Are internal tools helping or hurting your business?

This article summarizes an episode of Alex Kantrowitz’s video series featuring Arnab Bose, chief product officer at Asana.

Arnab Bose, chief product officer at Asana/ Photo credit: Arnab Bose

Allocating engineering talent to build internal operational software routinely drains resources away from a company’s main revenue sources. Arnab Bose, chief product officer at Asana, warns that leaders who insist on coding their own management tools often mismanage their technical staff.

He points out that the hidden costs of securing and maintaining custom software grow exponentially over time.

To prevent this operational drag, executives must keep their engineers focused entirely on building products for their actual customers. Centralizing complex daily work on existing specialized systems reduces this distraction and keeps the team aligned on their business goals.

Deciding to build or buy software

Companies must question why they would intentionally take on the technical burden of running a system that does not directly make them money.

Bose challenges this common corporate mistake, asking, “Why would you go focus on something that’s not your key business?”

Protecting engineering resources
Building a simple internal tool that works once is relatively easy. However, maintaining it at corporate standards requires ongoing effort. If a custom tool does not provide a direct edge over market competitors, utilizing an existing product is always a safer financial decision.

Forcing developers to fix broken internal tools drains company resources and slows down the delivery of actual products to paying customers. The financial burden of hosting servers, updating code, and patching security flaws quickly outweighs any initial savings from building the software internally.

The problem with learning alone

Purchasing a commercial software system solves this maintenance problem, but deploying basic AI without a clear strategy creates entirely new workflow delays. When an automated assistant works completely alone for one person, the lessons it learns are never shared across the company.

Bose points out the clear failure of this isolated setup, explaining, “It remembers what you tell it, but it will make that same mistake for me if I haven’t ever coached it through that [the correction].”

Connecting daily tasks to goals
This lack of shared learning forces every employee to waste time fixing the exact same software mistakes over and over. If five different employees ask an isolated program to write a report, all five will have to manually correct the same formatting errors.

To prevent this repetitive work, teams need systems that connect daily tasks directly to the main goals of the company. A connected setup automatically provides the software with the background information it needs to execute difficult jobs for the entire department.

When the system understands how different jobs fit together, it stops making isolated errors and begins supporting the whole group.

Using past information

Sharing knowledge as a team