Building a Product the Whole Company Must Adopt

Imagine yourself as a product manager building products for hundreds of internal teams, and thousands of brilliant engineers and data scientists.  These teams build and maintain products that rely on your product.  These teams’ products are consumed by 300+ million users every month.  Users of consumer facing products like Spotify have choices and explicitly decide if a product is worth it, either by voting with their time or their money.  Internal customers are not necessarily given the same type of choice.  Sometimes products must be adopted by the entire company in order to achieve some higher level company goal, and that changes things.  While the fundamentals of Product Development still apply, there is some nuance which must be understood when building for hundreds of internal teams, instead of hundreds of millions of music and podcast listeners.  The line between customer support and collaboration is blurred.  Marketing and selling boils down to shared incentives and priorities.  Project management is critical.