Productizing internal tools - by Patrick Donohue
If your company has invested heavily in developing internal tools, those efforts could be fertile grounds for a new commercial offering.
Amazon AWS started as an internal shared IT platform. Meta’s Workplace began as an employees-only version of Facebook. Slack was a modern IRC platform for developers of the video game Glitch. All three went on to be highly successful products when transitioned from internal-only to public product.
I have been lucky to work on several efforts to transform core internal tools to commercial products—including Workplace at Facebook and P2 at Automattic—and I became a firm believer that innovation used to solve your own problems can offer compelling solutions to other companies’ problems, too.
At the same time, I have also witnessed five product building anti-patterns for crossing the internal-to-external “chasm”. Managing around these traps is critical to bringing an internal tool to market, or if you can’t, determining quickly that your efforts are better spent elsewhere.
The core hypothesis in transforming internal tools to public products is that other companies face the same problems that your tool solves. However, this can lead to a false assumption: that your ideal customer should look like your company, or to put a finer point on it, to misunderstand what you share in common.
