How to Be a More Effective Internal Product Manager
By: Rui Zhang
Tags: Communication, Internal Product, Metrics, Product Marketing, Product Management

Communication Strategy #1: Value Positioning

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Internal products don’t have the same measurements for success or failure. When a department does not have to pay for it, team members can have a reduced sense of the product’s worth. — Product Focus

Internal products are generally not measured by business growth KPIs. This is unlike profit-driven products, which may have more straightforward performance indicators like revenue numbers or user growth.

Because there are no universal benchmarks, measures of success for internal products may vary widely, depending on which areas of product function, performance attributes and user goals that you would like to focus on.

For instance, the value of an internal finance system may be measured by how many manual reports it can automate or the usefulness of its accounting functions. Whereas an internal data visualisation tool may be judged by its computation speed and data wrangling features.

Without guideposts like revenue or user figures to rely on, it can be hard to identify and distinguish which metrics are truly important and valuable to your stakeholders. As a result, the benchmarks of success for internal products are often not well-defined.

As an internal PM, this can be an issue especially when you need to demonstrate value in order to justify the need for additional resources or headcount for your team.

Internal PM Strategy

I recommend the following 3-step approach to start quantifying and articulating the value of your product to internal stakeholders.

Step 1: Build a clear business case

Having a clear business case can help you to effectively communicate the importance of your product to internal stakeholders and provides justification for why resources should be dedicated to support its development.

Your product business case doesn’t have to be a clunky document crammed with market research and financials. Keep it brief and highlight the most important elements:

Key problems/pain points that your product is solving for

What is the solution that you’re building

Benefits that your product or feature brings

Resources required to make it happen

The business case is a good starting point for any new product or feature development. But even if you already have an established or mature internal product, it’s a good practice to maintain a business case document. This process forces you to evaluate the underlying assumptions about your product and helps you to articulate your product’s value proposition with clarity.

Step 2: Identify and measure product metrics

After establishing a clear business case, the next step is to select suitable product metrics to measure and track product performance. For internal PMs, this process can be particularly challenging as there is often no clear path to determine success measures.

To cut through the ambiguity of the metric selection process, a structured approach is needed. The HEART Framework and Goals-Signals-Metrics are two models that I’ve found useful in my own product metric definition process.

The HEART Framework is a methodology developed at Google to help define key metrics that measure the quality of user experience for a particular product. It covers product metrics in the categories of Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention and Task Success . As a start, you can select one or two categories in the HEART framework that are most relevant to the scope of your internal product and start defining quantifiable measures within those areas.

is a methodology developed at Google to help define key metrics that measure the quality of user experience for a particular product. It covers product metrics in the categories of and . As a start, you can select one or two categories in the HEART framework that are most relevant to the scope of your internal product and start defining quantifiable measures within those areas. Goals-Signals-Metrics is a simple process that allows product teams to articulate the goals of a product or feature, then identifying signals that indicate success, and finally building specific metrics to track product performance. This process helps to ensure that the metrics you select are aligned with your user goals.

HEART x GSM Matrix from Onix

The HEART Framework and Goals-Signal-Metrics can be combined into a matrix as shown above to identify and prioritise product metrics for performance tracking. As your product evolves, continue to update your metric framework to ensure you are tracking the most relevant metrics that are reflective of your product goals.

Step 3: Mapping product metrics to user value

Finally, you need to ensure that your product metrics are aligned with user goals and what users value. This is crucial because you want to know whether the value generated by your product is worth the effort and resources invested into product development.

For example, as a PM for an internal data analytics application, you may be interested to track the average time that your application takes to return query results to users. This metric can be connected to a user goal like faster report generation or higher work efficiency. Using this measure, you can then evaluate the potential user time savings against the resources it would take to develop a feature that improves the query engine performance.

As an internal PM, it’s important that you’re able to clearly articulate the connection between your product’s achievements and user success. To demonstrate your product’s business value, quantify the valuable outcomes and outputs you’ve delivered together with your team and present this regularly to your key stakeholders.