Internal Products Are Hard; Commercial Products Are Harder. That line captures years of hard-won lessons from leading both internal platforms and market-facing SaaS at HighLevel. I’ve seen how the two demand different muscles—even when the tech stack, talent, and timelines look the same on paper.
When I talk about internal products, I mean services and solutions that our own employees use to take care of customers—customer-enabling tools and services, agent consoles, fulfillment and billing workflows, operations dashboards, and the underlying platforms that keep them fast, compliant, and resilient. These tools don’t generate revenue directly, but they quietly determine customer experience, gross margin, and how quickly we can ship, resolve issues, and scale.
Commercial products, by contrast, add a second challenge layer. Beyond discovery, usability, and reliability, we must conquer positioning, pricing and packaging, competitive differentiation, sales enablement, procurement hurdles, and ongoing customer success motion. The surface area for failure is bigger, and the time-to-signal on product-market fit is slower and noisier.
Here’s how I decide where to invest. First, I anchor on outcomes, not output. If the business priority is net revenue retention, faster onboarding, or reduced cost-to-serve, internal products often provide the highest-leverage path. If the priority is new revenue, new market entry, or a must-have differentiator, we lean commercial. I make the trade explicit in outcomes vs output OKRs so we can defend the decision when pressure mounts.
Second, I run a clear build vs buy calculus. For internal needs, the default is buy if a mature, configurable solution exists that meets our security, data governance, and integration requirements. I only build when the workflow is core to our differentiation, the TCO of customization is lower than vendor sprawl, or we can capture unique proprietary advantage. For commercial products, I avoid embedding third-party IP in a way that caps differentiation or compresses margins as we scale.
Third, I insist on continuous discovery. Internal audiences are not a captive market—they’re discerning experts with real jobs to do. I treat them like customers, with structured customer interviews, journey mapping, and opportunity solution trees. I rely on empowered product teams and product trios to validate problems and reduce solution risk before we commit engineering time.
Fourth, I frame commercial vs internal work with capacity guardrails. In most planning cycles, I reserve explicit allocation for platform scalability and internal tooling, separate from feature bets. Without this, internal products become backlog filler, which guarantees we’ll pay the interest later in churn, SLA breaches, and slower delivery.
Execution differs too. For internal products, change management is the make-or-break. I plan enablement as a first-class deliverable: clear rollouts, in-app guides, training, and feedback loops with frontline champions. I track adoption, time-to-resolution, error rate, and satisfaction for internal users with the same rigor we apply to external users.
For commercial products, I design the discovery-to-GTM handshake early. Pricing and packaging must reflect value drivers discovered in research, not what’s easiest to meter. Sales and solutions engineering need crisp narratives, objection handling, and proof points. Customer success needs activation plans and health signals tied directly to leading indicators of retention.
Across both, I instrument the product and process. I lean on feature flags and progressive delivery to manage risk, and I protect SLOs with error budgets so teams balance reliability with iteration speed. CI/CD isn’t a badge—it’s how we earn the right to ship continuously without eroding trust.
Common pitfalls recur. Teams skip UX for employee tools because “they have to use it”—which backfires as shadow workflows and rework. Leaders underfund internal platforms, then wonder why velocity stalls. On the commercial side, teams over-index on features and under-invest in positioning and onboarding, leading to poor activation and elongated sales cycles.
What’s the payoff? When we treat internal products as products, we unlock scale: shorter handling times, fewer escalations, clearer accountability, and higher customer satisfaction. When we approach commercial products with the same discovery rigor plus smart GTM, we compress time-to-value and amplify differentiation. The craft is knowing which lever to pull when—and having the discipline to measure what matters.
My rule of thumb is simple. If the goal is operational excellence that compounds across the entire customer journey, invest in internal products with the same intensity you reserve for revenue-generating features. If the goal is market expansion or category leadership, invest in commercial products with a tight discovery-to-GTM loop. In either case, clarity of outcomes, disciplined discovery, and empowered teams win the day.
Inspired by this post on SVPG.
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