Product and Operation: A pair of good friends who love and hate each other

Today let’s talk about the conflicts with operations . Oh, no, in order to have a good new year, I will change the theme to: Good friends who love and hate each other - product and operation.

1. The relationship between product and operation

The above picture reflects the voice of most operators, because the situation they encounter may be like this:

1. The product is like shit, you think I'm a god, what kind of promotion is this?
2. There's only one week left for the event, and you told me you'd have to do it for a month. Go to hell.
3. If you change this product function, you will die.

…

In the long run, the product and operations teams look down on each other, and always think that they are the best and the other side is idiot.

Therefore, there are often such jokes on the Internet. In the eyes of a product, when the data goes up, the product says: I have a far-sighted vision and can plan and strategize. Standing at the forefront of the product, even a pig-like operation can fly. When the data goes down, the product will say: Look at other people’s apps, they are worse than ours, but their data is better than ours. You guys are such a loser in operations. Similarly, in the eyes of an operation, when the data goes up, the operation said: I am so awesome, what’s the use of your products? They are shitty. When the data goes down, the operations department will say: How do you expect me to promote this crappy function?

It is normal for products and operations to have conflicts in this regard. After all, their working methods, work goals and ways of thinking are different. A rough summary is shown in the following table:

But in essence, the product is the person who gives birth to the child, and the operation is the person who raises the child. During the raising process, the operation needs to provide feedback to the product on what the child needs, and the product needs to be improved based on the child, such as whether to trim the child's eyebrows, draw eyeliner, exercise muscles, etc.

To use Huang’s classic description: products are responsible for defining and providing long-term user value, while operations are responsible for creating short-term user value and assisting products in improving long-term value.

Therefore, in order to allow users to enjoy the long-term value of the product, we must constantly stimulate users with short-term value and convert it into what we usually call work content, such as attracting new users, conversion, retention , and churn recall, etc. The long-term value of a product cannot be achieved overnight, but must be established through continuous use and feedback from users, and after long-term optimization and iteration. Therefore, without user usage and feedback, the product may never create real long-term value. This is a concept that must be unified between products and operations.

When making Internet products, in most cases, the products are imperfect, which requires product and operations to work together to research competitors, research users, and promote product iteration from the user's perspective. Especially in start-ups, bad products are common. Not to mention product managers , sometimes even the CEO doesn’t know what he wants to do. Therefore, it is even more necessary for product and operations to work shoulder to shoulder to make the product better based on user scenarios and user feedback.

If product development and operations only know how to blame each other and argue with each other every day, and don't want to iterate or create solutions, then it is inevitable that the product will fail.

2. In the future, products and operations will be integrated, and product managers will be more operational

In fact, I am more inclined to believe that the era of operations-driven development is gradually coming.

Let us briefly describe that Yinghaiwei was established in 1995 and lasted until around 2004. The characteristic of this stage is that the Internet has just started, and both capital and industry practitioners are chasing concepts. So this is a concept-driven era. Then, up to now, with the rapid development of the Internet, more and more products have been launched online, from web2.0 to today's mobile Internet . How to provide a good product experience was the foundation at that time. Of course, Su Jie's "Everyone is a Product Manager", the enlightenment book for product managers, was conceived in such a background.

However, at present, with the gradual maturity of Internet technology and the improvement of product managers' capabilities, product methodology has gradually been exhausted, and product homogeneity has become more and more serious. From the Hundred Regiments Campaign in 2012 to P2P and live streaming in recent years, innovation in product models and functions has become increasingly difficult, and differentiation has become smaller and smaller. So probably from now on, operations will be important in determining whether a product can stand out from the competition. That is why the concepts of precision marketing and growth hacking have become very popular in recent years.

Therefore, in this era, product managers need to go deep into the business and the details of operations, and not think that they can make good products simply by studying interaction and user experience. Products must look at channels , operations, and resources from the perspective of business development, and consider a series of operational and promotion issues to evaluate whether their product architecture, iteration direction, and functional design are reasonable.

However, we also see that many product managers are not very clear about attracting new customers, promoting activation and retaining customers. Take our industry as an example. Many product managers are not clear about the approximate daily transaction volume, daily active users and investment conversion rate of their products. They don’t care about the conversion data of user registration, real-name registration, card binding, investment and reinvestment, and of course they don’t know which link has the most serious user loss. From this perspective, the decisions he made must have been inconsistent with expectations, and there is no reason why. For example, the operations and promotion departments of many Internet companies now work hard to attract users to their products based on KPIs, but the products fail to guide users to achieve certain expected results in business development and operations and promotion.

In the future, there will be fewer and fewer pure product function managers, and more and more product managers will have some operational functions as well. Products need to coordinate the overall advancement of the product from the perspective of business model and operational promotion.

On this basis, I personally predict that the product department will gradually produce a user growth team, and each product manager will be a Growth Hacker.

3. Final Thoughts

In the Internet industry, it is normal to have pitfalls; no matter it is product or operation, everyone will dig pits; but for the pits, everyone still has to reach a consensus to fill them together, and find ways to make up for it in time if it involves teammates. Don't be too eager to pass the buck and take credit first.

In a good team, everyone fills each other's gaps, while in a bad team, everyone makes holes for each other.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media information flow

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