Internal Product Championing

---
name: internal-product-championing
description: Drive zero-to-one product initiatives within a large organization by acting as the "keeper of the flame." Use this skill when pitching a bottoms-up idea, navigating a messy discovery phase, or rallying a team around a high-stakes vision that lacks formal top-down mandate.
---

The "Keeper of the Flame" strategy is a high-agency approach to internal product development. It requires maintaining optimism "bordering on delusion" to transform a fragile idea into a company-wide priority through visual storytelling and momentum hacking.

## The Champion's Workflow

### 1. Build the Foundational Insight
Do not start with a roadmap; start with an "A-" conviction based on immersion.
*   **Inseparable User Empathy:** Identify non-users and ask specifically why they *don't* use your product.
*   **Cross-Pollination:** Combine insights from research (feeling), design (visuals), and engineering (feasibility).
*   **Identify the "Democratic" Seed:** Find an existing behavior (e.g., how people use whiteboards for brainstorming) and envision what the world looks like if that behavior became the norm for all work.

### 2. Craft the "Show, Don't Tell" Pitch
Words are insufficient for high-stakes buy-in. Use a visual artifact (Figma deck or prototype) to make the vision "see-to-believe."
*   **The Triple-Threat Structure:** Organize your pitch as a repeating sequence of:
    1.  **Pain Point:** A visceral user struggle (use video testimonials).
    2.  **Solution:** A functional prototype or high-fidelity mock.
    3.  **Proof Point:** Data or user quotes validating that specific solution.
*   **The Reality Distortion Field:** Use small hacks to increase believability. For example, swap an existing product icon in a staging environment for your new product icon to show how it fits into the ecosystem.

### 3. Hack Internal Hype
Zero-to-one projects are "destined to die" unless you stoke the embers.
*   **Leverage High-Visibility Forums:** Insert demos into company-wide events like Sales Kickoffs (SKO), Hackathons (Maker Weeks), or All-Hands, even if the product is "barely built."
*   **Create Ownership via Staging:** Put the product on internal staging/dogfooding environments early. When colleagues give feedback and see you implement it, they transition from "skeptics" to "co-creators."
*   **External Symbiosis:** Use "Easter egg" launches or small community moments (like a "Birthday Party" for a feature) to generate external buzz that reflects back into the company.

### 4. Maintain Direct Momentum
*   **Clarify Opinion Levels:** To avoid steamrolling, explicitly state your confidence: "I think we should do X, but I have medium confidence—I defer to you if you feel stronger."
*   **Solicit Feedback First:** Before giving direct feedback to a partner, ask for theirs. This balances the "radical candor" and ensures the directness is two-way.

## Examples

**Example 1: Pivoting from Brainstorms to "Democratic Meetings"**
*   **Context:** FigJam was successful for brainstorms, but the team wanted broader adoption.
*   **Input:** Observation that brainstorms are democratic, while most meetings are one-way.
*   **Application:** Defined a vision for "Democratic Workspaces." Built features (music, voting, stamps) that specifically facilitated the "generative" nature of brainstorms in other meeting types.
*   **Output:** Shifted the product from a "whiteboard tool" to a "meeting ritual platform."

**Example 2: The "Maker Week" Product Birth**
*   **Context:** A PM has an idea for a new product but leadership is skeptical of the business value.
*   **Input:** A week-long internal hackathon.
*   **Application:** The PM walked the office asking engineers "Will you work on this with me?" until a team formed. They built a rough functional prototype and swapped the main UI icons to make it feel like a shipped feature.
*   **Output:** The demo created such internal "fist-pounding" excitement that leadership greenlit the project for a formal launch.

## Common Pitfalls
*   **Hearing "No" as a Final Answer:** Successful internal founders must translate "No" into "Not yet" and continue stoking the flame.
*   **The Vacuum Trap:** Coming out of a silo with a "perfect" vision. If the team doesn't feel they helped shape the insights, they won't have the durability to survive the "messy middle."
*   **Optimizing for the Tweet, Not the Tool:** Creating a demo that looks great in a presentation but lacks an "interactive black box" where users can actually manipulate the output.
*   **Waiting for Permission:** Thinking culture or innovation is top-down. Culture is set by values (e.g., "Play"), but the manifestation of those values (e.g., "The Figgies" awards) must be bottoms-up.