A must-read for mid to high-level operators! How to build a product operation system based on business logic?

Special reminder: This article is a long logical article, especially suitable for operation practitioners and entrepreneurs with more than 3 years of experience. The entire reading takes about 15 minutes.

In this article, let’s talk about how to build a reliable and stable operation system based on product logic.

As we have said before, operations work has two directions: one is to attract new customers, and the other is to retain users.

Theoretically speaking, a product requires a lot of exploration in its earliest stages. At this time, the operational work may not be so orderly, the division of labor is not so clear, and it is more chaotic and opportunistic.

But once you get past the initial, less organized exploration phase, you'll start to have more and more operational work to focus on and complete. At this time, you often need to slowly make your operations more orderly and organized. Including how to attract new customers and retain users, which all need to be defined more finely.

At this time, you begin to need an "operation system" to organize more clearly what you and your team need to do on the operational side, so as to ensure that your product can develop healthily.

To make an analogy, the relationship between the operating system and product development is like the former laying the foundation, and the latter building a high-rise building. How solid the foundation is determines how high the house can be built.

For an Internet product, the construction of its operation system may be considered around the following dimensions, and the specific operation work planning is completed:

1. There needs to be some basic actions to ensure the smooth operation of the main business of the product;
2. On the basis of 1, we should focus on increasing revenue and reducing expenditure, and form some fixed actions around increasing revenue and reducing expenditure;
3. Clearly define whether there are certain key user behaviors within the product, and ensure the probability of this user behavior occurring by sorting out the user guidance process and operation mechanism;
4. Definition of core users and establishment of retention mechanism;
5. Periodically expand product awareness and achieve user growth through activities, events, and marketing .

Do you feel a little confused? Don’t worry, we will explain them one by one.

The core business logic and processes of any product must be specific, and certain links in its core business processes often require operational intervention to ensure the operation of the product. For example, if a portal website has no editor to update and maintain it every day, it will become a "dead" website.

Therefore, on the operational side, the first priority is to ensure that the product can run smoothly and become a "live" product through a series of operational work.

To find out what this part of the job entails, you need to:

1. Sort out the main business process of a product;
2. Consider this process: In order to ensure that the core business process can be run (that is, at least users can smoothly experience the entire service process), what work needs to be done on the operation side?

For example, the following figure is the main business flow chart of the "Dongqiudi" APP product we sorted out:

Based on the business process shown in the figure above, if you want to ensure the smooth operation of the "Dongqiudi" APP, the main basic work that needs to be done by the operation side may include:

1. Upload and publish various content information, update various data, rankings, etc. on time with guaranteed quality and quantity;
2. Review, screen, organize and process user UGC content;
3. Release various football equipment on time and do a good job in marketing, customer service and other related work to ensure that users can complete their purchases smoothly online.

And these basic tasks may also need to consider the user's usage habits and expectations. For example, for news and information content, users may read it every day and always hope to see the latest content, so your corresponding release and update frequency needs to be as high as possible, and the update time should be more compact.

Basically, this part of the work is of the kind of "having it may not make you more powerful, but if you don't have it, you will definitely die."

For a product that has passed the exploration period, while ensuring the first point mentioned above, we always need to consider building a stable source of user growth and a controllable user retention strategy.

Once these two pillars are relatively stable, it can be guaranteed that the number of effective and valuable users on your site will increase.

When it comes to user growth, many people will first think of "spending a lot of money on advertising to buy users" or "planning a great event to drive a surge in users". However, you must know that money is not always available and great event ideas are often hard to come by. So instead of relying on this "one-wave" approach to ensure your user growth, it is better to first consider how to build some stable user growth paths.

For example, for an app like Dongqiudi, without any additional major events, its stable user growth may come from:

1. The high-quality content is shared and disseminated spontaneously by users;
2. This is brought about by the conscious external dissemination of its high-quality content. For example, there are two editors who regularly publish some in-depth technical articles published by Dongqiudi or interesting things in the Dongqiudi community to other related forums and communities;
3. Natural growth from search engines, app stores , and other portals;
4. Ensure that every time there is football news (such as major events, which are "routine" in the football world), the speed of reporting and the angle of interpretation of the football emperor can always be different from others, thus bringing a wave of stable growth every time;

Therefore, in order to make the "open source" of Dongqiudi relatively stable and sustainable, we should first ensure the execution of some routine operations around the above points. for example--

1. Combine user scenarios, design a reasonable sharing process, and do everything possible to optimize your copy ;
2. It may be necessary to have a dedicated person responsible for the promotion of high-quality content, including finding high-quality channels, establishing partnerships, regular content outsourcing and external channel maintenance, etc.
3. Spend time on SEO , app store ASO , etc., and continue to optimize afterwards;
4. Form a special news and information update reporting team and establish a reporting mechanism. Regularly plan in-depth interpretation content to ensure the speed of information reporting and the uniqueness of the interpretation angle.

The above is about "open source".

In addition to increasing revenue, another thing we need to consider is “reducing costs”.

The so-called "throttling" means reducing the possibility of user loss as much as possible and ensuring that as many users as possible can experience the core functions of your product and are willing to stay. Things that may be involved include:

1. Sort out the nodes where churn occurs most frequently.

For example, you may find that 30% of users never visit your product again after registering, and that about 20% of users churn within half a year after their first use, and that about 15% of users never visit your product again after using a certain feature. Then "after registration", "about half a year after registration", and "after using a certain feature" are all high-incidence nodes for churn.

In order to find the corresponding churn nodes, you may need to first pull out the data of all churned users, and then look for some common behavioral characteristics from them. Some data analysis methods and ideas may be needed here. If you are interested, you can refer to the previous "Serial 3.2 There has never been an article that explains the relationship between operations and data so clearly."

2. Define the reasons for user churn by combining user interviews, user behavior data analysis and other means.

For example, users may churn after registration because they do not understand what the product is for and do not have any guidance, so they do not know how to use it.

3. According to the reasons for user churn at each node, define a series of measures to reduce the possibility of churn, including but not limited to special welfare discounts, process optimization, guiding copywriting, setting up user churn warning mechanisms, etc.

For example, when Didi Chuxing was growing wildly in the second half of 2014, I remember that it offered new users a free ride on their first ride to reduce user churn after registration.

For another example, if you find that more than 80% of churned users perform certain specific behaviors before churn (such as the visit frequency drops from once every two days to once a week), then you can set up a corresponding churn warning mechanism to let the system remind you when someone encounters a similar situation, or rely on the mechanism to give the user special care (such as pushing two cute girls or handsome guys for TA to meet, etc.) to reduce the possibility of user churn.

The above is about the "increasing revenue" and "reducing costs" of a product, and how to ensure its stability through some fixed means and mechanisms.

What needs to be made clear is that the above-mentioned work only needs to be considered once the product has passed the exploration period and has a relatively clear direction and a certain user base.

If you are still in the exploration stage, everything is uncertain and the direction may change at any time. The only right thing to do is to complete the product exploration and accumulation of seed users as soon as possible. There is no need to think about such a rigid thing.

Any product often has a "most critical user behavior", which often revolves around the core functions and services of the product. The frequency of this behavior may directly determine the value of your product, and may also directly determine the user's recognition of you. Even a new user is more likely to deeply experience the value of your product only after performing this behavior.

For example, the "key user behavior" of Didi Chuxing is taking a taxi; the key user behavior of Baidu Takeout is placing an order for takeout; the key user behavior of Sina Weibo is following others (because if you don't follow someone first, it means you can't see anything on Weibo) and posting on Weibo, and so on.

Once such key behaviors are defined, you must ensure the probability of this behavior occurring by sorting out user guidance processes, operating mechanisms, novice tasks, and other means.

Of course, at different stages of the product, you may need to guide users to perform and learn different behaviors. For example, in the early stages of Zhihu, you must try to guide users to follow other high-quality answerers (only in this way can you see high-quality content on your homepage) and to answer questions. In the later stages, when there is sufficient content on the site, you may be able to guide users to consume content better.

The following figure is the user guide that came with a version of Zhihu that was launched in early 2016. You can refer to it:

For example, Baidu Encyclopedia had a period of time when its novice tasks and novice growth system were roughly like this:

As we mentioned, for most products, there must be a situation where "20% of users create 80% of the value."

Therefore, if you want to ensure that your product can continue to operate healthily, there must be an essential link, which is to find your core users and maintain them.

There may be two branches here:

1. What conditions must be met for a user to be defined as a core user?
2. How can we better retain a core user?

Taking Zhihu as an example, assuming that the number of followers is more than 2,000, and the number of answers within 3 months is more than 20, and at least 3 of the answers have more than 500 likes, then you can be defined as a core user. First of all, you need to set up a mechanism so that whenever such a person appears on the site, you must be aware of it at the first time and get in touch with him.

Then, if Zhihu's maintenance of core users includes the following points:

1. Pull into the "Zhihu Big V" group to help you get to know more Zhihu celebrities;
2. Regularly mail various gifts of different sizes;
3. Invite you to participate in various Zhihu official offline activities and have in-depth exchanges with the Zhihu team;
4. Get priority to experience various new Zhihu products (such as Zhihu , columns, etc.);
5. Priority will be given to services such as assistance in publishing books and column construction guidance;
6. Invite to participate in the discussion of Zhihu community building;
7. Get the priority recommendation right of Zhihu official website content...

So, what you need to do is make sure each of these things can happen smoothly and maintain close interaction and communication with them.

If the "open source" part mentioned above is about ensuring the product's stable self-growth capabilities, then for a product that has passed the exploration period, you must also need some means to periodically increase the product's popularity and acquire new users in batches.

Common operational methods in this area may include activities, promotions, and event planning (especially event nodes that are consistent with your product features and target users, which must be seized).

Here are some typical examples for reference, I won’t go into detail about this part——

"Yesterday, the Chinese national football team qualified for the World Cup qualifiers. This product has created a textbook operation case."

"During the hot period of the college entrance examination, how do these online education products operate?"

Well, that’s it, our fourth part of the series has officially come to an end. This means that the manuscript of "The Light of Operation" is really getting closer to completion.

In the remaining two parts, I will focus on my personal growth experiences in the nearly 10 years since I started working in the Internet industry, as well as my thoughts and suggestions for the entire industry.

Hope they can give you some inspiration as well. :)

Your APP