Operational Tips: A Checklist for Operational Review

I have previously posted a tweet about the review of Himalaya FM’s “66 Membership Day” event this year. As the most effective way of operation to attract users, event planning is one of the basic skills that every operator must have, and reviewing classic cases can help us grasp the ideas of event operations as quickly as possible. The review of Himalaya FM’s activities was my first analysis of an external product. When I first started, I also looked for some review routines, so -

To be honest, although the coverage seems to be relatively comprehensive, the analysis content remains at the operational skill level, that is, specific operations, without digging deep into the operational strategies behind them. The same applies to the analysis of product operations . Be careful not to confuse operations and experience.

1. Make good use of the reverse golden circle rule

Product experience often targets the product's presentation layer and framework layer, and is the perception of the product's functional iteration; while operation is to determine the operational measures that can be taken for the product currently and in the future through analysis of the product life cycle and core user clusters. The specific operational review ideas should follow the reverse golden circle rule, that is, thinking in depth from "what-how-why" layer by layer .

Usually, the golden circle rule of "why-how-what" applies to strategy formulation, and our perception of the review object often starts with "what". For example, we observed that during a certain period of time, ofo's idle rate was higher than Mobike's (what). After opening the Mobike app, we found that Mobike offers free monthly passes and two-hour free rides (how). Behind this is the competition for the shared bicycle market and the operational need to increase bicycle usage and mobility (why). Reviewing is a process from the outside to the inside, analyzing in detail what kind of operational methods made an activity or a product so awesome. The quality of the review depends on whether you can touch upon the "why", that is, to draw specific conclusions about operations based on the cause-and-effect relationship of each link.

2. Three steps to operational review

Step 1 Search for information worldwide and lay a solid foundation

The first step is to filter out useful information through detailed data.

New operators often feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to start when faced with review work. In fact, at this time, you can ignore the specific logic of the review and collect information from various channels first, so that useful information can be presented naturally. Of course, in order to streamline efficiency, we can divide the information that needs to be collected into three types:

(1) Product experience

Only those with usage experience have the right to analyze. Our focus on products cannot be simply understood as information extraction from news reports. Instead, we must first grasp the core business logic of the product and clarify the product type and features through personal trials. The "experience" here focuses on the degree to which the product satisfies user needs. By analyzing the product structure, a mind map must be output to clarify the form of service the product provides to users.

(2) Overall information

Understanding the entire product/activity is the first step in every review we conduct, including product positioning, product status, market background, competitive product dynamics, etc. At this stage, the search channels and search key points I often use include:

1. KuChuan: As the most commonly used free APP monitoring platform, you can obtain APP’s Android market download volume, Apple Store user reviews, application rankings, application information, version records, competitive product information and other information. Supplemented by App Annie and ASO100 . If conditions permit, iResearch Qianfan is also a good choice.
2. IT Orange: Obtain information on company financing , development history, news reports, etc.
3. Internet analysis reports on 199IT: including industry data and trends published by iResearch , QuestMobile, and Penguin Intelligence.
4. Baidu Index: Analyzes the search popularity of related keywords .
5. News media: including 36Kr, Pencil Road and other media in the vertical fields of the Internet.

After this step, we will sort out the nodes of each stage such as product cold start , development and transformation, as well as specific information such as product functional points, model organization, market position, business direction, etc.

(3) Detailed information

If we look deeper, we will mainly dig into the product promotion cooperation and content distribution on platforms such as WeChat , Weibo, Zhihu, QQ, and Douban .

1. According to the timeline and combined with the time nodes in the overall data, find out the key information of the official WeChat and Weibo. Pay special attention to the operation methods and effects of the activities (refer to the Micro Index), including title formulation, copy content, operation style, and corresponding key data such as reading, forwarding, and likes.
2. WeChat search. Compared with Baidu search , the advantage of WeChat search is that you can directly search for keywords used in official WeChat and other WeChat public account promotions , find product partners, and analyze promotional behavior. WeChat on PC already supports the “Search” function, and you can also use Sogou WeChat to search.
3. QQ group search. Determine possible operational purposes based on group creation time, group name, group location, number of members, and composition.
4. Lagou job search. From the company's job description, we can get the following information: the company's general department structure, specific job requirements, and job applicant evaluations, so that we can have an understanding of the company's business direction and personnel arrangements.

WeChat search use case:

On Weibo, we can find that in June 2015, ENJOY launched the "Japanese Food Season" and cooperated with UBER to carry out bento delivery activities. Are there more promoters for this “Japanese Food Season” event? You can find more answers by searching on WeChat.

Emotions, fashion, and food, the audiences of these self-media overlap with Enjoy's target users . In the second and third "Japanese Food Season" activities, shopping self-media also joined the promotion matrix. It can be inferred that the categories of food delivery may be richer than the first phase. When distributing these self-media, we should also pay attention to key data such as their respective reading numbers and analyze how well they match the products. Having a general understanding of these data will also help us choose suitable partners when promoting our own products.

QQ group search use case:

The above picture shows the results of searching for " Keep " as the keyword in QQ group. The earliest one was created in December 2014. The Keep APP was officially launched in February 2015, from which we can infer that this may be a QQ group to attract seed users .

Step 2: Organize data and restore the operating system

It is better not to review the data in a pile. The organization of data is to reproduce the operational scenarios following the product logic line. There are two types of common logic here: time logic and division of labor logic.

(1) Time logic: product life cycle

Even though this word has been torn apart, it is still useful. The S-shaped product life cycle can be regarded as a law in the operations world and is the path that products must follow for healthy growth.

Even at this stage, many people are still concerned about data issues. Because we are looking at the product from an external perspective, we generally cannot get the exact number of users and revenue figures. In addition to using basic data from third-party platforms such as Kuchuan and Xinbang , we can also use some data estimation methods. For example, the number of readings of WeChat articles, assuming that the article opening rate is 10%, can be used to reversely infer the number of followers of a certain public account . In addition, there are some data from media reports that can also be used for reference. There is no need to seek precise data. Even the officially released data cannot be guaranteed to be completely accurate.

From an operational perspective, the significance of the product life cycle lies in adjusting the proportion of operational investment at the decision-making level according to the scale of the number of users, increasing investment efforts, and improving the frequency and scale of activities. Of course, there are some little tricks here. Adjustments to operational strategies are usually related to the launch of new product versions and financing, so the basic nature of the first step is self-evident: with these key time points, we can trace the specific operational methods more accurately.

(2) Division of labor logic: composition of the operation system

Content operation , user operation , and event operation are the three most basic functions of operations, and their proportions in different types of products are also different. Based on the information obtained on the recruitment website, the functional division of the specific operation of the product can be broken down to form an analysis of the company's product operation process.

To give a more specific example, based on the recruitment information on Lagou, we can sort out the division of labor logic within ENJOY as follows:

As a PGC food e-commerce platform, the relationship between ENJOY's business development team and operations team is very close. Only after forming a large number of high-quality cooperation with catering providers can we attract users to browse ENJOY and generate paid purchases. Therefore, the first thing is to find various restaurants or online vertical e-commerce companies to cooperate with. Secondly, we need to create product introductions and merchant stories for them that are in line with ENJOY's "high-end buyer" tone, and follow up on the sales and coupon code verification sales of each cooperating restaurant. Furthermore, the information displayed in the product’s internal banner can be used to analyze the focus of the current product operating category.

Step 3: Personalized output, extracting key points and gains

In terms of written structure, you can refer to the structure of other people's articles at the beginning to have a general idea of ​​it. However, operational review is not like writing an academic paper. The purpose of reviewing is to grasp the key points, speak in plain language, add charts , and make people understand and gain something from it. But one thing to note is that the cause-and-effect relationship may be multiple. A one-way relationship where something you do leads to something else is a rare event nowadays. There will be more correlations. Therefore, we need to have a clearer understanding of the overall situation and conduct a sweeping operational review.

You don’t have to stick to a specific activity or APP when reviewing, you can also look for some classic cases. For example, Durex ’s Weibo post attracted our attention because it was very good at taking advantage of hot topics. We can then look at Durex’s response speed to hot topics, release cycle, copywriting, etc. to see what is so good about it and summarize some experience that we can use.

3. Data Collection Self-examination Manual

My personal view on tools is that only those that are commonly used are tools. Commonly used means that it can meet the basic needs of our work, and it also means that we know its functions and how to use it.

The following are the tools I often use when organizing operational materials. They are also mentioned in the article for reference only:

• Cool Chuan: APP Analysis
• WeChat search: official public account, promotion cooperation
• IT Orange: Company financing information and milestones
• Official Weibo: Weibo content and style
• Baidu Index: Search popularity (since many keywords are not included, the frequency of use is limited)
• Baidu: The portal for major media reports. It is not efficient to search for information on each media portal one by one.

These six are the most commonly used ones. As for others, such as Xinbang and Weixindian, you can use what you need. After all, if you open too many web pages, your attention will be distracted.