3 Reasons Why Building Internal Products Can Be 10X Harder

Over the past 18 months, I have worked on internal tools.

What most people don’t know?

Internal tools can be 10X harder to work on.

Here’s why:

🧵👇

1/ The challenge of discovery shifts.

It’s easy to go into “requirements gathering”.

“Requirements are hypotheses” @davidjbland

Your users are super close to the problem — they’ve tried many things.

You’re far from starting from scratch.

You’re optimising.

2/ You have worse tooling

Yes, you’re close. Too close to measure.

You don’t have a CRM or analytics for friends & family. Same principle here!

There’s no Amplitude or Zendesk. All that stuff is for actual customers!

Measurement in this space is hard. Hard to optimise!

3/ Low(er) impact

You’re serving under 1000 people even in a large organisation. Your opg caps the market.

While your cohorts deal with thousands & millions, you’re dealing with tens & hundreds.

Your impact feels small. You question if you’re good enough for bigger scope.

Would I recommend working on internal tools?

Yes & no.

• It’s optimisation work but it’s hard to optimise

• It’s easy to fall prey to biases

• It’s hard to feel impact

But when do we ever do things that are easy?

It’s good to try & challenge yourself!