How to rally engineering teams to build the internal tools you need

I once worked at a company where I was responsible for exclusively doing this: building internal tools.

It was one of the most satisifying jobs I ever had. It was for a mobile games company with between 100 and 200 employees. Most developers worked on the mobile games and since these were very hit & miss, developers got disenchanted working for months on a game that got canned because the numbers weren't hit or management changed the focus. Few got to work on successful games - the envy of all developers in the company.

Instead I built these tools - mostly stuff that moved data between various third party products. But also built tools for company motivational purposes. All sorts of stuff including a weather aggregated to measure air quality within the office which sent slack alerts if conditions got unacceptable.

Part of the enjoyment was the immediate feedback from stakeholders and since these were "only" internal tools, there weren't deadlines or hassle about hitting numbers or deadlines. Testing wasn't that important, as long as the tool worked it was fine - a real hack-away until it works type of job!

I also began to see how people worked and whether there might be tooling to make their lives easier - most projects were initiated by a conversationn over a coffee (or other culinary delights)!

I can only recommend this to any company to have a team that exclusively works for the employees to make their lives easier. Simple scripts can sometimes help a long way to making non-tech people more efficient.