Why internal product managers are your company’s unsung heroes

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

Every day, product managers (PMs) help their businesses build better tools, cultivate happier users, and drive serious business wins. And yet, when people think about who PMs are and what they do, they’re only seeing half the picture.

The role of the external product manager is well known. These teams work together to build and release products and features that customers (external users) will find valuable, and which align to deliver business wins on key metrics.

Internal PMs do much of the same work—but the products and experiences they focus on are employee-facing, and their coworkers are, in essence, their customers.

What sets internal PMs apart

What can be tricky about identifying internal PMs is that businesses don’t always designate the role as “product manager.” But anyone who is genuinely focused on internal users’ wellbeing and productivity, and who treats internal tools and processes as products and interacts broadly across various business functions to improve them, is acting as an internal PM.

There’s a good amount of overlap in the work that internal and external PMs do. Both focus on elevating the voice of the user to improve product experiences. Both succeed when they embrace a product evangelist mindset. And both own their respective roadmaps, turning user pain points into strategic initiatives.

One factor that sets internal PMs apart, aside from their focus on employees vs. customers, has to do with organizational buy-in about their importance to the business. While the value of an external PM is clear to most orgs, the same isn’t always true of their internal counterparts.

Oftentimes, leadership has to push for the addition or creation of internal PM roles from the top down. Other times, it will be bottom up, with product or IT teams going to leadership and making the business case for adding the role. 

Another factor is the nature of their work. External PMs tend to focus on shipping new and improved features within the products their company sells. In contrast, internal PMs tend to focus on cross-app processes.

Whether for sales, engineering, or marketing, most workflows take place across multiple apps, so internal PMs look at process frameworks and work towards improvements to boost outcomes like productivity, efficiency, and employee satisfaction. 

Why data is critical to an internal PM’s success

The unique role of internal PMs comes with unique challenges. Compared to external PMs, they have a larger scope of responsibility like working on optimizations across multiple apps to streamline workflows. And because the value of their role isn’t universally recognized, they often face a lack of support resources compared to external PMs. Internal PMs often end up owning the support motions for the initiatives they work on, unlike external PMs, who can rely on a function like Customer Success. 

For these and other reasons, having the right data and insights, and being able to take meaningful action based on them, is crucial to an internal PMs’ success.

Too many in the role are stuck in a status quo reliant on infrequent (annual or semiannual) user surveys 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 app and workflow behavior) easy to set up and maintain.

Many individual tools come with basic usage insights, but they’re usually limited to that one app. And we know most workflows don’t start and end in one tool. It’s extremely important for an internal PM to understand behavior across workflow apps, something that has traditionally required a lot of manual wiring and dev work. Unless you’re literally watching over the shoulder of your users, it is very hard to see how jumps to and from a different tool are happening. 

Going from insights to action to drive internal business wins

Getting powerful insights and immediately taking action on them is what makes the right digital adoption platform a game changer.

With powerful cross-app analytics that don’t require intensive engineering resources to build, internal PMs are suddenly empowered with a wealth of insights into how work is happening. Having a clear view into pain points and user frustration helps them inform their internal roadmap and prioritize the right improvements to workflows and support. 

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

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Andrei Zimin is a Senior Product Manager for Observability (internal) at Asana with over 8 years of Big Tech and Startup experience in the Silicon Valley. Asana is a leading enterprise work management platform where work connects to goals. Over 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.