Developing a deep knowledge about internal customers
How to build and train the empathy muscle to discovery real internal user needs, desires and pain points to improve and evolve your platform
[Portuguese version will be available soon | Versão em Português em breve]
Being able to feed our platform product decisions with great customer insights, creativity and driven value proposition, instead of relying only on engineering constraints and business needs is not a simple task. We need to train the muscle of empathy to discover real internal users needs, desires, pain points in order to enhance their experience while using our platform.
Platform product teams usually applies some good practices such as interviews, surveys or data analysis when discovering new initiatives. However, for most of them, we have the opportunity to develop better and organized processes and practices to help the platform product managers and platform engineers to actually build this deep knowledge about internal customers.
This article brings some suggestions that can be applied to Platform PMs daily routines to foster a customer-centric approach. Drawing from Teresa Torres' emphasis on Continuous Discovery practices and Lean Startup's build-measure-learn cycle, these suggested practices aim to inject user feedback into every stage of platform development.
Mapping and getting to know your customers
Different platform teams might have different client teams depending on the initiative being developed. However, there is a constant set of customers that we should consider, map, and get to know them to build a closer relationship.
One good practice is to build a customer's map to categorize them, considering their influence, their interests, how they make decisions or any other important factors that might apply to each context.
For example, a common platform team might have the following categories of customers.
Heavy Users: Engineers who interact with platform components and services on a daily basis;
Light Users: Engineers who interact with platform components and services once in a while;
Indirect Users: Other roles that do not interact with platform components’ or services' codebase but get its value to perform their activities indirectly;
Product Customers: PMs and Designers that do not interact with platform components but rely on its solutions to be able to deliver value through their own products.
Business Customers: Business people, executives, C-levels or other leadership roles that do not interact with platform components but rely on its solutions to be able to impact the business, even indirectly.
When mapping who is inserted in each category, we can prioritize to which one of them we can redirect our discovery efforts as needed. We can also assess each group level of influence on prioritization decisions, platform adoption and platform evangelism within the whole company.
Besides that, being intentional on building a closer relationship with each group of customers can help the platform team to have allies and platform evangelists across the whole company.
Building Platform Continuous Discovery Habits
Running discoveries as needed for each new initiative or new product launch that we should enable as a platform is just enough. However, how do we know we are making a good platform or creating capabilities that the internal customers really want? How do we ensure we are improving over time? How do we guarantee that our teams are creating value for the business?
Building a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery can help us to answer these questions as we continue to evolve our customer's knowledge as a team. Teresa Torres describes the Continuous Discovery process as “at the minimum, weekly touch points with customers by the team building the product, where they conduct small research activities in pursuit of a desired outcome”. The thing is that platform teams make decisions every day that usually affect the whole product ecosystem. Our goal with continuous discovery is to infuse those daily decisions with as much internal customer input as possible.
When inserting the following discovery habits in our routines as Platform Product Managers, in a structured and sustainable way, it can build the empathy muscle faster, as we take advantage of the proximity we have with our internal customers.
1. Building Experience Maps
The main goal of building experience maps is to visualize what we already know. When doing this practice as a team, you also get to know and understand better what is on their own minds.
Imagine you want to explore the opportunity to improve the workflow of how your customers integrate with one specific component of your platform. The fist step is to map out in a simple flow the internal user experience as it is today. Start by defining who is the user that act on this flow, and then list and connect all the steps they would take to complete the Job to be Done.
Ask the other folks of your team to do the same, mapping out their own perspective. Once created each individual map, take some time to explore each other's perspective and compare where do you have different perceptions. Together, these different perceptions represent a rich understanding of the opportunity space you want to explore with the customers.
As you discuss the different perceptions, enhance the details, link similar nodes and merge it in a single map. Limit the scope you want to focus and make it visual friendly. This map can be used as the starting point for your user interviews. You can use as a visual support to explore needs and pain points on each part of the journey and to understand better how is the user experience in different touch points of the journey that touches the platform components.
Do not forget to refine and evolve your map as you learn more about the customers to make sure you continue to have an aligned view with your team. Otherwise, there is a risk that individual perceptions can start to diverge even working with the same source of information.
2. Interviewing Customers to Discover Specific Opportunities
Teresa Torres emphasizes that customer interviews are not just about understanding problems, but crucially about uncovering specific opportunities for solutions. It's specially important for internal customers, since we can closely move beyond broad pain points to identify concrete needs and desired outcomes.
Some good practices that can help you booster your internal customer's interviews:
Instead of just asking about problems, probe into what your customers are trying to achieve as a team, but also as individuals. What is the team's their ultimate goal? How are they delivering value to the end customers? How their individual current experience using the platform as a way to deliver that value Understanding this provides a richer context for the challenges they face.
Use the time and the closeness with internal customers to explore the context of a problem. Don't just ask what the problem is, but also when, where, how often, and why it occurs. In case it is something tangible, like an error or a bug in the platform, or a gap in a process, ask them to specifically show you and your team how it happens. Listen for specific stories and examples. These stories reveal the nuances of their experiences and often highlight unmet needs that might not surface through general questions.
Identify current workarounds. Pay close attention to the alternative solutions or processes your users have developed to cope with their problems. These workarounds often point directly to unmet needs and potential opportunities for improvement in the platform.
Distinguish between needs and solutions. Since most of our internal clients are also engineers, it is normal that they would come with many solutions to their own problems in mind. Be careful not to simply record customer-suggested solutions. Instead, dig deeper to understand the underlying need driving that suggestion. This opens up a wider range of potential solutions.
After assessing a wide range of opportunities, prioritize them based on impact and confidence. Develop a framework and use your platform strategy to prioritize opportunities based on their potential impact on the internal customer customer experience but also on the external customers and the business (not a simple task, I know), as well as your confidence in your understanding of the opportunity.
3. Feed the Feedback Loop and Collecting New Ideas
Building a robust feedback loop is crucial for continuous improvement, aligning with the Lean Startup's emphasis on validated learning there are some practices that Platform teams can apply to leverage their internal customers feedbacks and suggestions.
Platform PMs have the opportunity to establish various channels for internal customers to provide feedback regularly, not just during formal discovery. Some suggestions to operationalize it are:
1. Have a dedicated Slack channel or Jira board to gather feedbacks and suggestions.
Schedule regular feedback sessions or syncs with key stakeholders with easily accessible feedback forms.
Make rituals to present the Platform deliveries to foster adoption and get quick feedback, such as Platform Showcases or All Hands meetings.
The key is to make it effortless for internal users to voice their experiences, frustrations, and ideas. Furthermore, actively soliciting new ideas through dedicated brainstorming sessions or internal innovation challenges can uncover novel opportunities that might not emerge from problem-focused discussions.
These collected ideas should be mapped, categorized, and linked back to the customer segments identified earlier, ensuring that the platform roadmap reflects a diverse range of user needs. Also, having specific and regular sessions to share it with the Platform team is a plus to foster the user empathy also within the team.
4. Benchmarking
It might seem unusual to talk about benchmarking for internal platform products, especially because they are often conceived and developed for a specific organizational context. However, this practice is entirely possible and highly valuable in this setting as well.
Despite their unique nature, companies commonly encounter similar problems and needs as they scale, launch new products, or innovate within their domain and industry. If companies face comparable challenges, why not explore how they are leveraging technology to solve them?
A delicate point here is that some companies won't be open to sharing their internal strategies and solutions, particularly with direct competitors. Therefore, it's important to identify insightful research sources relevant to your context, even outside your direct competitive landscape or in different business domains.
Exploring alternative ways to learn about other companies without direct conversations is also feasible. Valuable information sources often include industry podcasts, conference talks, publicly available case studies, company technology blogs or articles, and the organization's own website.
These can contain valuable insights into successful initiatives or lessons learned while solving technological challenges. This form of benchmarking allows platform teams to gather external perspectives and identify potential improvements or innovative approaches that could be adapted for their internal context. By understanding how others have tackled similar scaling or enablement challenges, platform teams can gain inspiration and potentially accelerate past common pitfalls.
By consistently applying these practices, Platform PMs can move beyond reactive development driven by immediate needs and instead cultivate a proactive, customer-centric approach. Aligning with Teresa Torres' vision of Continuous Discovery, it ensures that platform decisions are grounded in a deep understanding of internal user needs and desired outcomes.
Integrating these habits with the a common build-measure-learn cycle allows platform teams to iteratively develop and validate their solutions, foster platform adoption, minimizing waste and maximizing value delivery to both internal and ultimately external customers. The focus shifts from simply building technical capabilities to creating a platform that truly empowers its users and drives business impact.
Please let me know in the comments if there are any other discovery practices that you and your team usually do in order to train this empathy muscle with internal customers.