There are two ways of thinking for good operations

For a long time, we like to talk about product thinking, but operational thinking is not as popular as word of mouth. I always believe that good thinking can be summarized and generalized and easy to learn.

Today I will briefly discuss operational thinking. It is just an idea of ​​mine and I hope it will be inspiring.

I tried to summarize operational thinking into two abstract models, yes, two models.

One is user-oriented and the other is operation-oriented.

From the literal meaning, user-oriented means driving operations from the user's perspective and role, while operation-oriented means measuring business development status from the enterprise's perspective. Is it a bit weird? To better illustrate, let’s invite operators who have these two ways of thinking.

Xiao Qin is a handsome liberal arts student who joined the Internet industry right after graduating from school. What impressed the leader about Xiao Qin was his excellent writing skills, which can be both touching and hilarious. He started operations from the product’s two Weibo accounts, interacting with users every day, handling various complaints, and later on operated the community very successfully.

Xiaolu is also very handsome, with glasses and a gentle manner. When he first joined the company, because of his science background, he did a lot of reporting. After more than a year, we have become familiar with various indicators behind the product and can produce many high-quality analysis reports, which serve as a data bridge for the operation team.

These two types of people are easy to distinguish: one is more emotional, the other is more idealistic; one gets along well with users, the other delves into data.

When writing app copy, Xiao Qin prefers to take out his mobile phone and read it word by word rather than checking it on the computer screen. He will pay attention to the layout of the editing style on the mobile phone, will repeatedly modify the title and end of the article, and will ask friends for their feelings. Everything is to imitate the user experience.

If Xiaolu wrote it, Xiao Qin would roll his eyes. Xiaolu is also very serious, but he prefers to prepare in advance, observe the data of historical articles, what kind of content and titles users prefer, which topics have higher reading volume, and control the average reading time of content chapters.

Can you see the difference? Xiao Qin likes to immerse himself in the user's perspective because he can understand and empathize with others. Xiaolu is a model of acting after careful planning, and he is not as smooth and freehand as Xiaoqin. From another perspective, through analysis and summary, Xiaolu's copywriting may not be outstanding, but it can still make steady progress.

In the scenario of user operation , Xiao Qin's abilities are suitable for the early stage. For example, he must be able to maintain core users and interact with them like a duck in water. He can also get to the point in user interviews. When user operations shift to the later stage and the number of users reaches over one million, it is obviously not enough to rely on the previous centralized maintenance. After all, you cannot truly understand millions of users. However, Xiaolu, who is good at mathematics and physics, has an advantage in this regard.

Let’s give a more specific example. Now, when doing a marketing promotion activity, from what angle will Xiao Qin and Xiao Lu plan it?

Of course, Xiao Qin thinks from the user's perspective. Taking coupons as an example, he will not simply send out coupons for promotion, but will split the coupons into multiple pieces. The purpose of multiple coupons is to encourage users to make repeated purchases and develop consumption habits. One large coupon will turn users into "freeloaders" , while multiple small coupons will make them more sticky.

A more in-depth technique is to incorporate psychological marketing. Maybe everyone has heard this story: Lao Wang is the owner of a steamed buns shop. Every day he asks customers if they want steamed buns, but his business is average. One day, a Zen master (yes, a Zen master) who passed by gave Lao Wang a clever idea, and Lao Wang’s bun sales doubled. The trick is simple: ask Lao Wang to change the question he asks every day from "Do you want buns?" to "Do you want one bun or two buns?"

Careful readers can appreciate the implicit meaning of the words. This is to borrow marketing psychology to secretly preset the position for consumers, changing from "buy" and "not buy" to "buy one" or "buy two". Consumers will subconsciously make a choice between the two and ignore the choice of not buying.

By the same token, Xiao Qin also adopted a similar strategy in marketing activities . For example, he gave out two coupons of different prices, and used copywriting and design to create the suggestion that one would miss out if they did not buy. He also set a preset position: which coupon was more cost-effective, rather than whether to use the coupon or not.

Marketing campaigns borrow a lot from psychology. On other levels, Xiao Qin will think more carefully for consumers: Should we prepare for event filing? What if traffic is heavy and users cannot attend? What should we do if there is too much express backlog? How to give FAQs for customer service training activities...

Xiao Qin also spends time on the packaging of the express boxes, adding creativity to it, and puts a thank-you letter to the user inside the box. These will not increase costs much, but Xiao Qin’s goal is to increase the possibility of users posting unboxing photos.

The activity does not end when the user receives the goods. He has observed many WeChat Moments and found that girls like to post unboxing photos more than boys, and products with high-quality packaging are more likely to be posted than those with ordinary packaging. Every unboxing photo is an opportunity for brand exposure. If 10,000 users post unboxing photos on WeChat Moments, and each photo is seen by 20 friends, then that is 200,000 exposures, equivalent to the effect of two posts with 100,000+ views.

Throughout the entire activity process, Xiao Qin started from the user's perspective. All the techniques and routines, how users will use coupons, what the excitement and anger points will be, how to use and avoid them, etc., are a combination of users, marketing and psychology.

Xiaolu, first calculates ROI based on the data of past marketing activities and extracts user granularity. Which user is VIP, which user is premium, and which user is ordinary. These descriptive labels are quantifiable.

For example, user loyalty. Can user loyalty be measured by repurchase rate or repurchase rate? Yes, but not comprehensive. Xiaolu further breaks down the loyalty data into behavior-based loyalty and attitude-based satisfaction. Behavior-based loyalty is the repeated purchasing behavior of users for a product or service, measured by indicators such as purchase frequency and purchase share. Satisfaction is the preference and expectation of a product or service, which is measured by degree of preference, purchase intention and evaluation.

This is easy to understand. Although some users like to shop, they are only interested in low prices. If a competitor offers a lower price, buying is just a pipe dream. Commonly known as "saying yes with your mouth, but your body is very honest."

Xiaolu divides users into four quadrants based on satisfaction and loyalty: users with high satisfaction and high loyalty are angel-type users; users with low satisfaction and low loyalty are dangerous-type users; users with low satisfaction and high loyalty are wool-type users; and users with high satisfaction and low loyalty are hostage-type users.

Different strategies can be adopted for different user types. User value, user churn, and user preferences can all be segmented using data dimensions. Xiaolu's strategy for these groups is to adapt to local conditions.

From a business perspective, Xiaolu knows that the purpose of marketing activities is not to boost sales but profits, and business is always linked to revenue and costs. Now that the user groups have been segmented, the core of the strategy is to reduce costs and increase efficiency. For example, for wool-type users, we use preferential packages with low discounts; while for angel-type users, we entice them to spend more.

The price of each product SKU can also be adjusted. Commodities all have a price elasticity coefficient, that is, if the price of a commodity changes by 1%, how much will the sales volume of the commodity change? Lowering the price of goods may increase profits, and the same is true for price increases. This is also the logic behind marketing.

Xiaolu's plan is a typical play with data. Operation-oriented thinking is the thinking of business operations, and user experience and user feelings are only regarded as a variable in the operation process.

Let’s summarize the differences between user-oriented and operation-oriented models.

User-oriented thinking is linear thinking, which revolves around the process of interaction between users and products/services. Taking the promotion mentioned above as an example, it is attention - interest - understanding - purchase decision - consumption - receipt - sharing, until the next attention. This is a complete closed loop starting from the user end.

Operations-oriented thinking is structured. Although it also has a linear closed loop of goal-strategy-execution-data feedback-summary-improvement-new strategy, this closed loop is more of a business methodology.

Operational thinking is pyramid thinking , which breaks down corporate/business goals into a hierarchical structure. Profit is the difference between revenue and cost, and revenue is the product of the number of buyers and the average order value. The number of buyers is the sum of different groups of people, and the average order value is the size of different shopping baskets. When Xiaolu was making strategies, he broke down a big goal into multiple small goals. Each small goal had a different strategy and was interrelated.

User-oriented thinking controls users, and operational thinking controls the business. There is no actual difference between the two. The development of products and enterprises are two separate things. Perhaps in some contexts, user-oriented thinking is important, while in another context, operational thinking is slightly more important.

From the perspective of the capability model, the entry threshold for user-oriented thinking is not high. One bun or two buns? This is one of the cases of behavioral economics. It doesn’t take long to quickly understand this system and relate it to real-life cases. However, to truly understand and empathize with users from the user's perspective requires long-term research, not to mention the differences between users in different business scenarios. This thinking is common with product managers .

Operation-oriented thinking requires understanding of the business, which is closely related to data growth and has high requirements for mathematical logic. You can also call it business-oriented thinking, which is close to data analysts .

The learning paths of the two are inconsistent. User-oriented thinking requires learning marketing, consumer behavior, psychology, communication, creativity, etc., while operation-oriented thinking requires learning data analysis, project management, financial costs and management consulting, etc. The former is about grasping people's hearts, and the latter is about running a business. Of course, they all need to understand the concept of operations itself.

Are these two abilities in conflict?

no.

New operators aged 0 to 3 have obvious tendencies in two ways of thinking, which are related to their personality, ability, and position: either user-oriented thinking or operation-oriented thinking. Even if they have both, the ability of one of them is still a shortcoming.

As operating experience increases, they will all strengthen and merge. When operators are thinking about strategies and analyzing based on data, they might as well think about what they would do if they were the user. When operators communicate and interact with users in the community, they may want to take a closer look at the trend changes in the data, try to summarize and verify their ideas.

In short, after you think from an operational perspective, try thinking from a user perspective. vice versa. The activities planned by Xiao Qin may be praised by users and are thoughtful, but the profits may not be good. The activities planned by Xiaolu will not have a big cost problem, but the user satisfaction will be low. So the best way is to combine these two plans and take advantage of each other.

Xiao Qin and Xiao Lu are two thinking models. If you don’t master both types of thinking at the same time, you might as well have these two types of people in the operation team to complement each other. This is what most companies can try to do.

Whether it is user operation, content operation , event operation or product operation , they can all be combined with the two ways of thinking to subdivide different systems, such as user-oriented user operation and operation-oriented content operation. I will write about these techniques and methods separately when I have time.

I believe that after reading this, you may have a new perspective on operational thinking. These are the two ways of thinking in operations, which can also be called routines or capabilities. For newcomers, it can also be called the direction of learning.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

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