Leveraging a Product-Led Model for Internal Enterprise Applications   

As the pace of feature development for software and hardware products accelerates, internal enterprise tools often take a backseat to customer-facing and revenue-generating priorities.    

Yet behind the scenes, companies depend on hundreds of enterprise tools—from project management platforms to HR systems—to keep operations running and enable scalability. This vast, interconnected ecosystem is critical, but when poorly managed, it can create frustration: 91% of employees report frustration with their work software, citing outdated systems, poor usability, and fragmented workflows.    

Expectations for internal tools are rising, driven by the integration of AI-powered capabilities like predictive insights and automation. However, traditional PMO-led approaches to managing these systems often fail to keep up with employee needs, leading to underwhelming results. Shifting to a product-led approach—focused on ownership, continuous improvement, and user-centric design—offers a path to align tools with employee expectations and evolving business demands, ensuring internal tools deliver measurable value.   

In this blog, we explore how product-led management of internal tools can transform a portfolio of enterprise applications into strategic assets, driving productivity, adaptability, and innovation. 

# The Role of Enterprise Tools Across Teams

Enterprise tools are the foundation of daily operations, streamlining processes and enabling collaboration across the organization. These tools touch nearly every organizational role within a company, supporting critical functions and enabling teams to work more efficiently. Here’s how different teams rely on enterprise tools:

• Product Managers and Project Managers: Use project management and collaboration tools to organize tasks, share assets, and document workflows.
• Engineering Teams: Rely on developer productivity platforms for code management, version control, and deployment automation.
• Human Resource: Leverage human capital management (HCM) and applicant tracking systems to support recruitment, onboarding, and employee data management.
• Sales and Marketing: Utilize customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platforms to manage customer relationships, track leads, and execute campaigns.
• IT & Security: Depend on IT service management (ITSM) and cybersecurity tools to monitor network activity, manage secure access, and ensure compliance.
• Finance: Use enterprise resource planning (ERP) and financial management systems for budgeting, reporting, and overseeing financial operations.
• All Employees: Rely on collaboration platforms for email, file sharing, and communication to enable seamless collaboration across the organization.

These tools enable employees to focus on high-value activities by integrating and automating workflows. However, their upkeep is resource-intensive. IT and engineering teams spend 40% of their time maintaining these systems, and 76% of leaders view this work as a distraction from revenue-driving priorities.

This misalignment highlights the need for a more strategic approach to managing internal tools—one that prioritizes value creation and user satisfaction.

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# Imperatives for a Product-Led Model

Transitioning to a product-led model for managing internal enterprise tools enables organizations to maximize their value, responsiveness, and alignment with business goals. These imperatives demonstrate why this approach is essential.

# 1. Agility & Innovation: Evolving with the Business

The needs of internal customers — employees — are constantly evolving, driven by changing business demands. A product-led model ensures that internal tools remain aligned with the organization’s vision by enabling teams to continually prioritize investments across tools and adapt quickly to shifting needs. Limited IT resources must focus on delivering the highest-value capabilities, which requires flexibility to pivot priorities throughout the year.

New technologies like AI create new opportunities to enhance enterprise tools with predictive analytics and process automation, but balancing the decision to build in-house solutions versus adopting advanced off-the-shelf products is critical to staying innovative and efficient.

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# 2. User-Centric Design: Focusing on Internal Customers

Treating employees as internal customers is central to a product-led model. This way of managing enterprise tools allows the prioritization of usability, accessibility, and personalization to drive employee engagement and productivity. Employees expect workplace tools to match the seamless, intuitive experiences they’ve come to expect from the consumer mobile apps used broadly. This makes user research and design thinking for enterprise tools essential for uncovering nuanced employee needs and meeting employee usability expectations.

Enterprise tool capabilities on the market - such as Salesforce Einstein Analytics - exemplify this user-centered approach, offering personalized dashboards, role-based views, and adaptive learning. These customizations empower users to tailor their experience, boosting engagement and efficiency, a particularly valuable approach in platforms where streamlined navigation and targeted insights are key to user satisfaction. When enterprise tools are designed with employees in mind, they deliver better outcomes for both users and the business.

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# 3. Cross-Departmental Alignment: Balancing Diverse Needs

Internal tools must balance the diverse and often conflicting priorities of teams like HR, IT, Sales, and Marketing. While HR may prioritize ease of use for onboarding, IT might focus on security and integration. A product-led model bridges these gaps by aligning and negotiating departmental needs with broader organizational goals.

By focusing on ROI and creating a unified product roadmap, product managers can ensure tools serve both individual teams and the enterprise as a whole. This approach optimizes resource allocation, avoids siloed decision-making, and delivers solutions that maximize value across the organization.

# 4. Scalability and Maintenance: Growing with Organizational Demands

As organizations grow, internal tools must evolve to support larger teams, more complex workflows, and increasing demands. A product-led model ensures tools are designed with scalability in mind, maintaining performance and reliability as the business expands.

Flexibility is equally important—sometimes scaling back or simplifying tools is necessary to avoid inefficiencies or overcomplexity. By proactively managing scalability and ongoing maintenance, organizations can ensure their tools remain valuable, adaptable, and aligned with business needs over time.

# 5. Operational Excellence and Cost Efficiency: Maximizing ROI

With rising costs and increasing pressure on budgets, internal tools must be streamlined, cost-effective, and impactful. Every aspect of an enterprise tool—licensing, implementation, updates, and new features—represents a real expense. While some advanced capabilities, like AI, bring added costs, not all deliver meaningful value.

A product-led model emphasizes evaluating each tool’s contributions to productivity and ROI. Organizations can balance performance with cost-effectiveness by focusing investments on features that truly improve efficiency and eliminate unnecessary complexity. This approach ensures tools remain aligned with business objectives while delivering measurable value through time savings, productivity gains, improved employee engagement, risk reduction, and cost savings.

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# Four Steps to Implement a Product-Led Model

A product-led approach is built on strategic planning, organizational alignment, and a commitment to continuous improvement. Organizations can transform internal tools into strategic assets by focusing on the key principles outlined above. Whether your organization is just starting this journey or refining existing practices, the following steps provide a detailed roadmap to maximize impact and align tools with employee and business needs.

# Step 1: Assess Your Enterprise Application Ecosystem & Strategy

Large companies often lack a comprehensive picture of their internal product portfolio. Begin by mapping out your internal tool landscape to establish a clear baseline. This assessment should:

• Inventory all existing internal products, noting their purpose, user base, ownership, and how the portfolio and feature development are currently managed for existing products.
• Identify gaps in tool management, such as unclear ownership, inconsistent feature development, or departures from operational or enterprise application strategy.
• Evaluate redundancies or inefficiencies, including tools with overlapping functionality.
• Highlight variability across the organization in how internal products are managed. It’s common for different teams to have inconsistent approaches, which can create misalignment and inefficiencies.
• Compare current practices to industry standards to uncover improvement opportunities.

The insights from this assessment help uncover opportunities for standardization, prioritize high-impact changes, and build a business case for further investment in a product-led model.

# Step 2: Design a Right-Sized Product-Led Operating Model

A product-led operating model shifts focus from short-term projects to long-term ownership of internal tools. To implement this model:

• Clarify product ownership for each application, ensuring accountability for feature prioritization and ongoing improvements.
• Define how teams will collaborate to prioritize investments and advance product functionality.
• Create direct channels for product teams to gather real-time feedback from employee users.
• Implement reporting on success metrics—such as adoption rates, productivity improvements, and ROI—to track impact and guide decision-making.
• Foster collaboration with IT, engineering, vendors, and other partners to activate feature development and enhancements.

A properly designed operating model enables an organization to maximize the abovementioned principles, maximizing high-value capabilities and ensuring tools remain aligned with employee needs and business goals. Changes to organizational patterns or workflows may be challenging, but with the right approach, they can inspire resilient and valuable change.

# Step 3: Align Organizational Structure and Talent Strategy

While an operating model does not necessarily imply a reorganization, shifting to a product-led approach often requires shifts in team roles, accountability, and skillsets to ensure effective internal tool management. To align your organizational structure and talent strategy:

• Assess whether current team structures support clear ownership and accountability for tools.
• Model and compare organizational design scenarios to weigh potential outcomes and ensure alignment with the product-led operating model.
• Evaluate whether organizational changes, such as role realignments or new team structures, are needed to streamline decision-making and improve effectiveness.
• Develop a talent strategy that supports product management, fosters the expertise required to manage and evolve internal products, and addresses emerging needs.
• Prioritize skill development and talent acquisition in areas specific to enterprise product management, including cross-functional collaboration, business acumen, data analysis, change management, and strategic planning.

By building these competencies to bolster the new operational model, organizations can ensure their people can effectively support the enterprise application portfolio while fostering accountability and long-term success.

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# Step 4: Advance Product Management Capabilities Over Time

If your organization already has the right operational model, along with aligned organizational design and talent strategy, the next step is to focus on continuously maturing your product management practices. To build maturity:

• Enhance how teams approach business case creation, feature prioritization, user requirements gathering, and metric collection.
• Encourage education and knowledge sharing within product management teams to help advance the rigor of standard processes and cross-train product professionals.
• Create opportunities for cross-functional knowledge sharing and collaboration to develop new practices and standards that collectively lift organizational maturity.
• Highlight progress using current maturity data and success stories to foster self-correction, encourage evolution, and build momentum. Pair this with sponsorship and support from leadership to reinforce the value of ongoing maturity efforts.

By refining processes and advancing team capabilities, organizations can ensure their product management function remains agile, responsive to evolving internal tool demands, and continues to improve the health of the function while adding greater value for internal employee customers.

# The Path Forward for Internal Enterprise Tools

As companies grow and adapt, managing internal tools with a product-focused approach is essential for maximizing employee experience and business value. Tools designed with employee needs and updated with relevant features enable organizations to streamline workflows, scale efficiently, boost productivity, and make work smoother for everyone. By integrating emerging technologies like AI where they add measurable value and aligning tools with strategic goals, companies can create a seamless, scalable ecosystem that empowers internal teams and drives organizational success.

Propeller partners with organizations to unlock the full potential of their internal enterprise tools. Whether you're assessing your ecosystem, designing a product-led operating model, aligning your talent strategy, or advancing product management capabilities, we offer tailored support at every stage of the journey.

Transforming internal enterprise tools into strategic assets starts with the right plan, approach, and partner. Let’s work together to create tools that empower employees, align with business goals, and position your organization for long-term success.