9 Mistakes to Avoid while creating an Internal Product

Marc Molins spent six months as a product manager in Skyscanner's Data Tribe learning what doesn't work when building internal products. First mistake: not understanding product touch points. His team built a geographical API used by other teams. He made a list of everywhere the API showed up in the actual Skyscanner product—airports in search, results pages, hotel cross-sells. Only then did he understand what different squads actually needed from the new system.

Second: thinking you can succeed without other teams. You can't. His team needed all services across Skyscanner to migrate to the new unique Geographical API. That meant convincing other teams to prioritize migration over their own new projects. The urgency to deliver prevents you from taking time to communicate properly. You have to constantly communicate mission, vision, value. Explain which pain points you're solving and what effects it'll have on the end user. Otherwise teams won't prioritize your work.

Third: building something nobody knows how to use. A product that is not used is a failed product. Why spend time building if people don't know how to use it? Documentation, onboarding, clear communication—all unglamorous work that determines whether your internal product actually gets adopted.

The last mistake applies to highly technical internal products like data platforms or APIs. At first he was frustrated trying to understand every single detail. Felt like he couldn't contribute. Took talking to a PM with 10+ years experience to realize: you don't need to understand everything at once. Take your time to learn. Find spots where you can be valuable now while you're ramping up on the technical depth.

The pattern across all these mistakes: internal products fail because PMs forget they're still building a product, not just infrastructure. You need the same discipline around user research, clear value prop, stakeholder management, and adoption strategy. Just because your users are other engineers doesn't mean you get to skip the product management fundamentals.