Where is the "irreplaceability" and "core competitiveness" of an operation?

Where do you think the "irreplaceability" of an operation lies? Why do I feel like I can’t answer this question?

Looking back, this question, “What is the core competitiveness of operations?” is not the first time I have come across it. If you go to Zhihu or Baidu, you will find that similar questions are asked quite a lot online.

Therefore, their doubts are not isolated cases, but exist in large numbers among operations practitioners - everyone says that one should specialize in one's field, and that being an expert in coding is the core competitiveness of R&D workers, and being able to easily handle a large number of data charts is the core competitiveness of data workers. So for a profession like "operations" where the work is often both numerous and diverse, with tasks such as chatting with users today, organizing an event tomorrow, and spending money on promotion the day after tomorrow, what exactly is one's "irreplaceability" and "core competitiveness"?

Their questions also triggered a new round of thinking on this issue for me. So this time, I would like to answer this question based on my feelings and understanding.

I think this confusion is more likely to occur in operators with 1-4 years of experience (those with more than 4 years of experience have either become experts through hard work or should change their careers...), so I would like to discuss this from two perspectives:

First, for an operations practitioner, in the 1-4 year stage, what is more likely to become your unique competitive advantage compared to other operations?

Second, for an operations worker, what abilities you have accumulated through the work of "operations" will easily become unique and irreplaceable to you, ensuring that you will never have to worry about having no food to eat?

2.

Let me talk about the first one first.

In this section, I will directly talk about a few operators I have met who are in the 1-4 years of experience stage and who, in my opinion, have their own unique competitive advantages.

I mentioned before that I was regarded as a god by our team at that time——

G started out as a Weibo marketer . He was familiar with all kinds of Weibo gameplay and channel promotion . Under his leadership, one of our Weibo accounts that started from scratch quickly gained nearly 100,000 followers within 2-3 months.

Moreover, when it comes to promoting our products, G is particularly good at doing so through various means such as forwarding through big accounts on Weibo. He can always get the most channel resources and the most favorable prices.

Moreover, the most amazing thing about G is his superb ability in goal decomposition, affairs management and execution. He always manages to break down every little thing into various clear action steps, and then manage all these matters through a lot of fancy tables and tools , eventually turning them into an SOP. This gave him extraordinary abilities - for example, for a normal person like me, the limit for Weibo marketing is to complete the promotion of 3 projects within a week, but G, with his tools and amazing abilities, will be able to promote 7 or 8 projects at the same time and ensure that it is clean and neat.

There is no doubt that for G, his "superb goal decomposition, affairs management and execution capabilities" were his core competitiveness at the time.

I used to have another colleague D, who was introverted, taciturn, and not good at communication, but he was a joke teller - a real joke teller. I have never seen someone who can post 8 different messages in WeChat Moments every day, and each one is original, and most of them can make you laugh. For example, this one -

"Yue Fei's mother carved the four characters 'Serve the country with loyalty' on Yue Fei's back, which fully illustrates the saying - liking is unbridled, but love is like carving."

"Sanye's mother is called Erye, and Sanye's grandmother is called Yiye. So the question is: what is Sanye's grandmother's mother's name? Oh yeah!!"

I was curious once and asked him how he developed such a strong ability to compose jokes. He replied:

In fact, I just found the jokes on Weibo very interesting after reading them so much that I started to learn how to write them myself. I imitated and borrowed a lot from them, practiced repeatedly, and finally summed up my own set of methods and developed a strong ability to write jokes.

I asked him how long this process took, and he said about a year.

As far as I know, D, besides working, also contributes to at least 4-5 big Weibo accounts. The content is of course jokes, and he is charged by the word count.

For D, this is his core competitiveness - users don’t like to read content created by others, but the jokes he writes can always attract users’ attention and even make them laugh, which already has unique value. What's more, he still maintains an astonishingly high level of productivity? !

I also know a friend L who used to be in charge of community operations in a company. To put it simply, she was responsible for the operations of dozens to hundreds of WeChat groups at the same time, and maintaining the activity of users among them.

Undoubtedly, "managing a group" may seem like one of those things that is very basic and unskilled to many people, but in her hands, she seems to be able to make a big difference with it - she knows how to quickly establish her presence in a group, how to develop more administrators to help her manage and maintain the atmosphere of the group, how to motivate and maintain the enthusiasm of the administrators, and she even summed up her own "several key points" - according to her, in any of her groups, as long as these things continue to happen, the atmosphere in the group will not be bad.

Therefore, if others manage dozens or hundreds of groups, there may only be advertisements left in the groups, but her groups are mostly well-organized - this also makes her popular. For a while, relying on her outstanding output, she received invitations and offers from more than a dozen companies at the same time.

In fact, I have met many people like G, D and L. I guess you don’t think they are people who “have no core competitiveness”.

If I were to summarize and refine what they said, my personal feeling is that operations at the 1-4 years experience stage may be something that requires looking at both the weaknesses and strengths. In other words: you can neither let your short board be too short, nor find a long board to make it long enough.

Specifically speaking, in operations work, I think there are some skills that may be more "universal" and "generic", that is: no matter what product line you are in any company, as long as you are doing operations, your core work content will definitely be inseparable from it.

Typical skills in this area include: copywriting , data analysis , simple promotional activities, pleasant communication and interaction with users, writing a logically clear and understandable plan and document, etc.

In order to build your own "core competitiveness", what you need to do is to avoid having any shortcomings in this part of skills. To put it in human terms, it means that you have to at least score 60 points or above in these things, right?

For example, for me, data is definitely not my expertise. If you talk to me about data models or something, I will probably get confused very quickly. But I have to at least understand some common data concepts, and if I want to do a promotion, I have to know what data I should look at and how to analyze the data, right?

And, in addition to this, I think you must find a single point where you can "surpass more than 80% of people."

Let me give you an example. For APP application store promotion, 60 points may be enough to know what the APP application store is, what common practices are, and what the general operating procedures are.

But I know a guy who does APP application store promotion. He has the contact information of more than 85% of the app store managers on the market. He has basically met with them and established a certain personal relationship with them. As a result, he can always get various promotional resources such as "limited free" and special events from various app stores in the first place. In addition, he has an extremely detailed data statistics table, which records in detail the data changes of each app store channel for the "college student" user group, down to every week, every month, and every resource position...

This is pretty much what I mean by “ exceeding more than 80% of people at a single point .”

The first answer I want to give is this: for operations with 1-4 years of experience, your core competitiveness often needs to be that you can score more than 60 points in most general skills in operations, and find at least one thing related to operations for yourself, whether it's writing copy, chatting with users, field marketing , or something else, and complete it better than more than 80% of people.

3.

Let's talk about the second point: For an operations worker, what abilities you have accumulated through the "operations" job itself will become unique and irreplaceable to you, ensuring that you will never have to worry about food and clothing?

In this part, I would like to talk about some subjective things based on my own experiences and feelings.

After seeing this question, the first thing I asked myself was: I have been working in operations for almost 10 years, so do I have core competitiveness?

I think the answer is yes. At the very least, if I say now that I want to look for opportunities, I estimate that there will be no less than 100 companies willing to come and hook up with me.

So I continued to ask myself: In these nearly 10 years, are there any core and irreplaceable abilities that I think the operations job has given me?

I thought about it, and my answers should be as follows:

First, it is the ability to "build an ecosystem." This thing may sound a bit abstract, but it does exist.

For example, a WeChat group, from its establishment to its growth and continued activity, until the end it can continue to produce value even if you don't pay much attention to it. From an operational perspective, this actually requires you to do some specific things well, and through your words, deeds, behavior, rules, etc., encourage and restrict what everyone should and should not do in a group, and it can only be gradually achieved after a long period of habit cultivation.

But if you have not experienced the entire process yourself, you may find it difficult to appreciate and understand that there is some complex logic involved, and it will be even more difficult to turn such an abstract thing into a series of concrete actions.

But it is precisely these logics that, once you are familiar with and understand them, you will find that they can be applied to many other places, such as the management of a community, how a product can be driven into a "self-operated" state, and how a company can maintain a good team atmosphere.

At least personally, I feel that many of my abilities in managing and building teams are acquired from this "operation" job.

The second is the ability to “understand how to influence users”.

To give another example, now in Class 3, when an article comes out, I can basically tell at a glance where the user's main reading obstacles are, and how to adjust some language organization and expression for better results.

For example, for a title, I can roughly judge what its opening rate will be, with an accuracy rate of over 80%. And when the title is not good, I can also think of some other ideas to give different title options.

Similarly, if a course seems unattractive, I will know that if I compare it with other courses, it may be easier to promote user decision-making, and if I add some "early bird tickets" or "group purchase discounts" and other things, its registration number will increase significantly over a period of time.

And I also know how to increase users' favorability towards you and how to establish a true friendship-like trust relationship with users.

I believe that abilities like these are accumulated through long-term operational work and are extremely valuable and irreplaceable.

And most importantly, the Internet, which has long passed its bonus period, is no longer the era where everything can be done as long as you occupy and control the channels. On the contrary, in this era, it is more important to understand "how to retain users" and "how to create content that truly interests users." Therefore, such ability becomes even more valuable.

Third, it is a sense of "operation", which may also include the understanding of the business logic of various industries and even the understanding of business.

As the Internet has developed to this day, it is becoming more and more like an "infrastructure" rather than an independent "industry." In other words, descriptions such as "online education", " Internet finance ", "Internet medical care", and "knowledge community" are the industries.

But on another level, once all industries are connected to the Internet, there will definitely be some common things that need to be focused on, such as traffic, user access time, AR PU value, GMV, etc.

When working in the Internet industry, you will always be exposed to various products from all walks of life in the process of various collaborations, marketing, and even job changes. At the beginning, you will definitely feel confused about the similarities and differences between these products and businesses, but I think once time has passed, you will definitely start to try to think about some of the essential issues behind them - why do these products seem to focus on user volume and user activity, but the operational strategies and logic are so different?

Including, operations are ultimately responsible for the business. Whether you are responsible for traffic, user activity, or even sales, the ultimate goal is to achieve your business goals. Similarly, if the business logic is not so smooth, the operations work will probably be done rather awkwardly.

Therefore, after working in an operations position for a long time, you will definitely start to think more about "business" issues.

For me personally, it was after I had experienced 7 or 8 completely different products, including starting my own business , that I began to find that I could gradually understand the logic of various industries and see more macro things.

This also allowed me to gradually gain a kind of "operational" ability - I began to understand what kind of product is suitable for doing what and what is not suitable for doing at what stage, and what specific actions should be taken in the future to maximize its output.

There is no doubt that I think this ability is also brought to me by the "operation" job, and I am not sure whether I can still develop such ability if I do other jobs?

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