What is the difference between a good operator and an ordinary junior operator?

My name is Lao Huang. I am an operator.

In fact, since I entered the Internet industry, I have always been in operations and have never changed.

In the entire Internet industry, "operations" has always been easily regarded as a miscellaneous functional position with little future and a lot of hardship. As an operator, I understand this very well. You know, since I started recruiting Zhou Botong and doing three classes, I have encountered people asking me questions like this almost every week -

Teacher Youcan, I have been working in operations for two or three years, but now I feel that what I am doing has neither technical content nor prospects, and my own growth is also very slow. What do you think I should do? What is the way out for this operation position?

However, as a veteran who has been working in operations for seven or eight years, I especially want to stand up and say a few words for "operations" - it is true that it is miserable, but to say that operations is a boring and hopeless functional position, I find it hard to agree. At least, from my personal current experience, operations is something that is easy to get started but is actually very difficult, requires a lot of miscellaneous physical work, but is actually extremely interesting and highly technical.

At least, after all these years, I still like operations very much, and I really think that operations are a very interesting thing.

Therefore, in this article, I would like to try to use easy-to-understand language to describe where the "depth", "interesting" and "technical content" of operations lies, and what the difference might be between a top-notch operator and an ordinary operator who feels that his job is boring all day long.

To talk about the fun and bottomless nature of clear operations, we must once again return to the old question -

What exactly does operations do?

Countless people have given countless strange answers to this question, including myself, who once gave the answer that "the core of operations is to attract new customers, retain customers, and promote activation." However, this answer is too simple and one-dimensional, and may be far from sufficient to reflect the complexity of operations. So this time, I would like to interpret it in a different way to better pave the way for the answer to the question "What is the difference between top operations and ordinary operations?"

The answer I want to give is this -

In my personal understanding, any business has three essential elements: users, products and operations. Here, users are specific people who have certain needs that need to be solved. Products are the carriers that provide mechanism solutions around certain user needs. Operations are all relevant means and methods to help establish and maintain good relationships between products and users. Its ultimate goal is to maximize product value and user value. Among these, the reflection of product value and user value will mainly be externalized in indicators such as user number, user activity, user usage time and commercial revenue.

Therefore, around how to do a better job of "helping products and users build and maintain good relationships", the capabilities that operations need to have and the issues that need to be clarified are likely to include the following:

Recognition, familiarity and application of various conventional operational methods (such as copywriting, content operation, creative planning, activities, channel promotion ). What operations most often need to do is to directly increase a specific indicator through one or more of the above methods;

The recognition, familiarity and application of various unconventional operation methods (such as communication, brand promotion, and PR). The reason why they are "unconventional" is that these methods often indirectly drive data indicators and product value, and there are more complex variables and logics that need to be judged and evaluated;

You need to be aware of the different product forms and the operational focus that is more suitable for them;

A sense of the overall rhythm of “connecting products and users” (when to go fast, when to go slow, and how to connect?);

The ability to build an ecosystem. One of the things that high-level operations must do is to connect some seemingly unrelated and scattered nodes between products, users, and specific operational methods, and ultimately establish a virtuous ecological closed loop around the improvement of product value and user value.

Establish the operator's relative influence and control over the user group.

The gap between ordinary operations and good operations often appears in the above points. We can talk briefly about them one by one.

First, a NB operator must be capable of obtaining specific outputs (such as significantly increasing a specific indicator) through at least one or more of the following means: content operation (topic selection, planning, aggregation and creation of content, etc.), creative planning, activities, channel promotion, etc. They know what conditions will make it more likely to be liked by users, and they also know which points to focus on to quickly mobilize users' willingness and enthusiasm for participation. On the contrary, a very ordinary and general operation cannot be responsible for the results, and does not know how to better mobilize the user's willingness and enthusiasm for participation. They can often only do some purely physical work in the process.

Secondly, a NB operator must have some understanding of relatively abstract things such as public relations, PR, and communication, and have a certain ability to apply them. He may not be so professional in communication and PR, but he must know how to operate means such as communication and brand promotion, as well as some of the user cognitive logic behind them. There are often several in-depth questions that need to be considered clearly here - how can a communication be successful and popular? Based on the popularity, how can you make a successful communication directly related to your product value and operation, rather than having it be very popular but leaving nothing behind after the popularity ends? And finally, if the above two problems are solved, what should the operations side do to coordinate and cooperate with your successful communication?

In my opinion, a highly NB operation should have the ability to recognize and implement the above-mentioned issues, but a very ordinary and general operation will have no idea about the above-mentioned issues at all.

Third, products come in various forms, and the operating logic and focus of each form of product are likely to be very different. For example, the operating methods and focus of tool-type products, media-type products, and community social products in the initial stage are likely to be completely different.

As a good NB operator, you should be aware of this issue and have a deeper understanding of the operational focus of various products. On the contrary, an ordinary operator may know very little about this issue and may easily take an operation method that he thinks is more effective and apply it to the product.

Fourth, about the sense of rhythm. Doing anything requires a rhythm, whether it is running a business, making products, or operations. Operations serve products and users, and behind the user growth of a product there is a set of relative logic and objective laws. A good NB operator should have a deep understanding and knowledge of such issues. When applying it to his own products, he should know when to be fast and when to be slow, and what data to focus on at what stage to obtain what output in order to be more reasonable and valuable.

An ordinary operator with a lower level of skill will have a vague idea about these things. They often have a simple and one-dimensional idea in their minds: "The more users, the better." In fact, if you lose your sense of rhythm, ignore various internal and external factors, and only seek to increase the number of users, it will likely be a disaster.

Fifth, as mentioned before, operations are often composed of some scattered and fragmented things and nodes. As an NB operator with a big picture perspective, you should be able to sort out a framework or system, gradually connect all these fragmented points, and finally aggregate these nodes together to form an ecosystem with a virtuous cycle. It’s like you think that in order to operate a product well, it seems that you can build a few user groups, do some exciting topics, and regularly organize activities to distribute some benefits to everyone, or do some publicity and event marketing , etc. These are all things that seem to be possible, but in the end, it is very likely that how to make these seemingly isolated events be related to each other and form an overall linkage is the key. A good NB operation should be able to do this well.

Ordinary entry-level operators who lack vision will only focus on doing things and carrying out work in isolation on some scattered and fragmented points.

Sixth, after creating a close connection between users and products, as a good operator, you must also be able to establish and maintain your influence and control over the user group as an official. If this is not done well, you may gradually be ignored by users, become very invisible and highly replaceable. In extreme cases, users may even kick you away and choose to play on their own.

In order to establish and maintain influence and control over users, you often need to take a multi-pronged approach. For example, while ensuring that the value of the product is sufficient to attract users, you may need to establish a high sense of identity with users at the value level, establish deep and diverse emotional connections with users, and even build a sustainable and controllable benefit distribution mechanism among users.

Good NB operations are aware of this and try to do it well, while ordinary operations often do not pay conscious attention to it.

At this point, you may find that any of the 6 points mentioned above is an interesting, complex and challenging task to understand and do in depth. If you want to combine all of the above into one's own and master them, it will basically take ten to eight years.

That is why we say that operations is something that is easy to get started with but is actually very difficult and requires a lot of miscellaneous physical work, but is actually extremely interesting and highly technical.

However, although operations are complex and difficult to explain, I now believe that it has a methodology.

I am also seriously considering whether I should spend some time to write something related to operations in a more structured and systematic way. This may include some macro-level cognition (such as this article) as well as many specific practical cases and methods and techniques. But I want to know how many people have an urgent need for this, so if you really want to see this content, you might as well show me your urgency by giving me a reward (no limit on the amount), and tell me through comments what you want to know about the current operations and what problems you want to solve.

Who knows, if I really write it down, maybe I can also publish a book at the same time, what do you think? (over)

Will there really be many people who will give me rewards?