B-end product operation skills and strategies!

If B-side products are compared to people, a good product manager is a plastic surgeon who is responsible for building the body and skeleton, while the product orders and users are the flesh and blood of the B-side products. How to operate B-side products well? The author has summarized relevant knowledge based on his own experience for everyone to learn and refer to.

It has been three years since I transformed myself into a product manager. Thanks to my previous work as a project manager, demand analyst, and developer, I have made rapid progress in the product field and can face various current problems with ease.

In the past three years, I have been dealing with B-side clients. While serving clients and users, I have also been thinking deeply about how to become a qualified B-side product manager. My previous understanding was: as long as I can avoid those mission impossible requirements in advance, make product iterations smooth, let the team collaborate tacitly, eliminate all risks and obstacles at milestone stages, and ensure smooth phased delivery of products, product iterations will not affect the normal work of B-side users.

If you can do these things, you will be a qualified B-side product manager. I used to call myself a full-stack product manager. What does full-stack mean: "I can draw PRDs, manage teams, and develop products myself"; but as my experience accumulates, I find that to be a qualified full-stack product, the ultimate thing is to understand operations.

So how important is operation to products?

To give a vivid example, a B-end product is like a flesh-and-blood person, and a good product manager is like a plastic surgeon who can look at those good-looking products (imitating other excellent products) and learn from them to make the body look like a real thing without any visible cuts (such as some big stars).

Of course, it is not easy to do this step well. It requires not only certain medical skills (product design and planning capabilities), but also certain anatomical principles (technical background). However, this can only make a good shell, which is still far from the success of the product...

With a body and a skeleton, the next step is to add flesh and blood, and this flesh and blood are the product orders and users . The author is now working in a large traditional home improvement company, and is also eager to transform. Thanks to the boss's foresight, the product design was positioned as a platform from the beginning, rather than the BSS system used by the company itself. This will make a world of difference in the product architecture.

Moreover, the company's positioning has changed from the owner of the product to the first user of the product; the company itself has a large number of orders and users, which can be used to test the operation of the system's business logic, and also solve the problem of polishing many operations in the product 0-1 stage.

I thought everything was moving towards healthy development, but there were many difficulties in the actual implementation and promotion. Why is a B-end product that can actually bring value to users (I think) so difficult to promote?

Compared with new products on the C-end, which are driven by user curiosity and have low costs, they can attract a large number of young and fresh users right from the start. All the product manager has to consider is how to continue to attract new users, ensure existing users, and ensure user stickiness. However, B-end products must first think about how to make users fall in love with the product and maintain a delicate balance between ensuring that the functions are basically complete and the user's low learning cost.

How to guide B-side users to accept the product and make them their partners in their 8-hour work every day requires the product manager to evolve from a plastic surgeon to a wizard, because he has to give soul and life to the product and enable users to interact with the product spontaneously. This process is a process of operational iteration.

Some people may say that if there is a company to endorse this problem, it should be easy to solve. Can't the problem be solved by the central government issuing a formal document and deducting wages without using a system?

It is true that this method is simple and crude and can solve the current problem, but it is definitely a temporary solution to the product because it greatly increases the user's negative resistance to the product. It cannot be long-lasting and cannot be universal. Because you can only solve the problems of your own company in a centralized way, the method is difficult to be universal and replicable.

So how should the platform solve this problem in its early stages? Let’s analyze it slowly.

When I first started working, I worked in the telecommunications industry. At that time, I was working on a mobile first-level BOSS system. Most of its functions had never been used until I left the company. Do you think these functions were helpful?

As a developer, I dare say "absolutely yes", but there are many reasons for not using it. The company I am currently working with also faces the same problem. I have summarized it into the following four points:

1. Fear of change. It is scary to think about changing a habit that has been used for several years or even more than ten years overnight.
2. I have no motivation, and I can do my job well without a system. Using a system may improve efficiency, but what kind of help can it provide (it cannot be quantified or predicted), so I might as well stick to the current way. It doesn’t matter if it’s a little troublesome, because I’m used to it anyway.
3. Worried about the cost of learning. People working in traditional industries rely on experience to make a living. Most of them are very resistant to learning new knowledge and feel it is unnecessary.
4. Worry about being replaced. Once you use the system, experience is no longer the only value. You worry that you will be replaced at any time, or that your experience will be imitated by others, lowering your own value.

Looking through the phenomenon to the essence, what we actually need to solve are the deep-seated problems. These four points need to be faced by both our company and other companies in the same industry, and we need to break them down one by one.

1. As for habits, there is a famous formula that it takes 15 days to develop a habit. Most of the promotional activities of Alipay and WeChat last for about two weeks, with large red envelope rebates or payment discounts for two weeks. The purpose is to make some users develop payment habits. B-side users will also gradually become accustomed to it as long as they get through the 15-day torment period.
2. In terms of motivation, the platform or company needs to provide some benefits or policies to bind the interests of the product with those of the users. Are those Taobao merchants who always say "Dear, give me a good review :)" all sincere? That all comes from the wallet, because good reviews directly affect the next order;
3. In terms of learning cost, product managers need to do a good job of MVP. Under the premise of ensuring the circulation of core business, they should reduce the user's thinking and learning cost as much as possible. Based on the later user experience, they should gradually add valuable functions to bring surprise functions to users instead of burden functions.
4. As for the worry of being replaced, I personally think that there is no need to solve it. What we need to do is to introduce a competition mechanism. Personal crisis awareness is better than corporate crisis awareness. If the nest is overturned, how can eggs remain? If the fittest cannot survive, both companies and individuals may face the fate of being eliminated by society. If you don't revolutionize, others will revolutionize you.

The above four points cannot be solved by one or a few people, but require the tacit cooperation of the entire team and the support of the company. The product team needs to view the company as a society, formulate targeted operation plans and product design plans, and continuously refine the operation strategy through weekly data feedback, so as to guide users to accept the product and be willing to use the product from the bottom of their hearts, so that the product can bring value and data to users and the company.

No matter how things change, the essence remains the same. There are only a few problems, but thousands of solutions. There is no right one, only the relatively most suitable one. Keep trying until you find the best solution.

Of course, doing operations well is not the end of a B-side product manager. These are just some insights and complaints about my current work. Choosing to make products is choosing a direction for cultivation. On this path of cultivation, I will continue to explore and practice.

Author:zywudi

Source: zywudi