Hi all, wanted to do a quick poll on something I've been working on. I lead a platform engineering group, and we've been building an internal tool for our product managers. I'm looking to understand if there would be any value in releasing this tool by getting a better sense of the pain points currently felt by internal product managers i.e. PMs whose customers are engineers inside their company. Some examples of the things we've tackled: • Pulling together a CRM from internal company sources (think WorkDay, Github, Jira, Confluence, Slack) which helps understand the attributes of individual engineers or teams or groups of engineers for more targeted engagement i.e. mobile engineers who have been in the company for less than 6 months or all engineers who have been active in the support Slack channel in the last year • A way to send personalised Slack messages to various channels / individuals (think mail merge for Slack) so that the messages can be made relevant to specific team systems or capabilities Has anyone faced any other challenges (or the same challenges) that they think a tool could help them address?

Nice - cool idea! In my last role this would have been useful when we were rolling out our Audit log solution for adoption. We targeted the teams who had the most events to adopt for audit logging, but their onboarding was slow as they didn’t have a lot of knowledge on kafka. This meant we had to onboard them to kafka as well as onboarding them in how our solution had to be adopted, so it slowed the initial adoption phase significantly. What would have been nice (following the above) is if we were able to see • What teams had the most people building things with kafka • What teams had services using kafka • What people were talking the most about kafka or related infrastructure • What overlap there is with the above people, and the teams in our list of priorities to be onboarded first. Maybe we would have seen that #3 had more people engaging in the topic than #1 and we’d have a quicker onboarding A follow on question - would you have access to private slack groups? Much of the company was an internal/public slack group pairing, and a lot of the deep conversation might have been happening in private groups

Hey John, thanks for the feedback, really useful and makes me think there's others out there for whom it might be useful! In terms of the private Slack groups - we don't scan those. It's possible by doing an export in Slack of all the conversations, but we felt that it would infringe on people's privacy expectations - unless it's for legal reasons, I think the general expectation is that private conversations remain private even in a corporate system. Agree we're missing out on a lot of useful info but there's a lot of useful signal in the public channels.

This would be super useful! Right now I am a PM for an internal developer platform at my organization. I've had trouble scaling outreach to current & prospective users of the platform. Right now I keep track of all convos in a google doc as a kind of 'CRM' (ie teamX said they have too much on their plate to try the platform this quarter, but to follow up with them in a few months).

Would love to have a chat with you @Kirstin Slevin because many of the things you mention (internal CRM to track platform customers, Slack survey to track DX over time and segmenting using internal employee data) are things we're in the process of building out. I'll DM you separately!

I'd be very keen to join in and listen @Olivier Kouame and @Kirstin Slevin

This reads very intriguing; all too often in my work as a PM for internal platforms, I had scenarios where one asked, “ok, how big is the total addressable market of all data engineers who need this,” and the answer is “Hmm a bunch but I couldn’t tell you the number.” Anything that can help me automate and professionalize user research or product marketing would be gold

Great, thanks for this! I'll add you to the conversation when we kick things off 👍