Design tips for internal products

When folks who work in IT think about the various activities involved in developing internal products, one they may not think of immediately is design.

And if you talked to product designers, many would probably express more interest in working on a exciting new B2C product rather than the more humdrum internal facing products that even those B2C companies have.

Both perspectives short change the importance of design in internal products.

I can speak from my own experience about the power of design with internal products (which I share below), but I wanted to see if my experiences were outliers.

So I did a quick search for other people who have shared their experiences of designing internal products. I came up with some great examples, which I also shared below.

If you have any tips that have served you well, I’d love to hear about them.

Tips for designing internal tools

Akhil Dakinedi is a product designer at DoorDash who has had the opportunity to work on a variety of different products ranging from mobile consumer apps to enterprise web products to internal tools. Akhil notes that there’s a lot of unique design lessons you can learn from working on internal tools, and decided to share what he learned.

Akhil used Lyft’s Twilio Flex instance as an example throughout these tips to illustrate the principle. His goal is to provide a good starting point for anyone looking to learn more about designing internal tools, so hopefully you find them insightful.

Lessons learned from designing internal products at the iconic

Between 2018 and 2021 Naomi Holme worked at THE ICONIC where she designed internal enterprise applications that the company used today to manage their buying, planning and production processes.

Naomi shared her key learnings in a pair of articles (5 Lessons Learned and 5 More Lessons Learned) in the hopes that 1) you might relate and share your own stories & learnings about how you’ve tackled designing internal products and 2) the articles reignite the conversation on internal product design, and what considerations need to be taken by the designer and the business to make the products & system architecture a long-term success.

Naomi is now a Principal Product Designer at OVO Energy.

How to design internal products that are actually useful

Like any other product, an internal product is for the user: it needs to work for them to be able to achieve an outcome.

There’s a myth that spending a lot of time researching and designing internal products isn’t as important as customer facing products. This means that there’s never enough time given to it, and things are simply shipped as fast as possible in order to increase the team productivity.

This may result as an immediate value and initial increase of productivity, and if something goes wrong, that would only impact internal users, no big deal.

But what normally happens is an accumulation of quick wins on top of each other until you finally end up with a “Frankenstein tool” that looks more like an agglomeration of buttons rather than something actually usable. Creating such tools can be dangerous. They’re more focussed on “adding a new feature” rather than solving a user problem.

Nicolò Arena , a Product Designer at WhatsApp, shared a set of guidelines for designing internal products based on the idea that an internal tool should be researched and designed the same way a customer-facing tool is done, keeping the user at the centre.

Working with designers on Internal Products

I suspect if you asked a collection of people who work in IT, you’d get just as many people who say that designers aren’t necessary as you do people who say they are.

I’d suggest the former group is wrong.

I’ve always had the impression that internal products can gain a great deal from the involvement of designers, even though most companies don’t act like they are necessary.

Over the past few years, I’ve had a variety of experiences, both good and bad, that have confirmed my impressions. I thought I’d share a few of those experiences.

Thanks for reading

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