Product Discovery for
Internal Enabler Teams

​Dear Reader,​

Because the customers of your product just sit three desks away, you might think you can just "talk to them." And that's precisely what often leads to the low adoption of better product practices among product teams working on internal products (also sometimes called Enabler Teams). And why, when a user has a company email address, it is likely nobody's doing discovery on their behalf.

Because you might interact with colleagues every day, it can seem that you understand them. But that may just mean you hear the loudest voices: colleagues who complain in standups, or the ones who ping you on Slack. While the silent majority builds a no-code workaround to your internal CRM.

It's the bias you'd have with external users, but dressed in a company hoodie.

Three rationalizations I keep hearing:

We can just ask them: Asking a colleague what they need is not the same as understanding how they work. People describe their workflow as they think it works, not as it actually does. Plus, they will be tempted to dumb transfer their wish list into your backlog.

Possible Solution: Focus on behavioral data sources, not just attitudinal.

They have to use it anyway: No, they don't. People are remarkably creative at routing around tools they find unhelpful. 80% of your internal tool's capabilities can probably be covered by Excel, Lovable, and Claude.

Possible Solution: Be as alert about alternatives you're competing against and make them explicit as part of the playing field of your Product Strategy.

The stakes are lower: They're higher. You can't acquire new users. These are the only users you'll ever have. Lose their trust in v1...good luck getting them to try v2 without a CEO mandate.

Possible Solution: Invest in more white-glove, high-touch onboarding and rollouts.

Fundamental discovery principles don't change for enabler teams. You're still reducing uncertainty to protect the company's investment. Still connecting solutions to user problems to business goals. But the biggest risk is different: It's rarely "will they want this?" It's "will they actually use this instead of the thing they've already cobbled together?"

The usual discovery risks don't disappear when the user sits three desks away.

Thank you for Practicing Product,

​Tim​

If you consume one thing this week, make it this...

Who is Tim Herbig?

As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions.

I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery.