SUNDAY REWIND: Sharpening your product craft as an internal product manager by Alison Hickson

This week’s Sunday Rewind is a 2021 ProductTank London talk from Alison Hickson about the changes in her work when she moved from an external product management role to an internal one.

1 min read
Share on

Alison Hickson was Group Product Manager at GoCardless when she gave this talk. She explains that when she became an internal product manager, her reach shifted from thousands of external customers to hundreds of internal team members.

She found that captive users are a fallacy. While you may think that your users don’t have a choice about using your products, this is incorrect, but you can shadow them to get a first-hand view of their experience with a product.

She also suggests monitoring channels like Slack to get customer feedback and discover when things aren’t working.

To influence as an internal product manager, you need to build social capital, Alison says. She did this by identifying a representative for each user group.

Her other advice is to release little bets iteratively. Make the most of lower-stakes releases and do things so you can think about what to do next by building fast feedback loops.

Watch the original talk here: Sharpening your product craft as an internal product manager by Alison Hickson