Operations experts tell you: the mentality, skills, and thinking patterns required for operations!

I have indeed come into contact with many young people. When they communicate with me about their career dreams, the question I ask most often is: "Why do you want to develop Internet products?" And the answers are always varied -

Some people said: "I have understood that this does not require a threshold."

Some people say: "Because Zhang Xiaolong (this can also be replaced by Steve Jobs, etc.)"

Someone said, "Don't you think it's great to be a manager right after graduation?"

Well, actually, I have always believed that a position like product manager is not prepared for fresh graduates. The knowledge structure, demand sensitivity, and demand conversion ability required by a product manager are really beyond the reach of ordinary fresh graduates. Of course, if you are gifted, that is another matter.

When communicating with these students, I usually give them some advice, and the most common advice I give is:

“Why not try to start from operations ?”

First of all, operations is a good starting point for Internet work. Compared with the development line of product managers, operations can reach many other fields. For example, operations can be transferred to products, but very few products can be transferred to operations. Operations can be transferred to copywriting, sales, and consulting, but the reverse is actually somewhat difficult.

Secondly, the development line of operations work is very similar to other Internet jobs. Operations are not that easy to do, but the future development of operations is also good. Specialist - backbone - supervisor - manager - director - VP - CXO.

Two core tasks of operation

1. Traffic Construction

Traffic building is to improve the website's traffic indicators through various promotions, diffusion, marketing, and activities. What we usually call PV, UV, registration conversion, and SEO are all in this link.

The importance of traffic is actually self-evident. It is like a funnel. If the conversion of each link is a part of the funnel, if you want to accumulate enough valuable users, the greater the traffic, the larger the number of basic users that can be converted. Then when the conversion rate reaches the bottleneck, continuous large amounts of traffic are one of the key factors to ensure that a website or a product can operate for a long time.

Of course, there are some ideas now that if enough target users can be obtained, the conversion rate can be effectively improved and traffic is not so critical.

But we cannot avoid the fact that no matter whether we can obtain target users in a targeted manner or not, having a large amount of continuous traffic is a happy thing.

Second, user retention

After we have traffic and users, most of the operations work is about how to continuously and effectively promote user activity and retention, and to discover valuable or even high-value users among them. These users will continue to bring value and generate revenue for the website and products, allowing our website and products to survive and live with quality.

2. The mentality of doing operations

Mindset: When you decide that you want to enter the Internet as an operator, please first have the right mindset. A few things to make clear:

First, operations are not omnipotent. It is absolutely impossible to have no operations. Operations and products are not separated. Operations and many positions are close partners. The highest level of operation is self-operation.

While clarifying these things, you also need to understand some simple truths: there is no harm in being a little sweet-talker, whether you are in operations or not. Operations require unconventional thinking, but that doesn’t mean there are no traces to be found. Operations require creation, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be reused.

Second, operations require a positive attitude. Many details in life can provide insights into operations. If you work hard, you can still reap rewards.

For example, content preparation: you are given 2 Excel sheets, each containing 200,000 records, and you are asked to match and filter them first. Do you match them one by one manually, or use formulas to reduce the workload? This is a way to train your way of doing things - thinking before doing may be more efficient, and it can also improve your software usage level, etc.

For example, in the preliminary research of product operation, you need to make 100 calls every day to obtain the content of various conversations. So how do you extract similar needs from these contents and classify them and hand them over to the product manager? At this time, you need to have the ability to summarize and generalize, which can exercise your thinking method.

Three operational skills

When you have your mindset in the right place, you need to reflect on which of the following skills you currently have, from top to bottom or from bottom to top:

1. Sensitivity to data.

2. Imagination and creativity.

3. Oral and written expression skills.

4. Communication skills.

5. Execution.

You must understand that as a newcomer to operations, you may not be able to make a good event plan, you may not be able to organize and control a content topic, you may not be able to grasp the characteristics of website users in daily operations, and you may not be able to effectively improve various user data indicators with little effort, let alone draw inferences from one example and use structured thinking to help the product in turn.

At this time, the most important thing is your execution and communication skills. The least important thing is your ability to express yourself, your imagination and creativity.

Four ways of thinking about operations

The operational mindset is a very interesting topic, very mysterious and very abstract. For operators, there are some interesting ways of thinking or modes of thinking:

1. Divergent thinking: starting from one point, expanding thinking, and ultimately generating multiple solutions rather than a single solution.

For example, if the website wants to attract more registered users recently, how many ways can you think of?

A said that we can allow users to invite users, and each successful invitation can bring rewards to the inviter.

B said, my idea is similar to A’s, but not only the successful inviter will be rewarded, new users can also get rewards.

C said, I think we can have multiple options, such as invitation activities for existing users and registration rewards for potentially interested users. We can also set up some obstacles so that users’ permissions will be reduced and they cannot perform some operations if they do not complete the registration. However, this requires product support. If the product is willing to support it, we can also remind users to complete registration at every stage of product use. Finally, it is best to check with the product whether the existing registration process can be optimized to improve the efficiency of user registration. We can even use pre-registration to reserve an ID for each user who enters. Users only need to fill in their nickname and set a password to complete the registration and receive rewards.

C's way of thinking is divergent thinking.

2. Reverse thinking: This is a way of thinking that reverses cause and effect. The result can be inferred from the cause, and vice versa.

For example, the website’s churn rate has been a bit high recently. Does anyone have any good ideas for operating it?

A said that we can launch a campaign to recover lost users and give them some rewards.

B said, I have no other choice but to encourage activeness of other users who have not left and promote retention.

C said, let’s first look at what type of users the churned out are, whether they have anything in common, find out why they churned out, then eliminate these factors and design an activity specifically targeting the churned users. As for the activities, we can first send them some gifts, or tell them that the previous obstacles have been removed, to see if they are willing to return.

C's way of thinking is reverse thinking.

3. Structured thinking: This is a system-level way of thinking. It usually does not adopt a case-by-case solution of treating the symptoms but rather allows the system to solve all similar problems.

For example, the boss hopes to speed up the frequency of event operations, and it would be best if there could be website activities every day. What should I do?

A said, let’s add more developers and designers, and design more activities, so that new activities can be launched every day.

B said that we can classify activities and use templates to solve design problems. One set of programs can run multiple activities at the same time.

C said, we can look at our current operational goals and user behavior data to see if we can create a set of tools to help us launch activities quickly.

The thinking mode of B and C is structured thinking.

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