Latest / The Internal Move Podcast with Fexingo: Lateral Roles, Internal Transfers, and Staying at Your Company / How Internal Transfers Can Help You Learn Company Blind Spots
Transcript
- Lucas: You know, I've been thinking about something that almost never comes up when people talk about internal transfers — the idea that moving to a new role inside your company can actually teach you things about the company itself that you never would have seen otherwise. Luna: Like what? I mean, you're already there — you know the org chart, you know the products — what's really hidden? Lucas: Right, exactly — you know the official story. But every company has these blind spots, gaps between what leadership thinks is happening and what's actually happening on the ground. And if you stay in one function long enough, you start to see those gaps as normal. But when you transfer — let's say from product marketing to data analytics — suddenly you're seeing the same company through completely different eyes. Luna: So you're saying the fresh perspective isn't just about learning new skills, it's about seeing where the machine is broken. Lucas: Exactly. And I've got a concrete example. There's a mid-sized SaaS company — we'll call them CloudTrack — where someone moved from the sales support team over to the customer success team. And within three weeks, she noticed something that had been bleeding money for years. Luna: What was it? Lucas: The sales team was promising a feature during demos that the product didn't actually support. Not deliberately, but they'd say 'yeah, our reporting module can handle that' — and it couldn't. So customers would buy, hit month three, realize the feature didn't work, and churn. The support team knew about it, but they just worked around it ticket by ticket. The product team didn't know because nobody from support sat in their stand-ups. And sales didn't know because nobody told them. Luna: That's a classic silo problem. But the woman who transferred — she was the first person who had actually been in both conversations? Lucas: Exactly. She had the support context and the customer success context. And because her new role gave her a slightly different set of meetings, she saw the disconnect. She calculated that it was costing the company roughly two million dollars a year in lost renewal revenue. That's a blind spot you'd never find from the outside. Luna: And I bet leadership had no idea. They probably blamed churn on product-market fit or pricing. Lucas: Exactly right. They thought the problem was the product. Turns out the product was fine — the problem was the story sales was telling about it. And it took an internal transfer to connect the dots. Luna: So what's the lesson for someone who's considering a lateral move? How do you turn that kind of observation into career capital instead of just grumbling? Lucas: That's the real question. Because if you just surface the problem as a complaint — 'hey, sales is lying to customers' — you become the person who points fingers. But if you frame it as a systemic insight, you become the person who sees the whole picture. Luna: So how do you frame it? Lucas: You bring data. You show the revenue impact. You offer a solution — maybe a one-pager sales can use that clarifies the feature limitations, or a feedback loop between support and product. You don't say 'sales is incompetent.' You say 'we have an information gap that's costing us two million a year, and here's how we close it.' Luna: That's smart. It turns you into a strategic asset rather than a tattletale. Lucas: And the thing is, when you transfer internally, you have a brief window where people expect you to notice things. There's a 'newcomer license' — for about 90 days, you're allowed to ask naive questions and point out obvious inefficiencies. After that, you're expected to be part of the system. Luna: So there's a timer on this. You have to be intentional about documenting what you see. Lucas: Exactly. I'd recommend keeping a private running list in the first month — not formal, just notes. 'Sales promise X that support can't deliver.' 'Engineering reports bugs that customer success doesn't know about.' 'Marketing runs campaigns on a feature that's actually sunset.' Then after 60 days, you have a curated shortlist of the three or four biggest blind spots, and you decide strategically which one to act on. Luna: But not all blind spots are safe to surface, right? Some of them are political landmines. Lucas: That's the nuance. You have to read the room. If the blind spot is about a senior VP's pet project, maybe you don't send that email. But if it's a purely operational gap with no political owner, that's fair game. The key is to tie it to a business outcome — revenue, retention, efficiency — not to blame. Luna: I remember a former colleague who transferred from HR to operations and realized that the company was spending a ton on temporary contractors because the hiring process took forever. Nobody in HR knew how long the process actually took from the hiring manager's side. He surfaced it and saved the company maybe half a million a year. That was a big promotion for him. Lucas: Perfect example. HR thought the process took two weeks. Operations thought it took six. Both were right from their own perspective — but nobody had the full timeline. That's a blind spot that only exists between functions. Luna: And the only way to see it is to have someone who's sat on both sides. That's the argument for internal transfers right there. Lucas: It's one of the strongest arguments, honestly. External hires bring fresh expertise, but they don't bring organizational intelligence — knowledge of how your specific company actually works. Internal transfers bring both. And when you combine that with a new functional lens, you get this rare ability to see the gaps. Luna: Okay, so say I'm about to transfer. How do I pick the right new role if my goal is to maximize this blind-spot visibility? Lucas: Great question. You want a role that's adjacent to your old one but sits in a different part of the value chain. If you're in marketing, don't move to a different marketing sub-team — move to sales or product or customer support. You want to cross a handoff point. That's where the blind spots are, at the seams. Luna: Between functions, not within them. Lucas: Exactly. Handoffs are where information gets lost. So if you can position yourself on the receiving end of a handoff you used to initiate, you'll see the gap immediately. Example: if you used to hand off leads from marketing to sales, now go work in sales and see what actually happens to those leads. You'll learn more in two weeks than most external consultants would in two months. Luna: That's a very practical way to think about it. I'm going to remember that next time someone asks me about career moves. Lucas: One more thing — once you've surfaced a blind spot and helped fix it, you now own a piece of organizational knowledge that's very valuable. You become the go-to person for cross-functional issues. That's the kind of informal authority that leads to big roles down the line. Luna: And it's portable. Even if you leave the company eventually, that ability to see systems — that's a skill you keep. Lucas: Exactly right. And honestly, that's one of the reasons we keep doing this show — to help people think about their careers in ways that go beyond the obvious. We don't run ads on these episodes, and that's intentional. We want the advice to be straightforward and useful. If you find value in that, you can support the show at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just a way to keep it ad-free. Luna: Yeah, it's a small gesture that goes a long way. And it means we never have to compromise the content. Lucas: So back to the blind spots — I think the meta-lesson here is that internal transfers aren't just about your own growth. They're a way to make the whole company smarter. And that's a pretty powerful framing if you're trying to sell your manager on a lateral move. Luna: You're saying you should pitch it as a benefit to the company, not just to yourself. Lucas: Exactly. 'I want to move to customer success because I think I can identify gaps between product and sales.' That's a much stronger pitch than 'I'm bored in marketing.' And it's true — you will identify those gaps. The company gets institutional knowledge transfer for free. Luna: That's a great way to frame a transfer conversation. I'm going to use that next time. Lucas: Good. And if you do, let us know how it goes. We might do a follow-up episode on the best pitches for internal moves. Luna: I'd listen to that. Alright, thanks for the insights, Lucas. Lucas: Thanks, Luna. Talk to everyone next time.