes sense to build internally are challenges that PMs
can tackle.

35. Questions? Comments?
linkedin.com/lauramoldovan
Let’s connect!

36. www.productschool.com
Part-time Product Management Training Courses
and
Corporate Training