Internal Product Management?

Those looking into product management careers may be surprised to learn that the PM function is not only engaged in building externally facing products. It also deals with an enterprise’s own internal technology needs. Here I’m going to touch upon the differences between the two kinds of product management.

The contrast between what we might (awkwardly) call external and internal PM, occurs because of their contexts. And context is everything. The context in which the product person operates differs from one startup to another, from one product to another, from one team to another. But the difference in context between external and internal PM is even more pronounced.

Let’s explore how each of these plays out.

Imagine a SaaS startup founder as the key product person. He begins by characterizing a problem as one that is both important and actionable, and works on a prototype of the solution. Along the way he shares it broadly with those he thinks will find it valuable and might be willing to pay for it. His journey involves major effort toward gaining forms of commercial validation, what at times we call the discovery of product market fit.

The startup’s first idea may not cut it. The product team may find it needs to pivot to a different conception altogether. This process makes something explicit: revenue drives the business, not the cleverness of the founder’s initial solution.

But the internal product manager has it another way. She begins with a mandate. The company endorses the problem ahead of time, granting the budget and resources to produce a solution.

This product manager doesn’t need to locate receptive buyers because the sale happened already. Nor does she need to be highly opinionated about the best solution. The stakeholders who provide the product mandate may be much more opinionated about that. Marketing aspects of the PM’s job go away. Instead there are meetings to keep stakeholders aligned.

From these two stories we can see what’s going on pretty clearly. The startup is submitting to something called market discipline, whereas the internal product manager is submitting to operational control. In other words, the market and the firm rationalize problems differently. They demand different skills, impose different challenges, and realize different outcomes. And that’s why internal product management is not necessarily a close fit for someone in the PM community used to working in a startup environment. It just depends.

So if you are a PM contemplating an internal product role, ask a lot of ‘why’ questions. Why a product team for an internal role? This question alone can elicit a great deal of useful information. And let’s be clear - there are many skills an experienced PM can bring to an internal role, you just need to be sure what assumptions the company has about the internal PM role, and whether those assumptions line up with skills and interests that you have.