Episode 258: Treating Internal Tools with Equal Rigor
In this episode, Melissa Perri dives into the intricacies of product management with a focus on both inbound and outbound product management. Whether you're working on internal tools or customer-facing products, the strategic processes involved are crucial and similar across the board.
Melissa discusses the importance of having a strategy, discovery, and delivery process in place to maximize the value stream and mitigate risks, regardless of the product's focus. Melissa provides examples of how internal tools, like algorithms for insurance claims or bank teller systems, can significantly impact customer experience. This episode emphasizes that the core principles of product management remain consistent, whether you're dealing with AI product management or traditional product strategies.
Are you a product manager looking to enhance your understanding of both inbound and outbound product management? Tune in to this episode to gain valuable insights into effective product strategies and processes that can be applied to any product type.
You’ll hear us talk about:
1:37 - Understanding Inbound vs Outbound Product Management
Melissa explores the differences and similarities between inbound and outbound product management. She emphasizes the necessity for a strategic approach in both areas, debunking the myth that inbound product management carries less risk.
4:07 - Impact of Internal Tools on Customer Experience
Discussion on how internal tools like bank teller systems and insurance claim algorithms can significantly affect the customer experience. This section highlights the importance of strategic design for internal products.
6:10 - Consistency in Product Management Practices
Melissa stresses that the fundamentals of product management, such as strategy and discovery, remain the same regardless of the product type. She highlights the importance of maintaining a focus on discovery and delivery in AI product management.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way.
Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
[00:00:37] Melissa Perri: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. It is time for our dear Melissa episode. Those are the segments of the show where I answer all of your burning product management questions. Go to dear melissa.com and let me know what's on your mind. Today we have a really interesting question about inbound versus outbound product management.
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Dear Melissa, I loved your explanation of product versus project management. What is the difference between inbound and outbound product management?
So while not super common, I have heard a lot of companies that do separate inbound verse outbound product management. And what they mean in that case is that outbound product management is about all of our products that face external customers.
So things that they would use directly, things they might integrate with, different workflows they touch, all of those things. And inbound product management are internal facing tools. So that could be internal to our employees, maybe if we're a bank, it would be inbound tools that our employees use to help service customers. Or it could be platform, it could be any hosts that our employees use instead of our customers.
So that's a differentiating factor between that when you hear inbound versus outbound. And many companies that do differentiate between inbound and outbound product management do so in a variety of ways. Sometimes they treat them like completely different roles, and I don't necessarily think that is true, and I don't like to really separate them because our overall process of product management stays the same.
You still need a strategy. You still need to do discovery. You still need to do delivery, but there are some different factors and different tools that we would use during discovery and delivery that could change. And that's really the biggest difference between inbound and outbound product management.
So let's take an example. If you are in a bank, let's say, or an insurance company, anything like that, and you're doing outbound verse product management with your customers, of course you're gonna have to engage with legal and compliance. It might be faster and you might not have to go through as many steps if you are deploying, let's say, to a bank teller, or if you are doing something for an internal team, like a sales team or an HR team.
But you still should be approaching this the same way where you have a strategy, you're setting your OKRs, you have your goals, you're doing discovery with those users, you're trying to figure out what makes sense for them at the end of the day. AB testing, for example, makes sense on external facing things. Sometimes it doesn't make sense for internal tools. The way you do releases, how fast you can progress through those different stages may be different if you're releasing to customers versus releasing internally. Testing with the users could also be different, you would probably go through much more extensive user testing because the brand ramifications are very different if you're releasing to customers externally and there are problems there that they can see right away. So all of those different things could be tweaks along your discovery and delivery process in inbound versed outbound.
But why I don't like separating them is because there is a stigma that all inbound product management, everything we do for employees carries less risk than outbound product management. And I don't believe that's true.
Take for example, people who work on platforms. If you are working on platforms and building an algorithm, your users of that algorithm may be other product management or development teams, but at the end of the day, that algorithm could be something that affects a customer directly.
It was a great example of algorithms that were denying insurance claims. For example, if you consider yourself on a platform team, an inbound product manager. Only looking at stuff that you're building internally. It's an internal tool, let's say that, you're not really looking at the ramifications that internal tool might have on the customer at the end of the day.
We were just talking about bank tellers, another great example. If you go into the bank and your person who is helping you, your customer relationship manager, has a set of tools that they can use, and it's not all the stuff that's gonna help you at the end of the day, that's a bad experience for the customer, even though it's an internal tool for a bank relationship manager who's an employee of the bank.
If we are not taking the same consideration to design that well, to give them a great experience to make sure that they can help their customers, that end user customer is gonna have a bad time too. So that's why I do not love this way of doing inbound versus outbound, like we still need the same rigor. And we need to think about it as value streams, right? Just because a user at the end of the day, who's our customer, is using a workflow and it goes back through that into a platform, into an algorithm, into something a developer made. All of those things from what the developers use and what their experience is to being able to release, to be able to get their job done, to what the other internal teams are doing that are supporting that customer, from customer service to HR that supports our internal employees, all of that stuff needs to be considered to make sure at the end of the day, we can deliver great value to our customers.
So I treat product management the same whether you're doing an inbound product or an outbound product from the essentials of we need a strategy, we need great discovery and delivery, but we might just have different tools that we're using depending on where we fall. You see this with AI as well. Now we need to look at evals.
Now we need to know about how to test with data, structure data. It's a different tool for a different type of product management, but we never lose that discovery. We never lose a delivery. We're always solving a problem at the end of the day, and that's what we have to remember.
So I hope that answers your question, and if you have other questions for me, please go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are, I love answering all these questions and hearing what's on your mind. Make sure that you like and subscribe to the Product Thinking Podcast so you never miss an episode, and we'll be back next week.