Why are many internal products of poor quality?
💪 Most companies talk about how important the productivity of their employees is.
And yet, if we take a quick look at the quality of the internal products employees use in their daily job, many of them are poor quality. I have yet to see a HR or a time booking platform that is made to be used by humans, same goes for other common platforms we need to use to function as a company.
⚒ Then if we move into looking at the internal tooling used by developers, situation is not getting much better, in some cases these platforms are worse, especially the ones built in-house. They simply don’t seem to get the same attention as the externally facing products. Which is understandable from the perspective that employees do not pay for the internal platforms they use, these platforms don’t bring revenue directly (that would be a crazy idea, for employees to pay a subscription from their salary to use internal tools 😁). But they do indirectly, by enabling people to do their job faster 💪 and better 🌟. Since this is an indirect relationship, it is hard to quantify and visualise, but not impossible. Still, I don’t think anyone disagrees that better tooling enables being able to achieve more and better with the same amount of people and time.
❗ I think another important cause internal tooling is poor quality is due to it not being treated as a product. In many situations, it is not even well understood what its purpose is by some parts of the organisation. This brings a vicious cycle: poor understanding of the tooling and its purpose and value brings less financial investment in it. Less financial investment brings not having the time and people to turn it into a product, which contributes to the tooling being poorly understood.
❓ What is your take on this? ❓ What great internal tools have you used or built?
Originally posted on LinkedIn.