Several reasons why Alibaba’s operations are so strong!

When we say Alibaba’s operations are great, we are not referring to how difficult the specific tasks they do are, but rather to their operational strategies that are deeply aligned with the business + their highly efficient and extreme execution + their thorough data-driven approach . This is the essence of Alibaba 's operations.

01 The essence of Alibaba’s operations

What exactly are we talking about when we talk about “Ali operations”?

When I became an Alibaba operations manager in 2011, this term had no halo yet. I was just the largest team among Alibaba’s tens of thousands of employees. At that time, I was very motivated to learn. Alibaba itself was like a university, providing all kinds of software and hardware for learning. The company also arranged all the affairs outside of work. I focused on my work, worked hard, and never got tired of it. Some changes took place quietly in the daily "torture".

As an external trump card, Alibaba Operations does not only refer to students in operations positions. Thinking about the specific execution work I did at Alibaba, it didn’t seem to be particularly difficult. Compared to the cold start of a startup company with no resources, many things were more challenging than at Alibaba. Therefore, I feel that when we say Alibaba’s operations are great, it’s not because of how difficult the specific tasks they do are, but because of the operational strategies that are deeply aligned with the business + the extremely efficient execution + the thorough data-driven approach. This is the essence of Alibaba's operations.

02 What kind of people does Alibaba Operations help?

Before talking about what kind of people Alibaba Operations helps, let’s first talk about what Alibaba people are like. We can get a glimpse of this in the speech of Chief Talent Officer Ms. Peng Lei. To sum it up, four words:

(1) Smart

Both IQ and EQ are high. IQ is easy to understand; it refers to certain professional skills and understanding. But emotional intelligence is a little different from the emotional intelligence we usually talk about. It doesn't mean that the person has to be good at dealing with people, but that he needs to be very open, able to easily get into other people's hearts, empathize with them, and establish connections with others in an appropriate way. These two points combined are almost the same as "aura".

(2) Tough

A strong heart. The antonym is "glass heart". No matter how others praise you or humiliate you, you are very calm inside. No matter whether they praise you or criticize you, the external situation will not hurt you. It has the feeling that our ancients called "not being surprised by praise or criticism." Not only ordinary employees need it, but entrepreneurs and leaders need it even more.

(3) Optimism

The impact that an optimistic person and a pessimistic person have on the team value was something I deeply felt only after I became a team leader. It’s huge! The definition of optimism here is "after fully, objectively and rationally understanding the current real situation, one is still full of curiosity and optimism. I have seen such qualities in people who can stay in Alibaba for a long time and enjoy it, and have a long-lasting attitude towards the company, the project, and the team. Since life is already so hard, and this is objective and cannot be changed, why not be happier?

(4) Self-reflection

Alibaba has many talented people, such as those who were poached from the industry. They used to have a very large management radius, but after coming to Alibaba, they felt torn apart. They had to learn many things from scratch, and even do the same things as graduates. They might even have to consult people at a lower level than themselves on some matters. Some people will do very well, but they don't brag about their past achievements and just quietly absorb and learn new things. I think such people are capable of self-reflection. Joining Alibaba in his thirties was a foreseeable and huge challenge, and it was his own choice. Alibaba also has a tradition of performance review. Every quarter, everyone should rate themselves based on their originally set goals, the team should rate themselves, and their immediate supervisor should rate themselves. It is a painful thing to keep tearing your growth apart. Many people actually know where their shortcomings lie, but when they are really pointed out and exposed to everyone, they have to go through the pain of healing themselves. Ali never had a comfort zone.

The above four words are actually quite difficult, especially when they are all in one person. I feel that I was smart and optimistic before joining Alibaba, and it was only after joining that I became tougher and more self-reflective.

The above are the common characteristics of Alibaba people. So what kind of people does Alibaba Operations help? Let me share with you based on my more than four years of experience in Alibaba.

Alibaba operations are idealists who can handle KPIs

Alibaba is a company that advocates idealism, and it is also a company that advocates KPI. There is no contradiction in this. Jack Ma said, "Everyone wants to stay in the ideal, and everyone hates KPI. But if there is no KPI, no result orientation, no efficiency awareness, no organizational awareness, and no management awareness, then I think all ideals are empty words, and we become dreamers, talking nonsense."

I personally think that Alibaba’s KPI is relatively humane. It has quantitative and qualitative parts, as well as value assessment. When giving yourself a score, not only do you give yourself a score, but you also get a score from your direct boss, colleagues in the same group, and partners.

We attach great importance to KPI, but we will not do anything to achieve it. I remember one year my KPI was to have X number of sellers in my industry with annual sales of over a million. Because I can strategically break down and implement this goal, my colleagues in the same group are all working together, and I can also find the resources I need across the company, so it is particularly exciting to do it. Every week, we pull data to see that the target completion rate is constantly rising.

But this KPI will not let me ignore those sellers below the mid-level who cannot achieve sales of one million (we commonly divide sellers into top sellers, mid-level sellers, and tail sellers). Because they have values, beliefs and a sense of responsibility, I will continue to take care of them. Who knows, they may become dark horses next year or the year after! And I remember a seller told me, "The whole family and more than a dozen employees depend on this store for their livelihood." It is very important to them. A small mistake or indifference on our part may affect many people behind this store.

In addition, because of idealism, even if the work is tiring, most people can still find interests to balance, work happily, and live seriously. They will capture every sudden idea and occasionally "go off topic", which will give birth to many interesting projects. For example, during Alibaba’s 18th anniversary celebration, an employee posted on Alibaba’s internal website that they welcomed employees from all over the world to stay at their home, so soon a classmate developed an Alibaba version of a shared accommodation booking page. A similar example is “Singles Go” created by Alibaba classmates in their spare time to help single men and women at Alibaba make friends.

(Ali version of shared accommodation booking page)

Ali operations are people who are both careful and aggressive

The following picture is often posted on WeChat Moments , especially before the 618 and Double 11 promotions. Our situation was indeed like this, with Taobao City brightly lit until late at night. What makes a company awe-inspiring and respectable is not its business model , but its endless passion and wolfishness.

The word "wolf-like" is usually used to describe sales teams, but Alibaba's operations are the most wolf-like I have ever seen. What is most commendable is that they can combine wolf-likeness with carefulness. Why do people say that Alibaba people have wolf nature? Although Alibaba has abundant development, design, and traffic resources, every time we in operations put forward requirements to product managers or traffic demands to the marketing department, we still have to rely on competition and snatching . For example, we have an internal activity grading system, S/A/B/C. Double 11, Double 12, 618 Mid-Year Promotion, Spring and Summer New Fashion, and New Year’s Goods Festival all belong to the S level. The marketing department takes the lead, and we are particularly nervous every time the stalls are allocated. We wonder how many stalls there are in the main venue and how many stalls there are in the branch venue that can be given to the category I belong to. I really want to grab a piece back. It is a great honor for the activities we operate and plan to be rated A. It will also help us leverage greater resources when promoting them to your sellers and partners, so we always compete fiercely for them.

(Ali’s activity grading system)

Alibaba's operations are a drama queen with its own communication attributes

Speaking of drama queens in Internet companies, the first company that comes to mind may be NetEase. In 2017, it launched many waves of screen-sweeping marketing , giving birth to drama queens such as "Zhu Ni Ya". In fact, Alibaba's operations have also done a good job in this regard. The group buying, fission red envelopes, cash back, and distribution that are popular in WeChat Moments have long existed in the Alibaba ecosystem. If WeChat had not blocked most of Alibaba's links, everyone would feel it more obviously.

There is a rumor in the world that the difference between Alibaba and Tencent is the contrast between the Ming Cult and Wudang. Bai Ya, a former Alibaba employee and founder of Youzan, also said, "Jack Ma has a fiery nature, like a god, he strikes big and is as powerful as a rainbow. Pony Ma has a watery nature, he is low-key and reserved, he is very insightful, and he takes small steps but moves fast." Under the influence of Jack Ma, Alibaba's operators tend to do things in a high-profile and high-profile manner.

Alibaba's operations, especially event operations , are carried out from the perspective of the marketing department. They strive to ensure that each of their activities has its own dissemination attributes and is interesting. They will challenge themselves: Will users find this activity fun? Would you like to share and forward it? Is it original? Will it cause heated discussions in the industry?

If every operation department can think like this, cooperation with the marketing department will be smoother and the combat effectiveness will be much greater.

03 More than 50% of Alibaba’s operations are growth hackers

We say that a good Internet company should be data-driven, and Alibaba is a completely data-driven company. Anything sensory and experiential will be converted into a data model . For example, after multiple verifications, I found that this type of product will sell well. So what are the common characteristics of this type of product? Can they be picked out using data-based indicators? Can they be written into the program so that people who don’t have my experience can also select these good products? Any decision is also driven by data , such as whether this channel should be replaced by another channel, or whether this banner is more effective than another banner. Greatly reduces human influence and emotional judgment.

The terms growth hacker, chief growth officer, and data-driven growth that are popular nowadays from Silicon Valley seem to be very awesome and high-end. There are only one or two such people in a startup company, but in Alibaba, more than 50% of the operations have growth hacker thinking, which means tens of thousands of people. This is very scary. When I read books like "Growth Hacker" and "Chief Growth Officer", I feel very familiar with them. Isn't this what we do in our daily lives? Most people think that growth hacking is a combination of marketers and data, but at Alibaba, it is a combination of operations and data.

04 Awesome, Alibaba’s artificial intelligence

In recent years, artificial intelligence ( AI ) has been a hot topic. Just like big data back then, many people are still confused about it, but Alibaba has already applied it in its daily operations. At Alibaba, my horizons have been broadened time and again. When “A Brief History of Tomorrow” became popular, many people began to panic and started to speculate, “Which jobs will disappear? Will my job be replaced by machines?” In fact, in Alibaba, such stories have already been happening, and those of us who seem to be highly educated operators are being replaced!

Products with different faces

For example, in the "Double 11" before 2015, product recommendations were controlled by humans, and the operations decided what products to recommend to users. The "Double 11" in 2015 was the first time that Alibaba made large-scale, personalized product recommendations to users based on algorithms and big data. It was called "Thousand Faces for Thousands of People" and was a major upgrade and transformation of Alibaba's traffic distribution model. That was the first time I heard of “machine learning”. Specifically, a "Guess You Like" module is added to the homepage and activity page, and the machine decides what products to recommend to users, not the operator.

I remember that after the boss made this decision, the operations colleagues present were still full of doubts. After all, they used to be able to control what was displayed, but now they feel that some of it is out of control, but they are still full of expectations. Over the next few weeks, we all tested how accurate “Guess You Like” was. I received all kinds of frustrating feedback, for example, someone said, although I have browsed before, I have already bought it, so why do you keep recommending this kind of product to me? Some people also said, why do they recommend to me T-shirts that cost dozens to over a hundred yuan, when it is obvious that my purchasing power is higher than that! Some people also said that they bought the men's clothes for their husband, so they can't judge my preferences based on that... There are endless problems. During that period, the product colleagues were under a lot of pressure, and everyone was groping forward with trepidation.

After Double 11 that year, I vaguely remember that the team that worked with thousands of people and thousands of faces won a grand prize and was highly praised. The most striking point in the battle report is that the browsing conversion rate (the conversion rate from browsing UV to product details page) of the "Thousand Faces for Thousands of People" page is X percentage points higher than that of the "Non-Thousand Faces for Thousands of People" page. With a huge PV and UV base, this is equivalent to bringing millions of additional traffic to sellers every day. If you multiply it by the conversion rate and average order value, you can estimate the contribution to the overall market transaction volume, which should not be underestimated!

(My “Guess You Like” module after becoming a mother)

A thousand different banners for different people

On Double 11 in 2016, artificial intelligence surprised me again. An artificial intelligence product "Lu Ban" designed 170 million banners! It has achieved the transformation from the previous product personalization to the current advertising resource personalization. Can you imagine that the following focus pictures were all made by machines? Do the above products look familiar to you? They are all personalized designs and displays based on your consumption preferences.

(Banner created by artificial intelligence)

The principle is as follows. After a banner is structured, it is actually composed of three layers: theme style (which determines what kind of background to use) + product placement (place products that you have browsed, collected, added to the shopping cart, or anyway have consumption preferences) + copy placement (the copy is one or more sets of copy provided in advance by the operation based on the theme of the event). Through large-scale design and precise delivery, the resource efficiency of each ad space is improved, which drives traffic efficiency and business value.

In the past, making banners was a necessary skill for most Alibaba operations! And I think I have expertise in this area. We once summarized a golden formula for banners: highly saturated background + good-looking models or/and hot-selling products + copywriting with interest incentives, and the clicks are guaranteed to be good .

We also attach great importance to the banner click data. We will check the banner click data every day or even every hour. If the data is not good, we will change the picture immediately. Every week, the marketing department selects the best banners with the lowest CPC (Cost Per Click, cost per click = resource position value/number of clicks) for everyone to appreciate. I have been on the list several times.

How to estimate CPC? For example, the marketing department will estimate an advertising value of X million based on the average daily clicks of the ad space. When this position is used to launch internal activities, although we don’t actually pay for it, the resource space is monetized. The more clicks your banner gets on this ad space, the lower the cost per click will be. This is a very intuitive feedback for the operation of advertising creativity.

My old job of making banners has been replaced by artificial intelligence, and it can be N times more efficient than a skilled worker like me. As a result, the click-through rate has also doubled! I feel both proud and pressured.

In fact, since I joined Alibaba five years ago, I have often felt that operations were putting a constant pressure on me. For example, the tasks we were responsible for, such as event registration and product selection, event page production, filling and online launch, were basically turned into tools by product managers. Most of our work is dealing with tools, and the work can be completed with a few clicks.

On the one hand, we need to do less and less tedious manual labor, but on the other hand, we have to rack our brains to do things that machines cannot do and touch further boundaries, for fear of being idle and eliminated.

"Will we be replaced in the future? Will we still have work to do?" In fact, I asked my supervisor this question many years ago. She said that there is no end to the work, and you will do more challenging things. Sure enough, I later found that operations required more and more creativity and marketing knowledge, so I went to Tmall’s marketing department. There, I made up for some of my shortcomings. I have gained some understanding of integrated marketing, new media , social communication, event marketing , large-scale campaigns, etc.

I would also like to remind students who want to join Alibaba through social recruitment. Many people ask what is the biggest disadvantage of going to Alibaba from a small company. I think it is probably that you have not encountered such a large number of users, such a large amount of traffic, and such a large number of products in a small company. This is not something you could have accomplished manually before.

A very important point is to demonstrate during the interview that you are aware of turning your previous experience into data and products, so as to help artificial intelligence complete larger-scale and more accurate tasks.

Alibaba's operations are like an eagle with sharp eyes and a wise mind. It does not charge into battle, but deploys troops and makes plans in the dark.

In the two years after Alibaba went public, many people left the company. Jack Ma said there are only two reasons for leaving a job: 1. Not getting paid enough; 2. Feeling wronged. In fact, the main reason why most people leave is that they have the ability to pursue a more diverse life. My experiences in Hangzhou and Alibaba have allowed me to see many beautiful and rich things. Once I am no longer under financial pressure, I will want to experience them. Indeed, it is somewhat idealistic.

Alibaba is a very tolerant and idealistic company, and many people who frequently change jobs have settled down here. Many people who seek novelty and think they won't stay long actually stay here for several years.

Salute to the silly and naive, yet fierce and persistent Ali people, and former comrades-in-arms!

The above content is excerpted from "I work in operations at Alibaba".

Source: Ponyfish