Ha, good question

My 'ex' company makes enterprise virtualization software and networking devices. Customers want to know how we use our own products, as we also have a global IT infrastructure to manage. They want to see us using our own products for confidence reasons (if we don't use it, why should they buy it), and best-practices guidance (if we use it in such a way, they can learn from that).

My group was involved in architecting almost all of these products for internal use, starting with alpha and beta versions. We developed live environments to mirror production, permitting beta products to experience real-world tests outside the lab to find bugs, usability and overall design flaws, and then help engineering correct those flaws before the product was released to paying customers.

Within this framework, my job was to understand the overall corporate product strategy, and then strategize which products should be prioritized, and how the overall big picture architecture should look. I was the key team bridge to the product managers, often working with them to develop new features and brainstorm ways to fix some of the deficiencies we found, as well as help strategize new features and opportunities for their products. I'm proud to say my personal fingerprint is on a slew of enterprise infrastructure products used by millions of people around the world.

I'm also well versed in the product management concepts of SDBS (sell-design-build-service) and 'Purple Cow', for those who follow Seth Godin. This development process served one of our divisions very well, enabling them to essentially just print money.