How can one quickly move into an operations position?
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I have been working in the operation position for three years. When I first entered the Internet industry, I was a CV engineer (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, the nickname of a web editor). I was moving articles around every day, and I was not happy with the articles. When leaders come to understand the people's situation, they always leave a message: Thank you for your hard work. Every time this happens, my heart starts pounding as I wait for my leader to come up with the heartfelt copy , but he just turns around and leaves without saying anything else. At the beginning, I really wanted to change this sentence to "You have worked hard, and I will give you a raise right away." But it didn't matter, because in the eyes of my leaders, I had already become a website crawler software in the past three years. His words "Thank you for your hard work" were just a pop-up ad. It popped up automatically when I came to my place. It was very accurate. So, I have been thinking about how to make my life at operations a little more interesting. One evening, there was a fiery cloud in the sky, and I ran to the market to buy a bunch of fruits. The old man selling the fruits looked like an immortal, and when I left, he insisted on giving me a rotten peach, but I didn’t care. After I got home, I ate some fruit while thinking about operations, trying to figure out what operations really are. Before I knew it, I had finished the fruit and was so sleepy that I fell into a deep sleep. In the middle of the night, I suddenly felt my internal energy stirring, my bones were crackling, and a stream of gas was rushing through my stomach, making me pass out. When I woke up, it was already bright outside. I felt indescribably refreshed. Suddenly, an idea came to me and I solved the problem: Operations are project-based, with a starting point and an end point, focusing on the process, and the key word is tuning variables. Later I realized that it was this rotten peach that made me realize that the old man was definitely not an ordinary person. Because when I went to thank him, he had already closed his stall. From then on, I officially bid farewell to running and embarked on the road of operations. Maybe you are in the same situation as I was back then, doing the same thing over and over again every day, getting paid monthly, and having no fun. The goal of this article is to help you avoid some running problems and get into efficient operations as soon as possible: You don’t have to go to the vegetable market, I’ll give you a rotten peach. Let me first talk about the results. The following figure is a small result I made using this method for the APP Push project: We started to work on this operational project in the 27th week of 2015 and closed the case in the 46th week. Since then, it has been maintained in an optimal operating state. So what operational behaviors occurred during these 19 weeks to make the line graph so "twisty"? Obviously, the maximum effect was achieved in the 42nd week, so why did it finally stabilize at the 46th week? With these questions in mind, we set off. First, I will popularize an operation method , and then tell you how I did this case. Part 1: My Operational Method Operations are unscientific and there is no universal approach. Everyone can come up with his or her own set of practices. I have been using and refining this working method, and it has been quite helpful to my work, so I dare to share it with you. A picture summarizes: Describe it: 1. All operational projects have a starting point and an end point, and will eventually return to an operational state. Note that any project will eventually come back to operation, but the operation I’m talking about is efficient operation. 2. I call the journey from the beginning to the end of the project "operation", and the work in this process is mainly trial and error; I call this stage after the end of the project "efficient operation", and the main work content is to implement operational strategies. So I said that operations are project-based, with a starting point and an end point. There is no end to the operation unless the project fails. 3. During the operation process, please note that I am talking about the operation stage here. I generally go through three steps: purpose, key driving elements, and trial and error. This is the key point, let’s talk about it separately: 1. Purpose Why don’t I say it’s a goal here? Let me give you two real-life examples. I used to work in education, for a listed company that acquired many training institutions. Then there were conflicts in the businesses of the various institutions, for example, two institutions were both in the K12 market. They are also bidding on the term “college entrance examination tutoring” on Baidu, which immediately raises the click cost of these terms. This is internal friction. Therefore, the unit decided to set up an Internet operation center to unify the bidding. We put out the term "college entrance examination tutoring", introduced traffic through our own platform, and then distributed the sales leads to the two institutions. This can save a lot of marketing costs. However, one of the institutions was unwilling to do so because if they did so, it would be equivalent to losing potential customers to a third party and their profits would be no longer guaranteed. That was indeed the case at the time. Our newly built platform had just been launched and had neither influence nor trust. However, the boss has a tough attitude and must be integrated, but he must also be convinced by reason. So my leader asked me to plan an event, and then hinted at me to do something I was particularly unwilling to do: falsify information and find someone to make phone calls for consultation. I didn't execute it at first because I thought it was too stupid and would damage my image as an operator. It would be better to try and test various elements of the activity page. This made my leader very unhappy. Later, my leader had no choice but to tell me why he did this. It turned out that the big boss and this organization made a bet that on the eve of the college entrance examination, both parties would launch an activity on their respective platforms at the same time to see whether our platform or their own platform would get more sales leads. After hearing this, I suddenly realized what was going on and immediately asked someone to make a fake phone call. Because behind this competition is the question of who will get the hundreds of millions of marketing funds. This is a "grand strategy" and a matter of life and death. Another example is that around 2012, we made an app and were preparing to operate it after it was launched on the APP store, but the boss stopped us, and we were in great pain. Later I found out that because we are a high-tech listed company, we need to have our own product in the APP store. This is about building our brand and reflecting our technological strength. As for how the product will perform in the future, it is irrelevant. So, we have been busy for a long time, just making a work for people to see, which is called "strategic layout." Here is a question for everyone: I once met a client who insisted on putting his own name as a bidding word. What was his purpose? Therefore, when taking over a new operating project, don’t rush to set goals, but make sure to understand what the purpose of this project is. Then think about what to do. Of course, under normal circumstances, if there are no "special instructions", your leader will usually set a goal for you on the spur of the moment. There are monthly, quarterly or annual ones. You just need to complete it on time. 2. Key driving elements How to complete it on schedule? This is the second step, identifying the key driving elements. The key driving element is the driving factor that can make great progress in your goal by changing it. It is the growth engine of your goal. For example, we want Li Bai to produce more poems. What should I do? First, find the key driving elements that can stimulate Li Bai to write poetry. There is a poem "Li Bai drinks a hundred poems after drinking a cup of wine", which means that Li Bai can write a hundred poems while drinking. Therefore, wine is undoubtedly a driving factor; everyone also knows that Li Bai had a crush on Yang Guifei and secretly wrote a poem to her, "The clouds think of clothes, the flowers think of face", so if Li Bai could see Yang Guifei every day, I bet he could write a thousand poems a day. Therefore, the imperial concubine was also a key driving element in Li Bai's poetry writing. Let's take a few examples of Internet product operations . For example, if you want to run an advertisement and want to increase the click-through rate of the advertisement, many people are paying attention to the writing skills of the copy, which is indeed a driving factor. In addition, the degree of match between the users of the delivery channel and your target users is also a key driving factor. For example, if you want to optimize the registration process, then the smoothness of the process is undoubtedly a key element. Many people forget that reducing the user's task load during the registration process is also a driving factor. We need to exhaust these elements and then adjust the variables one by one. Of course, key driving elements are also a good way to discover problems. I have repeatedly emphasized this in my articles: When doing operations, discovering problems is more important than solutions. Once you discover the problem, the solution has already come out. For example, there is a bug in the payment process, but you insist that it is due to insufficient efforts to attract new users or insufficient traffic, and then you invest heavily in the market. As a result, after users come, the payment process cannot be completed, and the money is still wasted. This is the result of not discovering the key problem. It is even possible that there is no problem with your payment process, but your brand is not yet strong enough to convince users to buy with confidence. At this time, the brand is the key driving element that you need to optimize, and the solution is to establish a brand image and build trust. 3. Trial and Error Once you’ve found the key driving elements, you need to continually experiment and tweak them to maximize their effectiveness. Take my own example. Because I occasionally write some articles about picking up girls, people often add me on WeChat to ask for advice. I am too busy at work and don’t have much time to deal with these personal issues. I started thinking about how to prevent people who added me from asking me questions. Note that my goal is to reduce the number of questions asked to me. I tried many methods and found them incorrectly. For example, I kept silent when people asked me questions, shared on WeChat Moments that I didn’t receive visitors, etc., but the problem was never completely solved. Later, I discovered a key driving factor that can be adjusted: most of the friends who add me as their friend are single, and when they add me, they are impulsive and have a lot of questions. If I agree to accept the friend immediately at this time, then problems will come one after another. So the key problem I need to solve is how to get rid of this impulse. Getting rid of the impulse is equivalent to getting rid of the problem. I discovered the key driving factor: “Time interval between point acceptances”. That is, if you add me and I don’t accept the friend status immediately, I might get rid of your impulses and problems. I kept trying and tuning this time interval variable, such as accepting it after 2 hours or after 1 day. After repeated attempts, I finally decided to accept it after 2 days. Because I found that after accepting friends two days later, basically no one asked me questions anymore. In this way, I got a friend with whom I liked each other's posts for no reason, and I didn't need to spend too much time chatting, so my business value was maximized. However, some of them are outstanding, and their writing skills make me impulsively accept them immediately. This is a process of trial and error. To tune the key driving elements, you need to constantly try some methods, finalize some variable performances, and summarize some rules and experiences. Trial and error is also a process of constantly honing your understanding of users. Trial and error requires tools , but most small and medium-sized Internet companies do not have the financial or human resources to make a set of trial and error tools, because the cost of these tools is very high. You need to find a way to make a simple trial and error tool yourself. I was used to the hard days of operations, and later in order to improve performance, I figured out a trial and error tool on my own. I have mentioned it in many articles, which is about optimizing source tables. For me, this table is the best tool to move from operation to operation. This article will use actual examples to explain to you how to create an optimized source table. Ultimately, we identified the purpose of the project, found the key driving elements, and optimized the performance of each key driving element through trial and error. Then enter the "efficient operation state". As I said earlier, efficient operation status is based on operational strategy, which is a combination of key driving elements based on the goals. Take the example of Li Bai writing poems. If the leader set a goal: let Li Bai produce 100 poems a day, then we only need to buy a box of beer. If the leader set the goal at 1,000 poems, then you need to put the wine and the concubine next to Li Bai at the same time, and let Li Bai write poems while drinking and appreciating the concubine. In that case, it is not certain that Li Bai will write 10,000 poems. This is the operating strategy. Part II: A Case Study Let’s take APP push as an example. This is an example of a campus recruitment project. First of all, we need to clarify a prerequisite: APP push is a key driving element for APP product activation. When other elements remain unchanged, the higher the click volume of a unit Push, the higher the DAU will be. Click volume and DAU are positively correlated. Each key driver element will also have a tuning target. Therefore, the operation method mentioned in Part 1 is also applicable to decomposing the key driving elements of key driving elements. It is a bit confusing, so let's go directly to the picture: 1. Purpose: This project is a brand new one and I don’t know to what extent it can be achieved. So when I took over this operation project, I defined the operation purpose as maximizing the number of clicks. At that time, my leader didn’t set any goals for me, he just told me to try it. Of course, some people would say that if you want to maximize the number of clicks, you should just use clickbait titles every day. It’s amazing that you can think of this. I will talk about this issue below because it is very serious. 2. Key driving elements. The key driving factors for maximizing clicks are: the success rate of sending. When you have precise segmentation, the larger the sending volume is, the higher the clicks will be, which is a positive correlation; the click-through rate of copywriting. This is a point that many people pay attention to. The quality of copywriting has an overall impact on the clicks, and this driving factor is also an element that we operators can control; the sending frequency. If you are shameless and send 10 times a day to harass users, the clicks will definitely be higher than sending once a day, but you cannot harass users because there are uninstallers monitoring you; the time of sending is also very important. Maybe sending in the morning is more effective than sending in the afternoon, and maybe sending at noon is more effective than sending in the evening. 3. Trial and error tool. There are many trial and error tools, and AB testing is the mainstream, but the cost is relatively high, and some small companies do not have the budget for this. So you will find that many Internet companies will spend a lot of money to hire experts in the industry, because business experience actually serves as a trial and error tool. Once you have business experience and master the patterns of users and the characteristics of the industry, many operational decisions actually do not need to be tried. Therefore, business experience is very important, especially for operations. All operation methods are easy to learn, but business experience is the key core that makes you stand out from the crowd. So, how to summarize business experience and optimize source tables can help you. The term "source table optimization" cannot be found on Baidu because it is a term I made up. Let’s see what it looks like later. Among the above four key driving elements, there still needs to be a work focus. Here is a digression: when doing operations, you must know how to make choices and focus on the key points. You cannot do everything at once with limited energy. So I focused on the click-through rate of the copy, which is also my area of expertise, so we continue to deduce based on the purpose of the copy click-through rate: 1. Purpose: To optimize the click-through rate of the copy. As mentioned above, the click-through rate of copywriting is the most global and operationally controllable. Here I am optimizing instead of maximizing, because I have experience in copywriting. The best copywriting is basically clickbait and erotic articles. I cannot maximize it because it will hurt the job-seeking mood of fresh graduates, so I define it as optimization, which is reasonable. In my later work, I also tried and failed some clickbait headlines. The effects were indeed good, but they obviously generated negative feedback from users. 2. Key driving elements: The key driving elements of copywriting click-through rate include user segmentation accuracy, sending time, sending content, and copywriting strength. We can abstract it into 12 words: To whom? When to say? say what? How to say it? Here you will find that the click-through rate of the copy is not only related to the writing level of the copy. In fact, if your copywriting level is average, but you have accurate user segmentation and firm control of demand, you can still increase the click-through rate of the copy. There is a key driving element here called sending content. How to increase the click-through rate of copy from push content actually requires your business experience. For example, mid-October to November every year is the peak season for domestic bank campus recruitment. This period is also the craziest time for fresh graduates who aspire to work in banks. If you push bank campus recruitment information and job search guides to these fresh graduates during this period, your click-through rate will definitely increase (and these contents are rigid needs and will not cause harassment. You can also increase the push frequency. The push frequency happens to be the key driving element for maximizing the click volume of the previous level target). This is actually a business rule: you need to summarize which time point is the peak season for campus recruitment in which industry. For example, based on your experience, you find that most fresh graduates are eager to prepare their resumes and apply online when school starts in September. At this time, if you push articles such as resume writing skills and online application skills to users, they will definitely be very popular. In October, interview skills may be a necessity for most people. Therefore, you need to analyze these business rules and user demand rules through data . OK, let’s visualize the above four key driving elements: We can finally create an optimized source table using these four key driving elements. Because this project is a brand new one for me and I have no experience, I spent more than half a month to figure it out, familiarize myself with the system, and try to do it. I came up with the following optimized source table fields: Then, I started to record my operational activities, record the content pushed every day, and classify the content. Every day, we look into business rules and user preferences from different dimensions and summarize experiences. After five months of persistence, we finally maintained a stable level. Of course, this process is very complicated. How do I use this table to summarize experiences and rules? My usual method is the Excel perspective function. For example, during the trial and error process, I will consciously plan a trial and error strategy. For example, I post an average of 2 articles per week on how to write a resume, and I choose to post them on Mondays and Thursdays. In order to be more scientific, I control the strength of the titles at the same level. In this way, over a period of 5 months, I can compare on a monthly basis which month has the highest click-through rate for resumes, and I will come up with a user pattern. Because when you cannot achieve refined operations, you can maximize your business value by grasping the needs of the vast majority of users. Do you feel that operations are cumbersome and trial and error are even more cumbersome? In fact, pushing information to users every day is a highly repetitive job, but during these five months, I was actually doing operations rather than running the system. Finally, after all driving elements are optimized and enter an efficient operating state, follow the operation strategy shown in the figure below to maintain the click-through rate at the optimal level: Okay, let’s start the project closing: From the 27th week to the 46th week, I have been doing operations rather than operation. The real operation is an efficient operation state, that is, after the 46th week, I was given the "stability maintenance". These are the two processes of operation: trial and error tuning process and optimal operation process. As shown in the figure below. To answer the two questions mentioned at the beginning: Question: What operational activities took place during these 19 weeks to make the line graph so "twisty"? Answer: I am trying various key driving elements to find patterns and improve my understanding of users. For example, the red marks on the line chart (raised peaks) indicate that I have tried something out. Because this is data on a weekly basis, if you look at it on a daily basis, you will find more driving engines. Question: Obviously the maximum effect was achieved in the 42nd week, so why did it finally stabilize at the 46th week? Answer: Because in the 46th week I was trying out the strength of clickbait. At that time I had an idea that needed to be verified: If I use clickbait, but the content of the landing page I make is good enough, can I remove the user's negative emotions? During the trial and error process, we received complaints and feedback from some users and the verification failed, so we decisively passed this idea. Of course, it is also possible that the content of the landing page is not good enough and needs further verification. Conclusion: The difference between operation and operation in life The same goes for life. You need to manage yourself into something you are not. Ever since I started school, I have always been lazy and procrastinating. I spend every day thinking about business matters, writing love letters for my classmates, and not taking my studies seriously. As a result, I had to repeat junior high school for 2 years and high school for another 2 years. In my last year of college entrance examination, I still did not make it to the second-tier line and scored 450 points. The second-tier line that year was 459. Because I was a member of a minority ethnic group, the state awarded me 10 points, which was just enough to make the cut. I even exceeded it by 1 point, so I got into a university. Some of my classmates graduated from prestigious universities and started to make their own way in the world. The gap is huge. I was wondering, we are all from the same village, why is there such a big difference between us? Later I realized that it was the variables of life that were at work. For example, mediocre people like me are mostly lazy, procrastinating, not persistent, and not good at managing themselves, while great people are mostly able to seize opportunities, dare to challenge, are good at enduring hardships, know how to draw experience from failure, know when to exert effort in the course of life, and ultimately when an opportunity comes, they are in the best condition to seize this opportunity. This is actually the result of tuning. Therefore, if you want to live a crazier life, you need to optimize your key driving elements, make each driving element reach its optimal state, and ultimately maintain your life in a more efficient operation. For example, I wasted 7 years of my best time (4 more years of studying + 3 years of working in operations). If I hadn't gone to the vegetable market by chance and met a kind old man who gave me a rotten peach, I might still be a CV engineer now. Therefore, life is also project-based, with a starting point and an end point. The focus is on the process, and the key word is to tune the variables. This is the biggest driving force from operation to management! Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media information flow This article was compiled and published by @韩利由(Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! |
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