The Golden Age of Internal Tooling

Under-Invested

For many years, internal tooling was one of the most under-invested areas in many companies. That always led to friction when making changes or collecting data. Often it required a change request to a development team, a manual script run by DevOps, or manual data collection just to build a dashboard for the analytics team.

In many cases the price tag was an issue too. Expanding and supporting internal tooling requires time from the development team, and as a result can slow down key projects. Exploring APIs could be tedious as well, since a simple dashboard can hold data from multiple sources, each exposing its own custom API.

Buckle up for a cheesy statement, but AI has changed the playing field a lot, and it now feels like a golden age of internal tooling.

Customer-Facing First

Over the years I’ve worked on different projects - customer-facing, internal, frontend, backend. Almost always, the main complexity, visibility and investment were in customer-facing areas, as they were considered the main revenue generation tool. Everything else suffered from disconnected (fragmented) data and required a lot of manual processing to identify improvements and increase revenue.

What Changed

This year, wider adoption of AI coding tools changed that. Even small teams can now experiment, move fast, build unique tools, streamline processes and identify new revenue streams.

Built in Weeks

A tool that aggregates data from numerous systems, processes it and presents a report with improvement opportunities can be built by a small team in weeks and used by different departments:

• Internal tools self-service
• Content quality
• Backend performance
• Conversion rate
• Complex data processing

Expensive SaaS tools with flexible configuration can now be developed in-house over a short period of time to serve a specific, unique purpose. It has no limits, as companies define which key metrics they are looking for.

Final Thought

My peers confirm the same about their companies. Investment in internal tooling is only growing, as SaaS options are only getting more expensive and, in many cases, more limited. Simple, niche tools can make teams more productive and bring company awareness to revenue growth opportunities or possible savings.