Do you really understand product operations?

Do you really understand product operations?
Internet products have only been proposed as an independent industry in the last four or five years, and the emphasis on professional division of labor such as planning, design, development and operation has only been in the last two or three years. Last month, two colleagues talked to me about the same question in a row: What is product operation ? Looking at the operations staff in the industry, most of them are called "community managers" or "event planners", and a small number are called "content reviewers", which do not sound like senior positions. It can even be said that most operations jobs are ordinary positions with mediocre prospects. At this time, the boss spoke: If you want a promotion and a raise, okay, you first tell me what value product operation can bring to me? Not to mention value, even the concept of what product operation is is vague and lacks a standard definition. Sometimes it is confused with customer service, sometimes it is confused with promotion, and sometimes it is confused with editing. Even those who claim that “operations are important” may not be able to explain this. Basically, operations work is a hodgepodge of dealing with content and users. But you can’t talk to the big guys like that. Even when I explain it to myself, it still feels vague and confusing. How can you make others take you seriously if you have such a mess of accounts? When I talked about this topic with my colleagues, I tried to make some summary. 1. Content construction Products that need to be operated are basically content-based products, which are affected by the law of “convergence and diffusion”. Therefore, it is necessary to establish content standards to determine what kind of content is good and encouraged, and what kind of content is bad and unwelcome. There are two means to establish standards. The first is review, which eliminates inappropriate content and applications. The second is recommendation, which uses methods such as adding featured content, pinning it to the top, updating recommended positions, and producing special topics to increase the exposure of good content, thereby encouraging authors while also spreading the value of the content. Unlike traditional editing work, operators pursue not traffic but the popularization of content values. They screen user groups based on content values ​​and then guide them to spontaneously maintain an appropriate content atmosphere. Without operational work, the content will be mixed together, low-quality content will drive out high-quality users, target users will find it difficult to find a sense of belonging here, advertising junk will be rampant, and the product will get out of control. Some people also say, isn’t this what moderators do? Why do we need full-time operations staff? This question is more complicated to explain. First of all, moderators also need to be discovered and managed, and those who do this are usually full-time operations staff. Secondly, only in a mature community can a moderator gain sufficient sense of accomplishment and his input can be trusted. So which came first, the chicken or the egg? The answer is that full-time operations staff will first push the community to maturity, and then gradually delegate management responsibilities to moderators and webmasters. Finally, the moderator management system is only effective in forum-based public centers and is not suitable for all content-based products. In addition, segmenting the topics and populations of the content public center (such as opening editions) to make reading and discussion more targeted is another content construction task with very high technical content. 2. User maintenance Depending on the nature of the product, the means of user maintenance vary greatly. The common parts are: first, to establish and improve the help system and publish friendly product announcements; second, to resolve users' complaints and difficulties, especially to maintain close contact with high-end users and provide them with better manual services; third, to actively invite valuable users to try the product and bring people into the team. For some products that emphasize hierarchical permissions, user maintenance includes reviewing user levels and controlling precise upgrades and downgrades. For some community-based products, user maintenance includes mediating conflicts among user groups, adjudicating disputes, and harmonizing the atmosphere. For some newly launched products or features, user maintenance includes guiding users to understand the features, adapt to the scenarios, and integrate into the community. Compared with content construction, user maintenance work is usually trivial, difficult to quantify, and can easily be underestimated. But if we change to a more grand term: user maintenance, that is, the emotional management between the user group and the product, that is, the public relations management of this product, this is actually closer to the essence. The operational staff who directly face users in the virtual role of "administrator" in a sense represent the product image and communicate with users. The customer service they provide to high-end users or group users requires low resource investment and has high emotional added value, which can very effectively improve user loyalty and product brand image. 3. Event organization There are usually three types of product activities. One is content-oriented, which guides users to produce content that meets requirements, thereby spreading the content values ​​of the product. One is community-oriented, which promotes the expansion of community relations and enlivens the community atmosphere by inciting user interaction. One is product-oriented, which popularizes product features and strengthens product brands through mass participation. No matter what kind of activity it is, it requires program planning, page design, and organization and implementation. All of them require professional operators to operate. The so-called "professional" does not mean that he has many ideas or is a genius of ideas, but that he knows his products and users very well, can plan and organize activities based on product features and user characteristics, can control the atmosphere and rhythm of the activities, and ultimately bring planned promotion effects to the products. If we use this standard, most of the current product activities are blind, inferior, chaotic and disorganized. This shows that the product operation personnel are not mature enough, and also shows that the bosses do not pay enough attention to the event. In the domestic Internet environment, users are generally in a state of doing nothing. Lonely and at a loss. If a product creates more topics for users and provides more ways to play, it will easily gain their loyalty. It is not easy to achieve this simply by relying on the product itself. Activities have become an important operational means to increase user activity, similar to a certain kind of product fitness exercise. It is obvious that the more active the users are, the more they rely on this product. We care so much about product stickiness, but we are so careless about good activities. We let users be dazed and think we are helpless. 4. Assisted planning The best test engineer must be a good development engineer. Similarly, the best product operations staff must be a good product designer. No matter how much product managers shout “start from user needs”, they cannot avoid this fact: only those who are close to users can understand users. So, who is closest to the user? The answer is: product operations personnel. Only they who deal with users all day long can best understand users' feelings. Instead, planners watch the fire from the other side of the river, only try a little, and may have unrealistic ideas or generalize. Therefore, operations personnel also assume part, or even most, of the responsibilities for user research. They understand both user needs and product structure. From this perspective, they can provide great help to the planning team and improve the reliability of product design. Taking the project I led as an example, every design of the planning team must be submitted to the operation team in advance for effect prediction; all product suggestions put forward by the operation group are of very high quality; and whenever the planning group is unsure about user needs or there are differences of opinion, they request the operation group to conduct user interviews and use this result as an objective basis for judgment. Obviously, this is where the close relationship between operators and users becomes a huge advantage. Unfortunately, in a climate where operations are less important than functionality, the operations team is driven more by assessment criteria than enthusiasm. Their duties are blunt and their methods are rigid. Many of the operations staff, who should understand users best, have not integrated into the user group. They simply mechanically complete tasks assigned by their superiors and meet assessment targets, while maintaining a cold distance from users. This not only cuts off one's own arms, but also cuts off the arms of the planners. It can be said to harm others and yourself. Back to the topic, what exactly is product operation? The above four points are my answers. This does not include the promotion part because that is not my forte and I don’t know much about it. As for a giant operation-driven product like Taobao, my summary naturally cannot cover it all. All in all, these experiences are better than nothing. In today's Internet market, products themselves, as hard power, have long shown a highly homogenized phenomenon. If there is a lack of strong promotion resources, it would be very difficult to capture the market by relying solely on product design advantages. Product operation, as a soft power, can provide differentiated user services to enhance product competitiveness. Ultimately, both hard power and soft power will be transformed into part of the product’s features. Can't tell the difference between high and low. From this standpoint, the value of product operations is actually greatly underestimated. Not only do the bosses not understand and attach importance to the concept of operations; at the same time, the overall strength of the relevant personnel is relatively weak, and the implementation of operational functions is incomplete and superficial. So did the transformation start with the bosses offering high salaries to attract talent, or did it start with the operations staff working hard to improve themselves? I can't answer that question for you. The above content comes from blogger Chunyin ’s understanding of product operations, especially the operations of community products.

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