Your users sit 10 metres away.

Your decisions affect people you have lunch with.

Welcome to internal product design.

It is weird. It is wonderful. It will humble you.

Love #1: Your users are your colleagues

No recruiting panels.

No screener surveys.

No waiting three weeks to talk to a real human.

I walk over, tap someone on the shoulder, and say “can I show you something quickly?”

They say yes. Because they know it will make their life better eventually.

That feedback loop - priceless.

Love #2: You become a niche expert (whether you like it or not)

Crew planning. Network scheduling. Revenue modelling. Cost structures.

I know more about bus and train operations than I ever expected to know about anything.

Agencies give you breadth.

Internal design gives you depth.

Both are valuable. Only one makes you genuinely interesting at dinner parties. (It is this one.)

Love #3: World-class collaborators who don’t know they’re designers

Product owners who can map a user journey without blinking.

Engineers who ask “but why does the user need this step?”

Operations researchers who think in systems before I even open Figma.

They are design thinkers. They just never got the job title.

Learning from them changed how I work.

Love #4: The holistic view nobody talks about

Your user does not live in your domain.

They exist across 5 products, 3 workflows, and 2 departments.

Internal design lets you see all of that.

And occasionally, just occasionally, you get to collaborate with other designers across those domains and actually join the dots.

That is rare and special.

Love #5: You build the design culture from scratch

5 product teams. 3to 4 products shipping features continuously in a year.

I set up the design process. The rituals. The ways of working.

Nobody handed me a template.

Hate #1: Your users are also swamped

Yes. I know. I just told you they are always available.

They are also drowning in meetings, deadlines, and their actual jobs.

Usability testing? “Can we do it next month?”

Next month becomes the month after.

The access is there. The bandwidth is not always.

Hate #2: Tech builds it. Users accept it. Quietly.

Nobody knows exactly what they need. That is normal.

But sometimes I notice users hesitating to challenge a solution.

Not because it is good. Because the decision was already made above them.

When POs dominate the narrative, users stop voicing what actually matters.

That is not a design failure. But it is a design problem.

Hate #3: Enterprise time is a different dimension

You design something today.

It ships next year.

By then you have moved on mentally, emotionally, professionally.

Engineers pop the champagne. Designers have already forgotten what we built.

Celebrating milestones in internal design takes deliberate effort. Otherwise the wins just quietly disappear.

Hate #4: Design is still the last guest to arrive

I have sat through the reveal of a shiny new Power BI dashboard built as “the solution.”

Nobody asked what the user actually needed.

The immediate team gets it. Engineers get it. POs get it.

But somewhere up the chain, UX still means “make it look nice.”

That one stings every single time.

Hate #5: The work is impactful. The portfolio is invisible.

No Dribbble shots. No behance case studies. No “oooh that’s gorgeous” reactions.

Internal tools are functional first. Polished when time allows. Which is rarely.

The impact is real. Measurable. Sometimes huge.

But try explaining that in a job interview when all people want to see is a sexy UI.

How do you sell work that changed how 300 people do their jobs but looks like a grey table?

I am still figuring that one out.

Overall

Internal product design is not glamorous.

It is complex, political, slow, and full of constraints.

It is also one of the most meaningful design roles I have ever done.

You just have to be okay with the glory being quiet.