What do users really want? What should I give to users? Why do I find it increasingly difficult to understand what users like? Is there a pattern behind user needs that we can exploit? Unable to understand user 3 days ago, I met a friend K. K is a product manager for a well-known large company. He studied under a product godfather in the Internet industry. In my opinion, he is a PM with great talent and will probably be able to tinker with something interesting in the future. During the chat, she casually brought up this question: As a PM, she feels that she can no longer understand today's users, their way of expression and entertainment. For example, she has no feelings about products like TikTok and Volcano Video , and to a certain extent, she may even find it difficult to understand why users like them. As a product manager, would this be a terrible and fatal thing, meaning that you are beginning to move further and further away from mainstream users? When this situation of "getting further and further away from users" occurs, what should you do? She said she was anxious about it. I have two answers to this question that I would like to share with you. The first level of answer is the answer I gave her in person three days ago. It is an answer that focuses more on thinking about the external world. I think that from a product maker or business perspective, there are always two types of demands on the user side that are of great value and are worth your careful consideration and observation. Let's call these two types of demand Type A demand and Type B demand. Type A needs are often related to the user's external environment and specific behavioral manifestations, and usually change periodically due to changes in external conditions such as the environment, tools , and user habits. Typical examples include people’s discourse systems and communication methods in specific scenarios (such as the endless variety of fancy emoticons , “Pipi Shrimp, let’s go,” “Calling”), new entertainment and ways of killing time (such as Tik Tok, Werewolf ), what delicious foods have become popular recently, etc. Type B needs are often internal, and are often related to the user's psychology and inner emotions. Compared with Type A needs, they are more constant and lasting, and rarely change due to changes in the times and environment. For example, when you are inspired by someone or something together with thousands of people, and everyone unanimously completes a certain ritualistic behavior (such as a chorus of tens of thousands of people at a concert, tens of millions of people chanting and praying solemnly at a large religious ceremony, tens of thousands of fans cheering in unison in a stadium, the beating of drums or war dances before a battle on the battlefield...), you will feel a strong shock, self-identification and pride in your heart; the mixed feelings in your heart when you have to choose to separate from a group of friends who have shared countless joys, pains and sweat together; the heartache when you have to choose to break up after a love affair that you once devoted yourself to due to various irresistible external reasons; when you read or see some inspiring or touching novels or movie plots, if they happen to touch the softest parts of your heart, you will burst into tears involuntarily... and so on. Understanding Type A needs may mean understanding the user's temporary preferences. Understanding Type B needs may lead to a deeper and more universal understanding of "the users will definitely get or have certain experiences and feelings after encountering certain scenarios and impacts." My advice to K is this: if you have been working for 2, 3 years or even longer and start to have anxiety about "worrying that you may not understand users well enough", perhaps the best way to deal with it is to focus more on Type B needs rather than worrying about your lack of understanding and familiarity with the changes in young people's Type A needs. In other words, you need to have a deep and specific understanding of a large number of Type B needs. In comparison, when it comes to Type A needs, you can calmly accept your own "backwardness" and "ignorance." The logic behind this suggestion has two aspects: 1. As mentioned above, Class B demand is relatively more constant and lasting, and its half-life and long-term value are also longer. When your time and energy are limited and you are not facing many emergencies that you have to deal with, it is always an advantageous strategy to do more things with "longer half-life" and "greater long-term value"; 2. If you understand Class B needs deeply enough, you may be able to get twice the result with half the effort when you understand and think about Class A needs, but the opposite is difficult to achieve. In other words, Class A demand is sometimes just the manifestation of Class B demand in a specific environment, or it may be the upgrade and reorganization of some core rules and mechanisms. For example, from "Murder Game " to card games like "Three Kingdoms Kill", and then to the currently popular Werewolf Kill, if you look deeply enough at the level of Class B needs, you may get an answer similar to this - when people are in a group, everyone needs to constantly think and judge, express themselves in language, etc. within a limited set of rules, and cooperate closely with others to confront another group. People will very much enjoy the thinking game in this process and the thinking process of judging the situation on the field through all actions and speeches. Moreover, if someone can have a core impact on the situation on the field by utilizing the rules and formulating high-quality strategies in this process, he will have a very strong sense of accomplishment and self-identity. If you re-understand the whole thing from this depth of thinking, you will find that, including the games mentioned above, such as Werewolf and Three Kingdoms, in similar multiplayer collaborative strategy PK games, if you want to ensure the user experience and excitement, the elements such as "multiplayer collaboration, group confrontation, group information opacity mechanism, multiple roles and specific abilities, random role assignment, clear collaboration rules and victory conditions" are relatively clear and constant, and you may only need to reorganize and change the specific rules, the types and corresponding abilities of the characters on the field, the specific forms of confrontation, etc., and perhaps you can create a new game. Similarly, no matter the loneliness when no one understands the pain in your heart, or the throbbing in your heart when you meet a soulmate, it will always exist for people no matter when. The only difference is that people in different eras will have different expressions and forms of expression. In this sense, whether it is Tik Tok, Huoshan Video or Kuaishou , they may just be specific forms of expression that meet certain internal needs of users. In a sense, they may be the same as when you had nothing to do in the evening more than 20 years ago, you would hang out in the chat room and watch a bunch of people chatting nonsense, or when you visited the portal website more than 10 years ago, you would always like to click on various social news with sensational headlines . This is my first level of answer: You have to be able to realize that when you have a sufficiently rich and deep understanding of Class B needs, you may not be so easily anxious because of your "ignorance" and "backwardness" in Class A needs. The second level of answer focuses more on thinking about yourself, which is also an answer I would like to add to K's answer. In the process of an individual's growth and development, I personally believe in this logic: a person always needs to see enough first to fully complete his or her understanding of the external world, and then go back and find one or two core strengths that he or she has confirmed and use them for a long enough time. I think you should know which stage you are in at the moment so that you can better evaluate and judge whether your anxiety is necessary. For example, a social product manager must have a very deep understanding and insight into the various subtle emotions that people may have in the social process, from the desire to be shown and recognized for a small achievement, to the throbbing in the heart when being teased by a member of the opposite sex who one does not dislike, to the endless desire to talk when one can finally find someone among thousands of people with whom one can seriously communicate about lofty ambitions and goals, etc. Only then will he be more likely to focus on a certain type of social needs of a certain type of people, and do it deeply and well enough. A product manager who works on B-side products must be fully familiar with the B-side decision-making chain and various common business forms, and fully know which links are most valued by the boss and the company. It will be easier to achieve success by focusing on a certain industry, or only devoting himself to improving the efficiency of certain links. It is similar for a new media editor. You must be fully familiar with and even imitate various common forms of content expression, from graphic jokes to song medleys, from black-bellied rants to rational Chinese-style analysis and argumentation, from industry trend data analysis to circle gossip. Then, find one or two types of content that you are particularly good at and like, and bring them to the extreme. Only then will it be easier for you to stand out, and you will not be limited by the narrow coverage of your abilities. So, back to K’s question, as a product manager, if you are still in the stage of “not seeing enough”, then I think similar anxiety and tension are necessary. But if you have reached the stage of “need to recycle”, then similar anxiety is unnecessary. As for how to judge whether you have seen enough, the reference I can give is: when you see a new phenomenon, new means, or new tool in the related field, can you apply a lot of what you already know to explain and analyze it in depth? For example, you may not use TikTok, or even have never heard of it before, but can you use many phenomena you have seen in other products in the past to explain its core functions and user experience points? In other words, this may be the first time you have seen the Pechoin advertisement that went viral, but have you also been able to analyze it through the many creative ideas, advertisements, copywriting and even movie cases and phenomena you have seen in the past, and extract some of the core elements that determine its popularity? Finally, as to how long it usually takes a person to see enough, I can give you a rough reference based on my experience - if you are particularly good at thinking, and you have access to enough and rich enough cases and resources around you, and you yourself have plenty of opportunities to practice, then you may be able to complete this process within 2-3 years. If you are really gifted, then this process may be shortened by another 30%. But if you do not have the above conditions, and just have a normal career development trajectory like most people, working and getting promoted step by step, then this process should take at least 5 years. The above is for reference only. Finally, I hope you can think more. You know, most of people's anxiety and fear often come from uncertainty. Therefore, being able to think thoroughly and clearly about a complex and abstract thing is always the only way to deal with various anxieties.
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