How to operate a new product?

This problem is universal, and I believe every operator will face it sooner or later in his career.

In fact, it is both a type of problem and a problem, because:

1. As operators with different functions, we hope to see answers from different angles;
2. A new product can be either a newly launched product or a product that you have just come into contact with, but many people believe that the actual handling methods for these two situations are different.

Actually, from my point of view, no matter what kind of new product it is, no matter what your responsibilities are, there are probably three things that must be done and one thing you can choose to do.

The 3 must-do things are:

1. Understanding the Industry
2. Explore Products
3. Understanding Users

One thing you can do is: start with activities.

Understanding the Industry

I believe many people have heard the story of how Chen Ou and Dai Yusen pretended to be beauty experts and posted everywhere to attract traffic when Jumei was first founded, but it seems that most people have not carefully thought about the logic behind it.

In fact, this story shows the founder of Jumei Youpin's ability to understand the industry.

Cosmetics e-commerce is an industry where women make up the majority of the workforce. This industry is similar to 3C digital products, but not the same.

The similarity is:

1. Cosmetics, like 3C digital products, have a huge number of interested users;
2. They can all be assessed;
3. It is easy to form opinion leaders, and opinion leaders will have an impact on purchasing decisions;
4. At that time, the cosmetics industry did not produce a large number of high-quality KOLs .

The differences are:

1. Points that prompt consumption decisions
2. The price itself
3. wait……

If Chen Ou and Dai Yusen did not have a deep understanding of the industry, they might not have made such a move. Similar actions are reflected in the mine-laying plan of Keep, which is very popular.

Explore Products

In our company’s operations department, the students in the user operations team set themselves a small goal: to analyze the membership system of a product every week.

So, if you are an operator, how much do you know about the competitors in the industry? How much do you know about other products similar to your own? How well do you know your product?

When it comes to this matter, everyone thinks it is very simple. Of course I understand the product I am responsible for, and I deal with it every day.

In fact, this is an illusion. Most of the time, operations are dealing with the backend of the product you are responsible for, but sometimes you don’t have a clear understanding of what it feels like to use the front end.

A very simple example is that the operator of a public account will definitely say that he knows the public account he operates very well, but in fact, he is familiar with the background functions of the public account, not the public account itself.

But being familiar with the backend alone is not enough. Being familiar with the content presented on the front end and even considering looking at these issues from the user's perspective is the key to getting deeper into new products faster.

If you want to learn more about product analysis or competitive product analysis , you can read this article: Product | Three Steps to Competitive Product Analysis

Understanding Users

These four words seem simple, but they are actually both the starting point and the end point.

For Internet products, the most important thing is to continuously acquire users. This has two meanings:

• First, as an operator, you need to know where your target users are;
• On the second level, as an operator, you need to know how to impress your target users and bring about conversions .

These two layers are actually very abstract things to an operator who has just taken over a product. However, the longer you do it, the more you will find that it is not easy at all.

For example, you are in charge of new media in your company, your official account has 300,000 users, your Weibo has 1 million users, and you have been acquiring new users through mutual investment with other companies' new media.

You will definitely find that different new media channels have different conversion rates and ROIs.

But you will most likely do the following:

1. See which new media channels have high conversion rates and which have low conversion rates;
2. What is the ROI of high conversion rates?
3. Make a table and record the ranking of ROI and conversion rate;
4. Those with high conversion rates will usually continue to invest regardless of the ROI;
5. Only the parts with reasonable ROI will be retained for those with low conversion rates.

The reason for this is that through this method you will know the channels where your target users are located and how to convert them more efficiently.

But this is just one of the methods.

To sum up

For new products, it is impossible to have a sound system right from the start, so there is often no system available when operations are just getting started.

At this time, young operators usually try to set up a system first.

But experienced old players may not pursue this system, but instead start activities to test which functions need to be solidified into the system in the future and which ones need to be abandoned.

This is what it means to put activities first.

When operations receive a new product, they can start by understanding the industry, the product, and the users, and try to verify the system development requirements for the new product by conducting activities first.

That's it.