This is how awesome operations handle problems!

In the current environment, we call people who have outstanding abilities in some fields or have many unique insights in certain aspects "big cows" or "big shots" because there are many things to learn from them in this field. Therefore, we generally admire awesome people.

In the operations industry, there are many awesome operators. We want to know their insights and opinions on the operations industry, and we are more willing to take them as our goals to learn from and strive to surpass them. Have we ever thought about why these great people are so good at operations? Is it just because they have been in this field for a long time, or because they have an innate advantage in operations? In my opinion, none of these factors can be the key factor in why they are so awesome. Although these factors are an important reason, ultimately, I think they play a crucial role in the learning and working methods in this field. It can even be said that if you do not often summarize your working methods in the operations industry, you are likely to stand still and stop moving forward. This is why some people can be independent within one year of entering the operations industry, while some people will always be editors.

How do the awesome operations people handle all the complicated things at work? Before analyzing the problem, I think that to be a great operator, in addition to the premise that the working method is correct, your hard skills must be up to standard. If you don’t even have the basic skills of operation, is it a bit unrealistic to want to become an operation master?

Okay, after so much preparation, let’s officially start analyzing this issue. How does an awesome operations person simplify and streamline problems at work and solve them efficiently?

1. Please state the problem you are facing now

Why state the current problem? Some people may think that my problem is nothing more than how to do a good job in the current operations and promote the APP to more people. But many people ignore the importance of the problem. I remember a big name in the Internet once said: In the mobile Internet society, the questions asked are more valuable than the answers given. Why are questions more valuable than answers? We all know that in the Internet society, the demographic dividend has passed and information is overflowing. People will no longer passively accept this information as before. They will also selectively choose information that suits them to absorb. This is why more and more people will accept paid reading. So at this time, if the question you ask is more accurate or can better express the pain points of a group of people, then this question is valuable and worth answering.

In the background of my WeChat public account , people often ask various questions. I will answer some questions, but I will not answer some of them because I don’t know whether the question is valuable or not. For example: How to operate well? How can college students quickly get started with operations? I think these questions are too general to be answered from a single point and have no value.

So when you want to answer a question, please think carefully about how to express the question, try to state it again, and see if you can quickly understand whether the question has hit the point.

2. Analyze the problems you are facing now

When proposing your solution, you also need to analyze your problem. How to analyze it? Two points:

Back to the origin - extract key points

1. Back to square one

When solving problems, great operators are good at returning to the origin of the problem. That is, when you analyze a problem, you should think about the purpose of the problem and how it came about.

Let me give you an example

A few weeks ago, when we were holding an internal meeting, we were analyzing how we could cooperate with event organizers to organize an offline event . We mentioned why the event organizers would sign a strategic cooperation agreement with me and provide us with first-hand information free of charge.

If we want to analyze why event organizers would cooperate with us, we must go back to the most basic point, that is, what can we give to the organizers?

This way the problem will be clear and your solution will be targeted.

2. Extract key points

Extracting key points is a working method commonly used by McKinsey people to analyze and solve problems. Because key points affect the overall situation and are even direct determining factors, once the key points of the problem are found, the subsequent thinking of solving the problem will be much easier.

The guiding methodology for extracting key points is what we often call the "80/20 rule". The 80/20 rule is very common in life. For example, 80% of the world's wealth is in the hands of 20% of the people; 80% of the sales of a company's sales department come from the efforts of 20% of people; the most obvious point is that 80% of the APP traffic is now occupied by the top 20% of the platforms, so if we start a business now and make an APP, it is terrifyingly dangerous.

So after the above analysis, we should also follow the 80/20 principle when analyzing problems. I think a problem is not the result of all factors. There is often a key factor hidden behind it, and this factor is the key point where the problem occurs. So when we analyze the problem, we should find this key point.

For example, in August last year, we added a new feature to our APP. Starting from the first day of its launch, the registration conversion rate became lower and lower. When we extracted the background data and began to analyze it, we started looking for the cause from the source. However, no reason has been found for the decline in registration rates . Later, by analyzing the user's behavior path, we found that the user clicked the Get Verification Code button on the registration page multiple times from the time the user entered the APP, browsed the APP to the time they became interested in registering. We thought that the user could not receive the verification code, which led to the user's registration failure. Finally, it was discovered that there was a bug in the verification of some numbers, which was then fixed.

3. List the solutions

The McKinsey method tells me that when you have conducted a more in-depth study of the problem, you should list the answer in your mind. After analyzing the problem above, the solution seems to be clear in our minds. This is when you should let your brain run free, even bad ideas can lead to good ones. Keep an open mind and be willing to listen. Consider various ideas and evaluate their respective merits.

For example, your boss now has a question for you: Increase the number of followers of my official account to 100,000 next month, which means doubling it.

The question is: How can I increase my followers by 50,000 within a month?

At this time, you can follow the principle of results first and methods later. We know the result, which is to increase the number of fans by 50,000, but what about the method? At this point, you have to list the channels that may increase your followers, whether they have been used before or not. For example, online and offline activities, submissions, mutual promotion, forwarding in circle of friends, social groups , media matrix, and starting from the beautiful layout of content.

But according to our analysis above, you must extract the key points that can solve this problem, so that you can achieve twice the result with half the effort. The above methods are available, but which channels should we focus on and which ones can be discarded?

This has to start from two aspects. One is the channels we have used before. That is, we have had experience before that, for example, forwarding online activities can bring about greater conversions. Therefore, this is our main investment in increasing fans this time. The other is "good quality and low price". Everyone wants a method that does not require too much budget and can achieve better results, which is what everyone likes. Therefore, you can choose forms such as mutual promotion.

We need to be a little more powerful here. When we list the solutions, we should avoid being too comprehensive, which is what we call "comprehensive but superficial". This is also a mistake that many promoters make when building their own brands. They are not afraid of having too many channels, but experience tells me that the more you want to cover everything, the less likely things will turn out. So what we do is "precision and accuracy".

4. Evaluate whether the matching resources are sufficient

When the problem is clear and the method is correct, it is time to execute. In the process of execution, we all think of one word: resources (budget).

Sufficient resources are definitely a blessing for operations, but in many cases, it is not what we imagined. We want to achieve good results, but we do not have enough resources. This is like "wanting the horse to run fast but not feeding it enough." This is the most common problem we encounter when operating projects.

As a powerful operator, when you encounter insufficient resources when doing a project, you can avoid the difficult tasks and find another way. For example, when we were promoting the APP in the early stages, many people within our company believed that we could spend money to buy users, such as the door-to -door scanning QR code promotion that was very popular in the past two years. But we rejected them all. First of all, we don’t have that much money to invest; secondly, even if we attract so many users, we won’t be able to keep them because our product is not a product that meets rigid demand. So even if we attract tens of thousands of users in the early stage, we will still lose fans in the later stage. Useless effort. Later we changed our thinking. Since it wasn’t possible to just spend money on the C-end, could we start from the B-end and attract users from there?

Because we are an app that provides event information, we can cooperate with many event organizers, such as resource exchange, brand cooperation, etc. We have booths on site to display our brand and use the traffic at the event site to attract accurate users. It is also relatively low-cost to attract a new user on site. This was a relatively new way of playing two years ago. Of course, although these methods are used a lot now, they still seem to be effective, but the cost is already very high.

When we are promoting our products, resources are a very important part of our business. If resources are insufficient, we should adhere to the principle of avoiding the important and focusing on the trivial, and there are always more solutions than problems to solve the problem.

I have read a lot of useful information online, such as how to go from an operations specialist to an operations expert, and how to advance to senior operations. Many of them talk about how to become an awesome operations person from a skill level, but I think an awesome operations person is very particular about work methods. You can find the source from the complicated work, analyze it layer by layer, until you find the answer you want.

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

The author of this article @艺林小宇 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!