Cognition and scale—how do operations intervene in products?
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Products and operations may indeed conflict over differences in demand development, operational strategies, etc. This article uses rational language to tell you how operations should participate in product control and how operations and products can get along harmoniously. As an operator, after reading this, I suddenly understood the key to how to participate in product development in the future~ One concept that has always been emphasized is that all operations belong to product operations . Execution without a deep understanding of the product can easily deviate from the real goal. For example, when doing channel promotion, one must not only consider the purchase cost of traffic , but also understand the conversion path and subsequent user behavior in order to evaluate the fundamental value of the channel . What is a good product I do not agree with the statement that "even if the product is as bad as shit, operations must still make it flourish." This is an shirking of product design responsibility and an extreme waste of operational resources. There is a classic proposition: In your opinion, what kind of product is considered a good product? In the operation’s answer, it might be “a product with a good reputation”, “a product with great user volume and DAU”, “a product as awesome as WeChat ”, or “a very profitable product”. These responses are based on two grounds: The reasons described represent, to a certain extent, that this product is doing very well; After experiencing the pitfalls of the opposite side, I feel more and more that this is the product I want to operate Good products have some common basic characteristics, such as meeting user needs and providing a good experience. But in the eyes of operations, these standards are useless because they cannot distinguish. A demand analysis will be conducted for every product: good design and experience are standard, and the key difference is the way and degree to which the needs are met, resulting in different potential energy of the product. Reflecting from an operational perspective, a product that is well operated is a good product. What is considered a “good operation”: Low user education cost; What you see is what you get; Marketing support is in place. Taken together, it means "users can clearly and conveniently participate in the product experience, are satisfied, and are appropriately willing to participate in interaction and dissemination." "Good operation" reflects that the way of meeting demand is reasonable and low operation cost can leverage high growth. Of course, this does not mean that the operation requires less investment, but that the input-output ratio is reasonable based on the phased goals. Generally speaking, operations lack the professional perspective of a product manager , and the basis for controlling products mainly comes from user feedback, detailed analysis of data, growth needs, and accumulated operational concepts. How operations participate in product control The above makes three judgments on the product from the operational perspective. Based on these three points, we can understand how operations participate in the control of the product. User education costs The cost of education is actually the cost of new users, which includes several meanings: 01 Product definition from the user's perspective When promoting a product, we tend to confuse the professional concept of the product with the definition given to users; or when listing technical functions in the product's promotional copy , the copy's stance must be carefully considered, otherwise it will not be possible to stimulate users' interest and imagination in the first place. 02 User Expectations of the Product The first is the product’s design concept, especially whether the core services are intuitively presented and meet publicity expectations. If you are not the only one in the industry, be cautious when making rules: do not mistake rule innovation for product innovation, which may cause discomfort to users. 03 Guide the first experience In terms of concept, it is reflected in whether there is sufficient content, data, and timely response, and whether the product is active and efficient in conveying it to users. The problem of education costs is mainly reflected in the user's front-end link, and it is easy to get feedback at the operational execution level: Establish a user base, collect the most basic feedback, and determine whether the types of product problems are mainly bugs, experience, or fundamental concept problems. From the data, we can see that if the education cost is high, the retention rate , click and usage data of the core business will be significantly low. There is no need to blindly extrapolate the product before it is launched, and only focus on the download and registration cost data. Operations may not know how to specifically design and improve products, but they must be able to determine the direction of product problems. What you see is what you get It means that the service experience of the product is obvious enough, that is, the needs are met. To give a simple example, tool products such as Qichacha and Chelai, the query results are demands, which is very direct; UGC communities are a virtuous growth cycle, with less content and fewer people in the early stages, so the experience is poor. Obviously, the former is easier to operate. This example is more about the choice of model, and is not a product control issue in a narrow sense. It just illustrates the impact of "what you see is what you get" on operational difficulty. Then we can summarize the operational equilibrium point: when the marginal cost of core services does not increase with the growth of users , the problem is solved. For example, in the UGC community, when the operating mechanism and environment are improved, as the number of users increases, UGC will also grow naturally, and there will be no need to increase manpower investment, thus achieving a balance. It is similar to the PMF concept in growth hacking . Returning to the operational level, focus on 2 points: 01 Thoughtful service, coverage and experience 1. It is impossible for a product to satisfy all users. For example, some company information may not be included in "Qichacha", users on the e-commerce platform may not be able to search for their favorite products, and users on "Xue Ba Jun" may not be able to search for questions. The lack of coverage may bring fatal reverse psychology to new users. It is necessary to track the proportion and path of such behaviors through data, provide guidance and recommendations on products, and optimize click-through rate to reduce user loss caused by coverage. If it is a platform-based product, such as a community or C2C service, it is usually necessary to take care of the key end, and even use technical means to achieve automation. For example, C2C picture communities can solve early problems by automatically generating users and content by grabbing beautiful women’s portraits and pictures. Of course, this is just a small trick that cannot be put on the table in operations. 2. User experience is reflected in the optimization of links that may cause user service interruption. For example, in the UGC question-and-answer section of the technology community CSDN, when a user asks a question, historical questions and answers are recommended to the questioner through calculation. Reduce the waiting time of questioners to a certain extent and improve satisfaction. Including error pages, loading pages, and concept descriptions, all of which may cause users to panic and become annoyed, so detailed copywriting, guidance, or automatic jumps are required. In general, these are all aimed at driving product optimization through operational conversion funnel analysis. 02 Demand Exploration For example, the merchant side of an e-commerce platform initially only had functions such as listing and delisting, editing management, and financial settlement. As the number of users grew, it became necessary to explore the marketing needs of merchants and to provide stratification of buyers, flexible promotional support, etc. Pay attention to users' concentrated behaviors through thermal analysis and interactive analysis. For example, if users frequently click on the "experience" details, you can analyze and try to design activities around the experience. Operations require sensitive data observation and analytical thinking about the cause and effect of user behavior. Marketing support This should be the most common demand raised by operations, involving many types: interactive functions, points, sharing, invitations, activities, etc. For product managers and technology, it may not be a priority for core business, but it is indeed the weapon on which operations depend for survival. Here are a few key points from an operational perspective: 01 Scene combination Many of the current standard marketing functions are no longer profitable. It is not the case that data will increase rapidly just by providing an entry. Take the sharing function for example. How to embed it in the appropriate path, provide corresponding interest stimulation, use H5 interaction or direct download when traffic flows back, and even combine it with "rewarded invitations" are all worthy of a refined design strategy. 02 Reduce technology costs When making demands, fully understand the difficulty and cycle of the technology, and while maintaining core rules, consider third-party tools and compromise solutions, and even increase cooperative resources through the introduction of third parties. 03 Documentation and follow-up Sometimes, it is not possible to fully and constantly understand the key significance of marketing products, so corresponding explanatory documents are needed. And you must always believe that "only when there are no bugs online can there be real bugs". The bug-free in the test environment and in the technical staff's mouth is only for reference, so try to go online early or conduct small-scale testing. Product people in the eyes of operations Operations are the common parents of products, but parents may not know each child’s talents and growth patterns. They may be short-sighted, eager for quick results, or only care about their own business. The product manager is like a steward, coordinating and supervising the overall product and controlling the technical expenditure for each requirement. Operations help you grow stronger, while product managers help you shape your business. Indispensable We have always emphasized that operations should control products, which is a requirement for operations. In fact, product managers also pay close attention to data, conversion, and user behavior. They have professional knowledge of user analysis, a better understanding of the cause and effect of user behavior, control the overall design of the product, and are responsible for part of the product data. Another ability of a product manager is to help operations transform abstract requirements into logically clear product requirements and produce visual models. And coordinate design and development resources to follow up on demand. To a certain extent, the product manager is the Aladdin's lamp in the hands of operations. Friends and enemies Good product managers like to study products and users, so they will not reject operational needs and may even like operational work. But they are troublesome to operate: Fanciful and blind demands without considering product scalability and overall planning; Like a mole sticking out its head, it temporarily raises and changes requirements; it does not understand the technical principles of the product and is like talking to a cow. Likewise, product managers are also “hateful”: Ignore operational needs, design and meet these needs on their own initiative, and be proud that XX products also do this. Please, it is obvious that user psychology is different. Simply deprioritizing operational needs; Have you done any testing? There are so many bugs. How to cooperate In most cases, operations are responsible for user growth, activity and retention data, while product managers are responsible for product iteration, demand launch and testing. Different companies have different structures, which leads to different focus goals. There is nothing much to say about this, and we can only talk about daily cooperation. Balanced abilities and empathy. Operations personnel must understand product principles and processes, have the spirit of proactively researching and experiencing product details, and be well-reasoned when making demands, rather than being clueless. Product managers need to be familiar with changes in user behavior in a marketing environment. Only when the capabilities of both parties are balanced can they have empathy and reduce communication costs. Product documentation. The product manager produces complete product iteration functions and parameter descriptions, which operations need to know and review. On the one hand, they should be clear about the degree of product optimization, correspond to different promotion plans and promotional copy, and deal with user communication; on the other hand, they should not raise unnecessary operational demands and generate arguments over changes in demands. Needs assessment. When there are too many requirements and the priorities cannot be unified, regular communication meetings on the requirements are needed to reach a consensus. Communication method. In addition to silently looking at the data, product managers can listen to feedback from operations, proactively propose product improvement suggestions based on operational issues, and use automated product methods to reduce operating costs, and even form regular meeting documents. The user feedback and problem summaries collected by the operation must be presented in the form of a document, and both parties must agree on the format of the document. Mutual KPI thinking. It is advocated to understand each other’s KPI or goals and promote each other in a benign environment. For example, one of the KPIs of a product manager is to reduce user churn rate. From an operational perspective, adding other service entrances to the service-free page rather than a single copy can not only reduce the churn rate but also improve business data. Product managers are also happy to participate. There is no harm done to each other, just because we care about the product in different ways, we exchange and improve each other's skills, cooperate with each other's working methods, and understand each other's language. Harmonious relationship Let’s summarize the relationship between operations and products. We emphasize that operations must have a product perspective: on the one hand, when planning and executing operational methods, we must fully consider the attributes of the product, measure the overall cost, and feed back into product improvements. On the other hand, respect collaboration and product principles, have a big picture perspective, and don't operate in a way that can only solve needs through quarrels. To like is to possess, to love deeply is to restrain. Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising The author of this article @天佐 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Site Map |
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