The difference between advanced operations and ordinary operations

In a broad sense, all manual intervention around website products is called operations, so from this level, Internet product companies only have three business departments: products, technology, and operations. (I don’t think e-commerce websites can be called Internet products. They are just commodity companies that use Internet channels.)

A more detailed analysis would include market operation, user operation, content operation, community operation and business operation.

I don't like to separate marketing and operations like traditional companies do. Some companies are very rough and use spending money or not to divide marketing and operations. Some companies are better and use attracting new customers and retaining old customers to divide marketing and operations. However, this is also one-sided. This is to make management easier, not for the sake of good products.

Regarding operations, or the growth of operations personnel, we must first understand the roles of product technology and operations in an Internet product.

Product: Think of the product

Technology: Get the product out

Operation: Put the product to use

Strictly speaking, products and operations have different positioning and boundaries in different companies, which varies from person to person. Different products have different emphases in these three areas. Take BAT for example, Baidu focuses on technology, Tencent focuses on products, and Alibaba focuses on operations. To some extent, this is related to the core of the company's initial business. Of course, when a company grows to a certain size, it cannot rely on just one, the others must also be supplemented.

But back to operations, I think the most important psychological quality for all students doing operations is:

Don't talk about products and technology. You should have the awareness and ability to make a pile of shit out of it and let people eat it and give it good reviews.

Whether you are a junior editor, Weibo account manager, or operations director,

The thing you care about most is only one thing from beginning to end

Get users and keep them.

All the work you do should be closely centered around this point. Any work (including the work of your team members) must be directly or indirectly directed to part of this purpose and be responsible for the data results.

It looks simple, but it is actually not simple. For example, fellow operations colleagues, ask yourselves, among the work you have done in the past month, which parts of the work have clear "data results" for this purpose, and which parts do not. If the proportion of work without data results is too high, you need to reflect on your work.

This one can be broken down into the following four core links:

1. Find where the user is

User portraits, surveys, demand analysis, etc. Yes, you need to understand your product, even if it is a piece of shit)

2. Get users to use your product at an acceptable cost

Marketing, channel expansion, business cooperation, content editing, social media event planning, etc., whether you spend money or not, it is all for this purpose. Sometimes it is better to hire a professional to do it than to spend a week to create something yourself.

3. Keep users using your product

User operation, community operation

4. Stay connected with users when they are not using the product

Recall, Weibo and WeChat operations, feedback, and business cooperation on other products.

In my opinion, there is no strict watershed between junior operations and senior operations.

To some extent, if you are only responsible for a sub-project in one of the above four links (such as Weibo operations specialist, WeChat operations specialist, content editor, community event planner, etc.), you can be defined as a junior operator. Often, entry-level operations are among 2-3-4. At 1, you only need to understand and implement it, but you are not yet at the stage of participating in decision-making. At this time, you are an executor, just do it steadily.

And when you do better and better and gradually cover the entire link with your abilities, you are already considered an intermediate operator. You may not care about market launch, but only about retention, or even not care about retention, but only care about repeat purchases/sticky user UGC. To put it bluntly, you have formed a certain level that cannot be bypassed in the entire product business chain, and this is also your operational value.

Then as you go along, your abilities and vision will grow, and you will move upstream and downstream. For example, if you are a marketing manager, you will have begun to consider whether the traffic you have attracted can be retained, and you will actively start to cooperate with community operators to organize some activities. Or if you are a community operations manager, you will have planned a UGC activity within the community, and then actively coordinate with marketing personnel to spread these wonderful UGC to the outside circle. Then you will have taken a step further. At this stage, you have already advanced to advanced operations, with a broader vision and more resources, and the plans you need to make will start to be settled on a weekly or monthly basis.

The core purpose I mentioned before actually has two levels: 1 is to attract new customers, and 2 is to retain customers. If you break through from 1 to 2, or from 2 to 1, and do well in both, you can start to take control and focus on where you should make breakthroughs first in the entire operation process at different stages according to the different needs of the product at different stages. You already have the initial capabilities of an operations director, and the next step is COO. Some company COOs also have to consider investor relations, PR, deployment of various venders, and large-scale business collaborations, but these have already entered the company and are not just operations at the product level.

This layer is also the most difficult to break through. The bottleneck is that if you have been deeply engaged in one of the areas of "attracting new customers" or "retaining old customers", the longer you work in it and the deeper you go, the more difficult it will be for you to jump out and understand another area. Because the values ​​and ways of thinking here are completely different.

Only when you understand it, can you be considered to have truly opened up the Ren and Du meridians and be considered a qualified operator.

It's like the two sides of a coin. Don't think that you only need to look at one side, otherwise your development will stop at an operations manager with an annual income of no more than 200,000. Once you break through, unlimited positions are waiting for you. If you are interested, you can go to places like Liepin to have a look.

I have seen countless people die here. A UGC community product started advertising when there was nothing. Or a product with a great experience failed to arouse users' praise in time, and was used as a marketing weapon to spend money to spread it, but was quickly killed by copycats from big companies. There are countless such cases.

Do the right thing at the right time, not just everything.

Finally, I want to talk about the so-called data results.

What is a data result? It is the result reflected by data that can be quantified or qualitative (yes, a user sends you a long complaint letter, which is also data).

Don't do it if there is no result.

Based on my experience working in operations for so many years, I feel that many of my classmates’ work does not have a strong enough purpose.

For example, when you post a Weibo, you can’t really say what the meaning of it is or what the result is. After you understand the meaning, you publish it and use the data results to verify it. The quality of what you publish is completely different from when you were aimless before.

Get the data back, and then use it as accumulation to continuously expand the plate you can operate. In the end, you will find that it doesn’t matter what product you make, and you are a good operator.