7 essential skills for operators: Adhere to 4 principles and exercise your product thinking

The cultivation of this product thinking is not a matter of overnight, but requires long-term subconscious training to be effective. Remember not to fish for three days and dry the net for two days. It requires strong execution ability. Having product thinking ability is also a must-have course for an operator to distance himself from others within 3 to 5 years!

1. Why do we need product thinking?

I read an article before, which roughly means that in the future, the boundary between products and operations will become increasingly blurred. Product managers will also do a lot of things related to operations, and operations managers will also need to understand many product skills.

I think that’s probably the case. Now many operations people would say that they don’t know whether they are working on product or operations, and they always feel that they are doing everything. Especially in startup companies, you chat with users every day, but after getting user feedback or when the APP is upgraded or revised, you still have to draw prototypes and write requirement documents. So if you say that you are 100% in operations, no one will believe you. If you say that you are just a product manager, you may also have to do market research and business development. Now there are fewer and fewer jobs that can be easily defined as 100% pure.

Under this trend, we have to go with the flow and should not make a distinction between "you, me and him" between products and operations! Instead, you should learn more knowledge across disciplines. If you want to move up to high-level operations, you need to learn deeply vertically and expand your knowledge horizontally. The horizontal refers to your ability to learn product knowledge besides operations. This ability is the ability of product thinking!

2. What is product thinking ability?

So what is product thinking? Many product books explain product thinking in this way: starting from the psychological needs of users and combining the company's own capabilities and market diversity, a thinking system is developed to develop a plan for the "essence" of products that can maximize the market value of goods.

If you find this professional explanation difficult to understand, I can translate it into plain language as: turn yourself into a novice user to use the product, and then form a set of executable product plans that maximize the product value while taking into account user value and social value. In other words, when we do operations, we are also dealing with users, but we should connect users with company value, rather than operating for the sake of operation. This is purposeless operation. The ultimate goal of operation is to create value. Otherwise, operation is just a means of charity .

Learning product thinking is a process, not a quick fix. It's a learning curve. Whether you can finally acquire metaphysical product thinking depends on yourself. When it comes to product thinking in depth, it becomes an economic issue. Products are not created to change the world; they are ultimately driven by market interests. The so-called needs do not exist just because Maslow talked about the five major needs. Rather, in daily life, people unconsciously make choices that they feel are right when evaluating the costs and rewards of life. For example, the business model of IM is mostly based on satisfying communication needs and then occupying a large number of users to provide value-added services. The business model of e-commerce platforms is mostly about how to balance the relationship between merchants and buyers. We will not conduct an in-depth study of product thinking here. We will only explain what product thinking is and what are the benefits of operating with product thinking?

3. So how should we exercise our product thinking ability?

Let’s first take a look at the logos of the three apps above. How much do you know about them? If you know all three, I think you have a good sense of product! But having a sense of product is only the first step in learning product thinking!

If you had just downloaded a new APP, how would you use it? If I'm not mistaken, many people open the APP, scan the APP UI twice, and if they think it's okay, they will continue to look at other functions to see if there are any interesting functions. If so, they will register to try it out. If not, they will basically just pass by the APP.

But as an operator, if you want to focus on cultivating your product thinking, I think you should follow these four principles to cultivate your product thinking:

Ask more & do more & organize more & compare more

For example, those of us who are in operations are most exposed to apps, websites, or WeChat and Weibo. Let’s take APP as an example.

1. Before using an app, ask yourself these questions:

• How did this app catch your attention?
• Was it recommended by a friend?
• Why did he recommend it to you?
• Or did you see this app in an article?
• If so, what motivated you to find the app and download it?
• Did its icon or name attract you?
• Have you heard of it before? I have heard of it several times, why didn't I download it then but downloaded it now?
• If you were to give this app a one-line review before using it, what would you say? It would be interesting to compare the before and after reviews.
• How do you feel about it now? Do you think it will catch on? Does it work? Did you read the ratings, reviews and description when you downloaded the app?

2. After asking the questions, we open the app and start using it with the questions we just left in the notebook or the questions you remember in your mind. Try to use it for the normal amount of time you normally would (it could be a few minutes or half an hour), and then ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the product’s start screen or sign-up experience like? Is it as simple as pressing a few buttons or is there a bunch of complicated verification steps?
• Is it easy to use to jump to pages, look at button design, and arrange information content?
• What is the design style of the interface? Do users like this design style? There is also the content of the copy . Should good copy content be divided according to user groups?

Then use Xmind to display the overall architecture of the product. The core requirements require fewer entries, and other requirements are generally at the second or third level based on user priority. APP generally does not exceed the fourth level page.

Most people form their impression of a product within the first few minutes. Reviewing this process can help you better understand how an app creates value, how easy it is to use, and how it makes people feel the developer's dedication.

3. When we use this app again a few days or even weeks after using it, you can see the durability and growth of the product. Then you think silently:

• How does this app compare to other similar apps? What is done better and what is not done well? Why would you choose this app over another?
• What do others think of this app? See what people are saying about it online and how your friends and family are using it. Do other people's comments match your own? If different why?
• Based on what you know, where do you think the app will be in a year? Writing down your true thoughts and storing them will be very useful for future summary and analysis.
• After a while, see if your previous predictions were correct. If not, why? How do your personal preferences differ from market performance? You must understand this so that you can rationally revise your views in the future.

Even if you do not follow the above process completely to test an app, and many of the steps in between can be omitted, one thing is certain: when you are using an app, ask more questions about the structure layer, scope layer, presentation layer, etc. of this app. Your familiarity and mastery of the product will be easy. When you are thinking about and testing a product, you are actually practicing your product thinking.

The cultivation of this product thinking is not a matter of overnight, but requires long-term subconscious training to be effective. Remember not to fish for three days and dry the net for two days. It requires strong execution. Having product thinking ability is also a must-have course for an operator to distance himself from others within 3 to 5 years!

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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!