The Eighteen Martial Arts of Operations: Life Cycle

We all know that operation is a meticulous and complicated job. Some people compare the operation work to one job for each person. The operation positions recruited are to fill the holes, such as content holes, data holes, etc. As an operations student who is there to fill a gap, my thinking is easily restricted by a single work module. After working in operations for several years, I still only see the trees but not the forest.

This article will analyze the entire life cycle of the product, so that operations personnel can have a global understanding of the product's birth, aging, illness and death process. In this way, when doing their job, they can clearly understand the value of their work in the entire system and the direction of their future growth.

Introduction to product life cycle

The life cycle of a product is the process from the initial project establishment, research and development, internal testing, launch, to final maintenance, long-term operation and even shutdown.

Games have a shorter life cycle than apps, so they are more perceptible. A mobile online game with a life cycle of about two years is considered a high-quality one. A mobile game with a life cycle of about one year is enough to support a mobile game team. Online games with a life cycle of about half a year are as numerous as stars in the sky, but they are all meteors, all of them are meteors, although they are only fireworks for a moment.

The life cycle of an application is very long. What has been said online about the mobile Internet entering the second half refers to the surviving applications, which have entered a long period of strength (pi) and durability (ruan). Unless the company makes a wrong decision or its funding chain is broken, the application can generally operate steadily. After the number of users stabilizes at a certain value, it will slowly decline, enter a recession period, and start to accelerate monetization.

The reason is not that our operations colleagues did not do a good job, but cross-border competition, just like it was smartphones that defeated chewing gum and Focus Media. Are you surprised? Is it strange? Are you scared? In the future, the app that will defeat yours may be the mobile game King of Glory! Tencent daddy is probably going to stand up and say: We don’t take the blame for this!

To make it easier to understand, I divide the product cycle into three stages: early, middle and late.

• Definition of the initial stage: the stage from product project establishment to online promotion.
• Definition of mid-term: product promotion reaches the stage where the number of users stabilizes.
• Definition of the later stage: The focus of operational strategy shifts from focusing on incremental growth to maintaining existing stock.

Initial stage: product project establishment to online promotion

The initial stage is the most leisurely and comfortable stage of operation. Why do I say so? To give you a personal example, in the several projects I have handled, in the early stages of the product, that is, during the project development period, the operations team only had one thing to do every day: competitive product analysis .

At this stage, operations cannot be involved at all. For example, data analysis is not available because the product has not yet been launched. When it comes to event operation and user operation , a good cook cannot cook without rice. How can you talk about operation if you can’t even see the shadow of the users? But there are still a few users, test classmates.

Moreover, there are still no KPIs at this stage. KPIs are nothing more than assessments of revenue and user volume, which are mid- to late-stage goals, so generally no operations staff will be hired in the early stages of a project. Yes, you read that right. In the early stages of a project, a lot of it is made up of technology, design, and the boss. Both operations and business people were recruited when the project prototype was almost completed. Why? To save money. As I just said, in the early stages of a product, there is nothing to do in operations, but the boss still pays you a salary, unless you have nepotism, such as the boss’s father or the boss’s godfather (ahem, I don’t have a son like you, unless you are a daughter).

The first project in my life: mobile game, was something I got involved in during the product beta testing period. When I joined this project, I was in charge of one person. Later, we recruited 7 to 8 operations people one after another. Some of them did version analysis, some did soft promotion, and some did activities. I also define the stage of product internal testing and large-scale promotion as the early stage. Because users have not yet been fully introduced to the system at this stage, internal testing is only conducted on a small batch of users. The work of serving users also falls under the category of operations.

At this stage, data operation and content operation play the biggest role.

Data operation is the key to determining the survival of this product. I have seen many products that died in the womb before they even went online. The most well-known example is the currently popular King of Glory, which almost failed during the internal testing period due to poor data performance. We had a browser APP online at that time, and the job of data operation was to use data to analyze whether this product was recognized by users and whether there was a need to continue operating it.

For example , if retention is found to be less than 10% during the internal testing period, then there is a big problem. The retention rate of ordinary applications is above 30%. At this time, what operations need to do is to analyze why the retention rate is so low, whether it is an adaptation problem or an experience problem. At this stage, content operations and data operations complement each other.

During the internal testing period, the quality of user experience , in addition to performance, such as fluency, crashes, login, and menu switching, is most affected by content. When a user opens a browser, he or she will definitely visit a website. If there are no shortcut entrances or search entrances to well-known websites, users will easily be lost. How to match these entrances is something that content operations need to consider.

In order to provide a better user experience, we also learned from other browsers and added an information flow (news) at the bottom. The purpose is actually for monetization. Will I tell you? The result of the analysis at that time was that the length of time our bottom-level users spent browsing news and the PV were close to the first-tier browser data. This was really great news, and several months of development were not in vain. Although the project failed in the end, it also fully illustrates this point: success is a low-probability event.

Mid-term stage: Product promotion and user volume stabilize

The mid-term is more exciting. During the initial internal testing and tuning, when all product values ​​have reached the standards and can be put on the market to harvest users, this stage is the time for operations to shine and show their magical powers.

Let’s talk about delivery first. There is no free traffic in the current market, unlike the early days of mobile Internet , when as long as the product was good and had a certain reputation, thousands of users would flock to it without even having to look at their eyes closed. Today’s users are all purchased with real money. Where there is gold and silver, there is the underworld, and where there is the underworld, there is cheating.

In order to deal with cheating, a task was forcibly separated from the operation branch: user attribute analysis. By analyzing the user data imported every day, retention, payment, login habits, etc., we can determine whether this is a real person or a robot simulated by a computer. In some companies, this work is done by the business department. What does this indicate? Their company is not operating!

User attribute analysis is not the most important task. The most important thing at this stage is how to attract more users and retain more users. Since many companies do not buy traffic through operations, we will not analyze it here.

Since business has brought in users, retaining these users is the biggest task of operations. If it is a game, then payment is equally important. Let’s take applications as an example. For example, a business imports an average of 10,000 users every day through relationships. Then based on the churn rate and what we learned in school, when a bathtub releases 10 liters of water per hour and dissipates 9 liters of water per hour, how long will it take for a 100-liter bathtub to be filled with water? Through such a comparison, we can determine the number of daily active users of the product after one month.

At this time, the boss appeared with KPI. It is said that the daily active users will reach 10 million and the turnover will reach 20 million in three months. Although, this number is something I made up on the spur of the moment. But in reality, how many KPIs are not thought up by the boss on the spur of the moment?

Although it seems unreliable, once the KPI is determined, the operations department will work hard to complete it even with tears in their eyes. If you can meet a reliable boss, burn incense and pray to Buddha immediately. This is the blessing you have earned in several lifetimes. If you can meet a great boss like Lei Jun to lead you, you will be happy even if you work 996 or 997. The purpose of operations work is, on the one hand, to earn a salary, and on the other hand, to gain growth. What is the difference between a life without growth and a salted fish?

Later stage: The focus of operational strategy shifts from focusing on incremental growth to maintaining existing stock

Finally... I have passed the initial and middle stages of life and death. The product has entered the second half, a stable harvest period. The word "harvesting" always has a derogatory meaning. Making products is not charity . When the free services are almost provided, users should be allowed to pay a little, such as watching advertisements. The information flow advertisements of a certain social software are a good example.

At this stage of operation, the focus will be shifted towards monetization. After the initial stage, the product version has become stable, and the operational energy itself will be reduced a lot when optimizing the version. Just like the browser mentioned at the beginning, more than 90% of the core functions have been completed. The subsequent function development is nothing more than making some layouts based on the strategy and adding some entrances, which is essentially for monetization.

The work of later operations is relatively simple. There is no passion for trial and error in the early stage, nor the emergence of various new ideas. All the time is spent on existing users' desire to experience and monetize. If it is an application, the most feared thing at this stage is the occurrence of a major negative incident, such as the "halal incident" that occurred a few days ago. You must know that the cost of acquiring a customer is tens or hundreds of yuan now, and an operational accident may cause immeasurable losses. At this stage, many companies are very neurotic, and taking the blame becomes the norm. All operations have to do is to make good use of the users in their hands and not make any mistakes, otherwise their bonuses will be lost, and in worse cases, they may even lose their jobs.

Let’s talk about the later stage of the game here. It’s like a person in his old age. How do we treat him? The later stage of a mobile game is all about crazy monetization. Recharge activities used to be held once a month, but now they may be held once a week or even every two or three days. When a game launches a recharge activity, its life cycle will be shortened a lot. Students in charge of event operations have to make a choice between recharge and life cycle every day, which not only ensures maximum revenue but also minimizes user churn . Therefore, a good operator can balance user experience and monetization well.

In summary, the focus of operations is different in different stages of the product. There is a very simple way to outline the focus of the current stage, which is KPI. All operations work is carried out around KPI, whether it is activities, user maintenance, etc., ultimately it is all for the purpose of achieving KPI.