Building an Internal Product — How I Successfully Transitioned from Customer Success to Product Management.

I decided to deviate from my usual medium posts: This post was long overdue.

9 min readDec 17, 2021

When I started my career, the top career traits I needed were: empathy and emotional intelligence. Understanding, managing, and feeling the customer’s pain (and, of course, anger) was indispensable. That’s right; I started as a Customer Success Specialist (CSS).

In my CSS role, I learned what it meant for a product to work, and not to work as intended. I fell in love with the idea of customer obsession.

Having become obsessed, I moved to a new role — Product Manager (PM) — I was super excited. I finally get to help build the product, not just quench the fire that tries to light up when using the product, haha!

Practically everyone around me had known about my newly found love for Product Management and how eager I was to transition into that role.

The first PM event I attended in Feb 2019, which Product School organized, solidified my interest. After that, I went to other events organized by ProductTank, etc. One of the events was where Tobi Otokiti announced a PM event she was organizing, and as an aspiring PM, I couldn’t miss it. It was at this meetup that Tobi launched the ProductDive community (*chef kiss*).

Let me start with this, undergoing training is different from the experience of getting your hands dirty — it was insightful training. You get to learn from great minds and interact with people who are aspiring PMs or already PMs wanting to learn more. From the teachings to the assigned teamwork and the connections. Anyway, if you are looking for a sign to enroll in ProductDive training, this is it (do it!)

Pause! Let’s get back to the gist. So I got my redeployment offer letter to move to the Product Team when I least expected it. I was happy. Unlike other years where I will add something beyond my control, I did not add “Become a PM” to my goals; truth be told, it was beyond me.

I had spent the past year post-NYSC as a Customer Success Specialist, where I excelled pretty well, but nothing prepared me enough for this new role. I honestly thought I was ready — I mean, I was, but you get it?

The beginning.

For the first phase of this transition, the focus was to improve the work-life of the internal team. I was assigned to work on a product I had used for over a year as my hose for quenching fires; the internal dashboard. It was new to me in a way; I had been keeping up to date on external product management, ignoring the in-house bit of products. The core focus of the internal dashboard is not to generate revenue but, the insights and data obtained from it is part of what the company uses to drive revenue thereby supporting the external product and growing the business.

If you are new to Product Management or not a Product Manager at all, you may wonder: “what is an internal product?”

An internal product is pretty much a product that connects teams at an organization. Like the way Slack and Basecamp works. The internal product, in this case, is more like a CRM, providing insights and actions needed to ensure that our customers are getting the best service and support from us.

The goal for the internal dashboard was to understand how the internal teams worked daily, what they needed internally to make work a little easier and more effective while supporting our customers and growing business in the best possible way. We had to engage in conversations with members of each team involved validating some assumptions we had regarding the product. We also had observation sessions with these teams while they worked in some cases.

The advantage we had with having these conversations was that our prospective “users” were within. The users were people we could send a slack message to during work hours, people we could call or text. It was pretty easy to get great feedback.

Taking some steps back.

The MVP for the first version had limited functionalities (which were built in a way that can be improved or expanded). Using this product was quite strenuous as the user experience was not efficient. For instance, It was difficult to get full transaction details for case resolutions — even though the CS team did their best to ensure complaints resolution happened within the stipulated time. It did not come without some issues for the user to get extensive information; as a first version, it did not contain all the necessary information the team needed for their work which led to setbacks in the workflow. The teams had to reach out to the engineering or product team for insight. The process was quite hectic for both the user and the engineering/product team as half the time, delays set in. Either the engineering team was caught up with something and failed to respond on time or the customer was demanding a resolution within seconds (I mean, money matters are quite sensitive and need to be treated as such). Getting information on how the business was doing — including data visualization and the general report was quite a chore. Do you see what is happening here? The user experience and more use-cases needed to be a factor. To improve these processes, we had to carry out a product discovery by conversing with our users to ensure that the product is optimized and solves the problems they might be facing.

Validated Assumptions

We validated the issues faced by customer success and other teams that interacted with the product. The main focus here was to:

Learn how each team operates, gets the insights required, reports on their day-to-day activities, and makes informed decisions.
Understand each team member’s good experience(s) and pain points during this process.
Understand what each team was willing to change about the decisions they’d made.

We defined what we expected to get from each team and, this helped us understand the pain point(s) experienced by each team.

Some of the pain points:

Different internal teams, different expectations: Every internal team had unique reasons for using the internal dashboard. Customer success uses this to support our customers when they face challenges with using our products: from transaction resolutions to verification purposes, etc. The marketing team requires an internal dashboard for effective communication with our customers. The growth team needs an extensive report on how the product performs as a business and financial partner for our customers.

For an internal tool to be effective, it needs to cater to the needs of all internal teams in one place — quite tricky and bulky but, nothing is impossible.

In-depth customer behavioral analysis: Although we had external tools that aided customer behavioral analysis, they were not in-depth enough. There’s only so much these external tools can provide as support for a product.
Ease of use: As I stated earlier, the user experience for the first version of the internal dashboard was a hassle, and our users expressed this as pain.
Data synergy: Every day, different data is needed to tackle or complete a task. Some data the internal teams needed for work were at separate points and tools. Getting data from these tools gave the teams quite a headache.

Lights on, action!

From feature prioritization ➡ user journey map ➡ user stories ➡ user flow➡ roadmap etc. we analyzed and defined how best to execute solutions proposed from the user pain points. During the process, we were in constant sync with the internal teams and stakeholders to ensure that what we have aligns with the goal set in place.

And what is this goal? To make sure that the product improvement will adequately help our users support our customers and grow the business as a whole.

One thing to point out here is how important it is to understand and digest the impact of the product on the users. How do we ensure that the solutions align with user satisfaction and business goals? It was what we rolled with while working on the project.

Internal meets external.

With all these stated above, there are multiple sides of Eyowo: the banking product and the product that supports the internal team working with the bank. We built the new internal dashboard as a web application. While redesigning version 2, we focused on three insights: Customer, Product, Money. Excluding its people, every product organization is concerned about these three things. It starts right from when a customer launches the product or logs into their account; to them making a transaction or using the services rendered, to receiving an income or money in the bank.

From these three baselines, we subdivided the design into different modules. (For this article, these are the top four I will be stating):

Customer: “Everything customer” As the name states, we designed this module to provide everything needed to support a customer effectively and proactively.
Transaction: This module displayed transactions as they happen — in milliseconds. From this module, the user can view every piece of information needed for transaction reconciliation or resolution.
Report: The snitch of them all — haha! We designed this module to contain all information from other modules: from customers to transactions to fraud reports, etc.
Protect: We designed this module to help stay up-to-date on fraudulent accounts and risky customers. In addition to that, users can set triggers on actions based on the rules library and rules violated.

The Realization/ Lessons Learned

While working on this product as a newbie in Product Management, I realized and learned quite some things;

You need to be strong-willed & have emotional intelligence. Having and honing these skills will go a long way in helping you relate with your new team. You are not just managing the product. You are working with the emotions of people whose work makes or mar your performance.
TALK. Ask all the questions; even when you feel like the question may be stupid, still ask. I asked every question down to the single grain. If you don’t voice your opinions, no one will know you are a superstar.
The right team makes the work a little easier. The right manager helps the work in set exciting. I have a great team and, they have been supportive in every way. Softcom’s Product team is BIG on autonomy. Like I thought I had to depend on someone else to make a decision but nope! I made the decisions with my subteam but had my manager in the loop of all decisions for accountability’s sake and for “Look, I’m making this decision, are we good to go or nah?” Lol. It allowed me to learn faster, both from my mistakes and wins.
Do your research; be open to learning, try not to slack.
Having experience from Customer Success helped me more than I expected. Oh my God, the level of patience I had to have. I am very keen on managing time effectively and ensuring everyone completes their tasks. But on some days, it is not the case and, that is where patience undergoes testing.
Still on Customer Success acquired skills: having been at the forefront of fire quenching, I knew (to an extent) what was critical for our target users. This knowledge helped my team create a user experience that works for every team involved.
Mistakes are part of the journey; we learn from them, we work with them.
Whenever you feel like you don’t know what you are doing, always remember no one magically knows these things. We grow by asking questions and doing.
You cannot have all the answers and, that is fine — no one expects you to. We are all just “winging it” — at least more than half of us are.
There will be delays and setbacks; breathe through it.
Join communities like ProductDive to connect with other PMs who are more experienced than you are for some sort of “support group”

Working on this product piqued my interest in analytics and, it will help in my product management journey. It is vital to know how well to analyze every data extracted from the product you are working on as a product manager — it is more like a nice-to-have skill.

Customer is King or, in this case, Your employee is King.

As a company pays all the attention to their customers, it is equally important to give all the attention to the internal teams. How the internal team supports and interacts with the customers is just as important as how the customer interacts with the product. They both work hand in hand; one cannot suffer.

Your employee is King.

This project is a stepping stone to my product management journey and, I’m excited to embark on this path set out for me!