Say goodbye to confusion and become an operator with "routines"

Having been engaged in product operations for many years, I know very well that it is very easy to get confused in operations , so I chose this topic, hoping to share with you some of my previous experiences and some things I have summarized.

Before officially sharing, I would like to pay tribute to all operators. It is not easy to work in the operation profession. Not only do you need to master a lot of skills and learn a lot of things, but you also have to be working almost all the time. There is a saying that goes, once you enter the operations world, it’s like being in a deep ocean. From then on, holidays are just a thing of the past, and it’s all tears if you talk too much.

Although the life of an operator is already so difficult, we are often misunderstood by colleagues from other departments. They think that we are unplanned, unprofessional, make random demands, have no results, etc. Many times we doubt whether the path of operations is worth continuing. But I still want to say that if you stick with it, the future of operators will be as bright as the stars and the sea.

Why? Take my own experience as an example: My first job was a web editor. At that time, web editor was known as the least technically demanding job in the entire Internet industry. As for content, there were a lot of plagiarized articles in the world and anyone could do it. The salary was the lowest among all departments in the company, and the upward development path was very narrow. The highest position was editor-in-chief, which was equivalent to the head of other departments, and it seemed that there was no future for development. But look at today, e-commerce says we want to do content e-commerce, finance says we want to do content finance, and all walks of life want to do content. Students who know how to create content have suddenly become very popular, and their career development paths are very broad, with various content directors, chief content officers, etc. with annual salaries of millions. Even if we don’t want to work anymore, we have enough capital and enough platforms to do our own media . As long as you create good content, you can still live a comfortable life.

With the development of the Internet today, it has become very difficult to achieve obvious uniqueness and differentiation in products, technologies, and business models . This is when the value of operations comes into play. So I want to say: Come on, my fellow operations staff, your journey is to the stars and the sea!

"I am responsible for copywriting , operations, and events. I am always doing odd jobs."

“The product is not good, the resources are not enough, and I don’t know why this project was done.”

“I lack a systematic operational knowledge system . I have no one to guide me. I want to learn but I don’t know how to learn systematically and gradually.”

“I have done a lot and paid a lot, but the results are not obvious. I feel frustrated and have no sense of value or achievement in my work.”

…

Dear operation experts, does the above situation sound familiar to you? After all, why does the above situation occur? Looking back on my operating experience over the past decade, I can summarize it in the following points:

• Lack of understanding of the industry, unfamiliarity with the company's business, and unclear department positioning;

• They don’t understand their users or competitors, and have no strategy planning.

• The goal is not clear, the focus cannot be found, and things are done blindly;

• Accustomed to comfort, lacking the courage to constantly innovate and break through.

The summary above may seem empty and pretentious, but I still want to say that the confusion of operators lies in the fact that they are often diligent in execution but lazy in thinking! Operations is a profession that requires a lot of thinking and strategy, but most people treat it as a simple execution profession. They do more and think less, so the more they execute, the easier it is for them to become confused. Here, I would like to give two words to all the partners who are doing operations, let us encourage each other:

“Don’t use tactical diligence to cover up strategic laziness.”

"To plan more is to win; to plan less is to lose, and what about to plan nothing at all?"

To sum up, think twice before you act.

Above I simply put forward the results of my own summary. Below I will explain in detail why I made such a summary and my own coping strategies.

Routine 1: Formulate strategy and accurately position

When doing anything, the first thing to do is to develop a strategy. When you work in a company, your only strategy is to help your company and your department achieve its company goals and department goals. At this time, you need to find your own value positioning.

How to do it? You must be familiar with the company's business and the positioning of your department. You must find the value differentiation between you and other colleagues in the value chain of achieving the company's goals and form a complementary relationship with them. Your value is reflected in strengthening the weak links in the company's goal value chain and helping the company and the department achieve their goals better and faster.

When I came to our company, I actually went through such a process. When I first arrived, because I was not familiar with the business, I randomly positioned our team to do the work of " attracting new customers ". This positioning overlapped with the value chain of the promotion department, and naturally formed a competitive relationship with them. After a period of time, our results were dispensable and worthless compared with the data of the promotion department.

Later we said that we were in charge of sales and were in competition with our colleagues in the marketing team, but the result was still disappointing.

As I gradually became familiar with the nature of the industry and the company's business, I slowly discovered that our company and our colleagues have done a lot and made a lot of efforts for this industry and for our users. We are actually much better than they imagined, but these situations have not been fully conveyed to our users, resulting in users' lack of understanding and trust in the company. So we finally positioned ourselves to strengthen the weak links in the value chain, helping the promotion department to attract new customers and helping the marketing department to increase sales. Now, everyone here knows that the work of our department has been unanimously recognized and praised by colleagues, department leaders and company leaders.

I would also like to share a case here. When I was working in a well-known domestic Internet company, the department's strategy in a certain year was independent of the company's strategy. Although the core data of our department was very good that year and increased several times year-on-year, it still did not get the recognition of the boss. We were a large department of 30 to 40 people at the time, and the entire department was almost cut. Later, the department boss adjusted the strategy in time and accurately positioned the department, which ultimately saved the department. Therefore, it is very important to clarify the strategic positioning.

To sum up, the key points of this routine are: you must be familiar with the industry and the company's business, understand the company's strategic goals, and reduce the deviation in understanding of the same thing caused by information asymmetry. Finally, you need to accurately position the value of your position based on the company's strategy.

Routine 2: Develop tactics and keep an eye on the results

Once the strategic positioning is determined, we will break it down into several stage goals around the final outcome goal and formulate implementation tactics for each stage.

The key is to formulate implementation tactics and accurately grasp the outcome goals. To accurately grasp the result target, my routine is: think about the problem from the perspective of the industry and the background of the company, and think about the problem from the position of your leader. You need to figure out why your leader wants you to do such a project and what the result goals are that your boss really wants, and then break down and decompose the goals and develop tactics to achieve them.

Key points for developing and implementing strategies:

• Who are your target users ?
• What value do you create for your target users?
• How to deliver value;
• Analyze and study competitor strategies, combine them with your own situation, and extract points that can be optimized;

Many times our projects fail not because of failure in execution, but because of failure in grasping the initial target results. The target results you set are not what the bosses really want. One thing I hope everyone will remember carefully is that completing a task does not mean you have achieved the results and goals.

Let me share a case to illustrate this.

Background: A real estate portal. The company's strategy is that every community should have an owner forum. Each owner forum must have a certain amount of content updated every day to make the owner forum look active. Our department's responsibility is to run the owners' forums for all the communities in our area. At that time, there was a large high-end owners forum, and the company was very eager to get the project, but it was never done. Later, no one was willing to take over, and then it came to me. After two months of operation, the forum became one of the top five most active forums in the region.

The following is a summary of the analysis I have done within the company:

1. Colleagues

Result goal: Complete the number of content updates required by the company every day.

Tactical strategy:

1. All owner forums on hand have the same operating strategy;

2. Register multiple fake accounts, post content mechanically every day, and answer your own questions;

3. Purely online operation, reprinting news content, and posting spam replies under pseudonyms;

4. Update the content daily, and complete the task when the number is reached;

5. No mercy for posting advertisements;

6. Wait for users to actively apply for moderators, otherwise use a fake moderator;

II. Myself

Result goal: Achieve user self-activation in one or two forums.

Tactical strategy:

1. Core operations of the two most promising owner forums, and the rest as daily maintenance

2. Sneak into the owner group and forge the owner’s discussion content in the forum;

3. Grasp the time nodes, go to the community with the sales to inspect, obtain first-hand information on hot issues among the owners, and release content in batches;

4. Actively apply for SMS push notifications for first-hand hot content;

5. Contact forum advertisers to discuss cooperation and seek benefits for owners;

6. Actively develop real user moderators offline, encourage moderators to continuously share community dynamics, strive for company resources, and assist moderators in organizing online and offline linkage activities;

The difference in your grasp of the target results determines your different tactical strategies, leading to different final results.

Routine 3: Summarize, precipitate, and break through yourself

In my personal opinion, the best way to learn and grow is not to listen to anyone's lectures or to copy other people's experiences, because most of the time, other people's experiences may not necessarily be in line with your own actual situation. The best way to learn is to constantly summarize, accumulate, and break through yourself during the execution of work, and let these three things run through the entire project and the entire career.

The key point here is to analyze and find the advantages and disadvantages during the execution process, consolidate the advantages, propose ways to improve the disadvantages, and then test the analysis results through practice, repeat continuously, form your own knowledge system, and form your own methodology. If you really don’t know how to start, you can start by imitating your competitors.

Share a personal case. In 2010, Sina Weibo started to become popular. According to the instructions from the head office, each regional branch had to operate an official regional Weibo account. As it was a brand new business requirement, no one in the department had any experience in this area. The job finally fell on me. In about a year, I created two popular accounts from scratch, sorted out the knowledge base of Weibo operations and shared it within the company. Colleagues in other regions copied the experience and made great progress.

The whole process is summarized as follows:

1. Research and imitation stage: The target users are local active fans; research local grassroots Weibo celebrities, imitate their operation models, actively add their active fans through the GreenFlow tool , and harvest the first batch of high-quality active fans;

2. Breakthrough and innovation stage: Continuously summarize content operation experience, make full use of the company's information advantages, refine information content selling points, make the account you operate the source of first-hand popular content, have at least one Weibo content forwarded more than 10,000 times per week, and the average forwarding volume of the published content exceeds 1,000;

3. Value Enhancement Stage: Taking advantage of the high exposure on Weibo, combined with the company's sales and partner merchant needs, a set of standardized cooperation process plans are formed. The Weibo account launches regular fan welfare columns to form a competitive barrier with other competing accounts and extend the popularity cycle of the Weibo account;

4. Form a knowledge system: Through continuous summarization, a replicable Weibo operation and a standard process system for merchant cooperation were formed, and the experience was successfully replicated in other regions through internal sharing;

The best way to learn and grow is to think and summarize during the work process, verify the results of thinking and summarizing through execution, repeat it continuously, and form your own methodology and knowledge system.

Next, I will analyze and discuss with you several very typical project cases that I have personally experienced and which can easily confuse operators. I will share with you my thinking process at the time and the subsequent implementation ideas, hoping to bring some inspiration and help to your future work.

Case 1: How to acquire seed users without money and resources?

Background: A financial management startup project. Both core founders have been engaged in the financial management industry for more than ten years and have rich professional financial management knowledge and industry network resources. The company's project product is a financial management APP that provides traffic diversion and purchasing services for financial products of major banks.

Project features: You only need to register and bind any bank card to purchase all financial products in the app. The financial products recommended in the app are low-risk, high-yield products that have been professionally screened by the system and humans, helping users complete the tedious work that requires learning a lot of professional knowledge.

Problem: The APP has been developed, but the project has not yet been financed . There is financial pressure, lack of promotion funds, and no fixed user base.

Requirements: Without spending money or spending as little money as possible, quickly acquire a group of real seed users and achieve a breakthrough in transactions from 0 to 1 within one month?

This is a startup project of a friend of mine. The background of this kind of project is very common in startup companies and it is also a headache for operations. At that time, my friend had been recruiting operations staff for half a year, but either the conditions were agreed but they ultimately did not come, or they came and resigned after only a month and a half. Finally, my friend found me and hoped that I could help him come up with a solution.

When starting to operate such a project, the first thing to do is to analyze the key essence of the problem. For projects like e-commerce and financial transactions, the essential problem is to solve the problem of users' trust in the project. If the trust problem is solved, other problems can basically be solved.

The following is a summary of our entire implementation process at that time:

1. Feasibility analysis:

Core issue: Solving the trust issue;

What they have: The founders have extensive professional financial management knowledge, teaching experience, and industry connections;

Feasibility: Provide users with free, high-quality financial training services with low cost threshold for user participation. Through long-term high-quality service training, users' trust can be cultivated. Original content can be spread and trusted after being converted into text, audio and video.

User needs: Through observation, we found that financial management content platforms, such as Wacai Forum, Shelicai, and Mamawang, have a large number of users who are eager to learn financial management knowledge;

2. Clarify short-term and long-term goals:

Short-term goal: Verify the feasibility analysis results, attract potential users by providing free high-quality financial management training services, cultivate user trust, establish a financial management knowledge learning community , and acquire target users at low cost.

Long-term goal: financial education.

3. Formulate stage strategies and tactics:

Target users: Women and mothers, who have the strongest desire to learn financial management knowledge;

Where are the users: financial forums such as Wacai Community, Her Financial Community, Mama.com, and Good Planning;

Create value: Provide users with free, high-quality financial training services and an online community for interactive learning and communication;

How to deliver: Official accounts provide text content, WeChat groups provide live classes, and Himalaya provides financial management radio stations, etc.

4. Implementation:

Core work at this stage: live classroom broadcast and content dissemination in WeChat groups;

Division of work: The founder prepares the class content, and the rest of the people go to the financial forum to attract users to attend the class and organize content dissemination;

5. Effect evaluation:

In one month, 4 classes were held, more than 280 users joined the WeChat community, more than 400 followers of the WeChat public account , more than 100 app downloads, more than 40 users registered, 8 users placed orders, and the customer order was 50,000;

6. Optimization and adjustment:

1. Recruit external lecturers to liberate the productivity of founders;

2. Classroom content is systematized to keep users’ attention;

3. Paid promotion of high-quality content to improve user acquisition efficiency;

…

After a year of persistence, the project's app had a turnover of over 70 million and the official account had nearly 100,000 followers. It then transformed into a full-time financial education + asset planning and allocation company. It did not require any financing, was financially self-sufficient and had a certain amount of surplus, and became a small but beautiful project.

Case 2: How to break the deadlock after taking over a project that has been sluggish for a long time?

Background: A company engaged in e-commerce training business, which has an e-commerce training vertical UGC forum, founded in 2006, has considerable influence in the industry, but since 2011, the traffic has been maintained at an average daily UV of 70,000-80,000. After replacing many operation directors , there has been no improvement. The founder is well-known in the e-commerce circle, the secretary-general of an e-commerce association, and has a wide network of contacts ; the five people under the operation department are all recent graduates. The operation department needs to be responsible for operating the UGC forum, WeChat subscription account , and the newly launched e-commerce social app.

KPI requirement: The UGC forum traffic should reach an average of 200,000 UVs per day within one year;

The social app has 100,000 daily active users;

Active promotion is not allowed, both paid and free (the boss’s bottom line).

Analysis and discussion: What would you do if you took over such a project?

My approach: When taking over such a project, the first thing to do is to figure out why the traffic data has not increased. You can propose a few hypotheses through data analysis , user research, and user interviews, and then verify them through execution. After identifying the problem, study past operating methods, which ones were done well and can be retained or even expanded, which ones are insufficient and can be improved, and which ones are missing and need to be added, and customize your strategic plan.

When deciding on specific implementation tactics, we must choose the key tasks and then focus all resources on these key tasks. For example, in our case, the operations department had limited manpower and capabilities, but was responsible for several projects. From the boss's perspective, he certainly hoped that you could do everything at the same time. But reality did not allow this. So I chose to focus on the forum because compared with several other tasks, the forum was the most likely to achieve a breakthrough. At the same time, a breakthrough in the forum could drive several other tasks.

The following is a summary of the implementation process:

1. Cause analysis:

Research and analysis: analyze data , conduct online research, and conduct in-depth offline interviews;

Conclusion: The user life cycle is too short to accumulate users year by year;

2. Define the problem:

A. The platform content is too basic and only suitable for beginners.

B. The loss of KOLs , most of the content is fake;

C. Content producers have little rights and interests on the platform and lack motivation to be active;

D. There is a lack of interaction and discussion atmosphere, and users are unable to solve problems through discussion.

3. Formulate strategies and tactics:

Recalling the original KOLs: such as Bai Ya, Gui Jiao Qi, Wu Wen Mi, etc.;

Introducing new KOLs: Li Jiaoshou , Ma Jiajia, Li Chengdong, etc.

Guide interaction: stimulate user disputes through vests, form discussions, and help solve practical problems;

Official regular content column: collect and publish information on policy adjustments of various e-commerce platforms, interpret and propose response strategies;

Essay solicitation: Find resources and jointly launch essay solicitation activities to enrich the content structure and seek benefits for high-quality content producers;

Member privileges: Members are divided into different levels, providing outstanding authors with special identity tags and special traffic channel support;

Endorsement from the industry: Excellent authors participate in offline meet-and-greet exchanges with industry leaders, and are recommended for mid- to high-end boss meetings, etc.

5. Effect evaluation:

In one year, the website had an average of 180,000 daily UVs and 160,000 daily active users on the APP; the number of registered users on the platform increased from 800,000 to 3 million.

6. Optimization and adjustment:

A. Enrich the company's business: provide financing and recruit e-commerce talents for e-commerce enterprises;

B. Enhance platform value: provide content monetization services for outstanding content creators;

…

Case 3: How to turn a startup project around and revive when it’s at the end of its rope?

Background: The project was originally an internal incubation project of a large real estate company. The business model was to attract popularity for the offline ecological farm project of another subsidiary of the group, sell organic agricultural products, and drive land appreciation. Later, due to financial problems of the group, the project needed to be self-sufficient (including employee salaries), but the cooperative relationship with the farm still existed. The project leader was a mentor from Zhongda Lingyuan who had extensive connections. There were about 10 people left in the team. At that time, the team had a complete idea for a new project plan, and the team members unanimously agreed that the idea was very worthy of implementation and believed that it had a great chance of success. However, the project required about 100,000 yuan in start-up capital. At that time, the team had no financial reserves, and most of the team members could only survive for a maximum of three months without salary.

Innovative project plan ideas: One of the group's farms is located at the foot of Luofu Mountain in Huizhou. It has a beautiful environment but lacks characteristics. Therefore, our idea is to build a farm park on the farm for children born in the 2000s and 2010s to get close to nature and experience the games that parents born in the 1970s and 1980s played when they were young (launching game activities with different themes according to festivals and seasons). The concepts of nostalgia, closeness to nature and weekend parent-child educational tours are used to impress young parents in the Pearl River Delta and attract them to bring their children to the farm for self-driving tours on weekends.

Question and requirements: What would you do to help the project achieve a breakthrough and win financing within three months?

My approach: Before deciding whether to stay and work hard for three months, there are two main issues to be addressed: 1. Are the target users willing to accept the project idea? 2. How to solve the problem of start-up capital.

We polished and packaged our ideas and plans into a PPT plan. We leveraged the founder's connections and began to gather entrepreneurs and investors born in the 1970s and 1980s online and offline for roadshows to see how they evaluated the feasibility of the project. After several rounds of roadshows, we gained the approval of most people and gathered a group of very interested entrepreneurs and investors . We then set up a group and initiated equity crowdfunding in the group, solving the problem of start-up capital.

The following is a summary of the implementation process:

1. Feasibility verification:

Project optimization and packaging: organize and package project plans, and use CEO's network resources to initiate online and offline roadshows for the project;

Solve the problem of start-up capital: equity crowdfunding, raised 260,000 yuan, with more than 60 shareholders;

2. Clearly define your goals:

A. Build an offline farm park within two months;

B. At least 100 families are present on the opening day;

C. Achieve successful financing and expand the project;

3. Formulate strategies and tactics:

Target users: mothers in the Pearl River Delta region;

Where are users located: Guangzhou city, Zengcheng, Shenzhen, Huizhou;

Creating value: Weekend family trips, buy tickets and get a farm fruit and vegetable gift package of equal value;

4. Implementation:

A. Distributed tens of thousands of flyers offline and added more than 60 interested full-time mothers on WeChat;

B. Plan online H5 bargaining activities, guide mothers and shareholders to participate and spread the activities;

C. After the bargaining activity is launched, you can plan and sign up for free admission to the park on the opening day;

5. Effect evaluation:

A. More than 600 copies were sold through bargaining activities;

B. More than a thousand families showed up on the opening day;

C. The angel investment was basically finalized, and 3 million was received in April of the following year.

6. Optimization and adjustment:

A. Chain franchise form;

B. Only serve as an online traffic platform;

C. Develop project APP;

…

That’s all for my sharing. I hope today’s sharing can bring practical help to everyone’s work and help you become a well-managed operator. Thank you for your patience in listening!