What Happens When You Apply Product Thinking to IT

For 25 years I've worked in and around Product and Tech. I recently took on our global IT function.

It's the first time IT has sat fully with me and, if I'm honest, it's been humbling.

What I didn't appreciate

I'm in and out of M365 admin most days. Looking at WiFi setups. Dealing with firewalls and device management. Helping when laptops and meeting rooms refuse to behave five minutes before a client call. Working through Cyber Essentials Plus, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 conversations. Reviewing policies I previously skimmed over.

I don't think I ever properly appreciated what it actually takes to run a solid IT function.

When IT works, nobody notices. When it fails, everybody does.

That asymmetry shapes everything. The team is always a few bad minutes away from being visible in the worst possible way, and the work that prevents those minutes is almost entirely invisible. IT is often positioned as friction — a blocker, a cost centre, a function that says no. Seen from the outside, with good IT underneath you, that framing can feel accurate.

It isn't.

What product thinking adds

We're trying to apply product thinking to how IT operates at CIP. That means shifting some of the instincts that calcify in IT functions over time.

Treat colleagues as people, not tickets. Reduce time to access, not just time to resolution. Design onboarding as an experience, not a checklist. Make security feel embedded, not bolted on. Use automation to remove repetitive internal admin. Create clearer self-serve pathways so people don't need to ask for everything.

For example: instead of long policy documents nobody reads, we're testing shorter guidance with practical scenarios. Instead of reactive laptop fixes, we're looking at proactive device health and lifecycle management. Instead of endless email chains for access requests, structured workflows with clearer ownership.

The overhead doesn't vanish. But it drops enough that I think IT can actually work the way it was supposed to — enabling people rather than managing around them.

The thing that surprised me most

I used to think product was where most of the leverage sat.

I'm less sure about that now. If your IT function is clunky — if onboarding takes a week, if security processes create constant friction, if people lose an hour a day to tools that don't talk to each other — every other digital ambition slows down. The product work, the data work, the AI adoption. All of it runs on the IT infrastructure.

It's messy. It's operational. It's not glamorous. But it is foundational in a way that I underestimated from the outside.

What changes when you're inside it

The product intuition transfers. Some of it.

The instinct to talk to users, to understand the actual problem before proposing a solution, to measure the right things — that's useful. The instinct to think in terms of experience rather than process, to design for the realistic user rather than the compliant one — that's useful too.

What doesn't transfer is the comfortable distance from operational reality. In product, the work is always one step removed from the outcome. In IT, you're much closer to the consequence of getting it wrong.

That proximity is uncomfortable. It's also clarifying.

If you've spent your career in product, you probably have opinions about IT. You probably think it could be better. You might be right. But running it for a while changes your understanding of what "better" actually requires.