In the next five years of the Internet, will operations become a more promising career than product development?

" As an Internet person, in the next five years, do you think it is more promising to develop products or to operate operations ? "

This is something that many newcomers in the Internet circle will think about when facing career planning, and it is also a question we raised on Zhihu a few days ago.

In just a few days, this question received 2,038 views and 125 responses, including from Internet celebrities such as Liu Fei, Su Jie, Zhang Liang, and kentzhu. The results of the discussion were quite unexpected to us - most people, including many product managers , agreed that from a big trend perspective, operations would be a more promising career in the Internet over the next five years.

Among them, the answerer @龙崎 directly mentioned——

This question is so interesting.
Why is it interesting? Because five years ago, no one would have asked this question: because LowB operations were either derived from products, or were simply the original editors or supply chain practitioners changing their job titles.

This stance actually represents the perception of many people to some extent - everyone knows that in the past five years, "product manager" has been a very popular profession in the Internet industry. So much so that many people say that "the product manager is the person closest to the CEO."

But I never expected that, without realizing it, such an era seems to have passed?

Below, we have made a simple summary of the views of all parties on this issue. We hope that the content of the article can help everyone to further think about products and operations, the industry and themselves.

First of all, regarding the prediction of the prospects of the Internet industry, almost everyone agrees that the Internet industry will remain relatively stable in the next three to five years and will not undergo earth-shaking reshuffles.

@黄有灿believes that the technological development of products has entered a bottleneck period. Products are becoming more standardized and process-oriented. The responsibilities of ordinary product managers will be replaced by templates, and operations will create differences between products instead.

As for the current stage of the domestic Internet, whether on the Web or mobile side, the room for innovation in product form and product design has actually become smaller and smaller. On the contrary, many products will become increasingly homogenized, and the threshold may lie more in technology, services and operations. ...Therefore, unless a completely new scenario emerges (such as VR ), the design of specific products will become more and more standardized and procedural. There will even be some efficiency tools (such as online) that will replace some of the current responsibilities of product managers in a relatively templated way.

@kentzhu came to a similar conclusion from another perspective, namely, mobile phone technology and VR technology/wearable devices, the former is already mature, while the latter is still in its infancy. There is a gap between the two, and it will be difficult for breakthrough changes to occur in the field of applied technology within three to five years. Only in-depth operation is the current breakthrough.

The result of such steady development is that the Internet is gradually returning to its commercial essence, and the importance of operations is also highlighted in the process of commercial operations.

@孙志刚, the person in charge of NetEase Cloud Classroom who holds this view, pointed out that the two major trends in the Internet are: "First, to C is weak, while to B is growing encouragingly; second, the number of users is becoming meaningless, and it is more important to get users to pay." As for the former, entering a purer business field and catering to the business rhythm will be a compulsory course; as for the latter, getting users to pay is difficult to achieve by relying solely on product design, and more operations are needed, whether it is brand packaging or market expansion, whether it is content production or user operation . The e-commerce field is the best example of this.

@kentzhu pointed out directly: "The competition in China's Internet has evolved from competition for ideas to competition for traffic, and will gradually return to competition in the essence of business. Of course, we cannot say that the previous competition was not competition in the essence of business. It was, but not as thorough as it is now." The days of slash-and-burn farming are over. The current situation is either mergers or cooperation, or refined operations in subdivided fields, and this is destined to make operations play an important role in the next three years or so.

In addition, as the industry matures, some mechanized work will gradually be replaced by machines, fixed patterns and general solutions, while only creative and non-replicable work cannot be replaced.

For example, @Lebanner defines the difference between product and operation in his mind in this way: the former seeks unchanging rules, while the latter constantly seeks change. "The mindset of a product manager is to design reusable business models with increasing marginal returns. The mindset of an operations manager is to continuously design non-reusable business models that maximize total revenue." Under this definition, the more mature the Internet is, the lower the value and significance of product managers, and the more valuable an operations manager with a constant stream of creativity becomes.

@黄有湛 also expressed a similar view. From slash-and-burn farming to intensive cultivation, the industry has put forward higher demands on the sophistication of operations and constantly innovative creativity. Constantly stimulating users' pain points in various ways will become the standard for operations. With the establishment of industry standards, the development of tools and the maturity of rules, the mechanical work of writing product documents and drawing prototypes will be more easily replaced. "In the workplace, from a big logic point of view, people who are engaged in creative work, can solve more key problems, and are less replaceable are more valuable and have a stronger sense of existence."

In the past 5-10 years, operations had a weak presence and value, mainly because the general environment at that time was still the booming period of the Internet and there were dividends. Generally speaking, if a product was made well enough, fast enough and stable enough, it could basically succeed on its own. Therefore, operations only needed to do miscellaneous work, place some advertisements, do some content maintenance, and at most take a look at SEO and SEM .

But in today's environment, if you enter any vertical category, you will see at least three or five competitors as soon as you look up. In terms of operations, do you think you can succeed just by doing some routine maintenance and promotion? Making trouble.

Therefore, today's operators must rack their brains to plan marketing events, create topics, find more unique and cost-effective channels, output high-quality content... and so on, to attract users' attention. The substitutability of these things is becoming weaker and weaker.

On the contrary, as mentioned earlier, with the standardization of product forms, the creative work content of product managers is actually decreasing. The daily work of most product managers has now begun to become slightly mechanized work such as writing documents, drawing prototypes, and holding meetings.

Of course, when it comes to the management of massive demands and R&D follow-up, the logical architecture of particularly complex products, etc., these things are still quite irreplaceable, but it seems that less than 20% of product managers are exposed to this part of the work content, right?

Based on the above predictions about the industry prospects, we put forward the following specific arguments for "operation will have a better future in the next five years":

1. On the employment situation and talent demand

@黄有灿: "From the employment situation, the industry's demand for operational talent must be much greater than its demand for product talent."

@BuMian: "The number of pure product managers will decrease, while the number of operational talents and compound talents will increase. In other words, the number of Internet practitioners with basic product capabilities will grow exponentially. The number of operational talents is huge. In the future, the ratio of product dogs, engineering lions, and operational cats may be 1:5:10."

2. About career prospects and career development

@黄有灿: "From the perspective of career prospects and development space, operations should be able to access more and richer work content. At least the ones we are familiar with in daily life include: content and copywriting , event planning , promotion and marketing, user management, data analysis , etc. Compared with products, perhaps at least the possibilities of operations are more open?"

@刘飞: "If you have absolutely no conditions and no background assumptions, I would suggest you do operations, which is more promising."

@张亮: “It takes five years to become an excellent operator, but it is difficult to create an excellent product. The premise here is that although everyone starts from scratch, operators have products to operate from the beginning, but sometimes product people enter the industry with nothing. Therefore, even if everyone has to try their luck, the probability of success in the five-year operation position seems to be slightly better than that of the product position.”

3. About salary changes

@黄有湛: "In terms of salary, the current salary of junior operations is still not as good as that of junior product, but I believe that with the development of the industry, after about 3 years of experience, the salary of operations should be able to gradually catch up with that of product (provided that you can become an operation that can solve problems, rather than an operation that does miscellaneous things). Later on, perhaps the salary of operations may even surpass it. After all, in terms of the overall environment, excellent operations in the current industry are much scarcer than excellent products..."

Of course, there are also many people who believe that "product" is a more promising career. Around this position, a number of big Vs including @苏杰老师 have also put forward their own opinions.

Below are some key insights about product positions that we have excerpted and summarized.

First of all, the broad concept of "product" will transform from a specific profession into a common thinking mode among Internet people.

@文士 believes that the product will become a mode of thinking, and at the execution level, it will be manifested as a flourishing of operations.

Just like what Mr. Su Jie said, 'Ten years later, there may no longer be product managers.' Because products are gradually being refined into a mode of thinking and a way of working, which is 'product thinking'. Products are the root and foothold, but operations are at the execution level. At the execution level, there is the possibility of a hundred flowers blooming and more room for development.

@黄有湛 pointed out more clearly that the so-called "product thinking" that everyone must master in the future specifically includes thinking habits such as "everything starts from demand and typical usage scenarios", "less is more", "agile + rapid iteration", etc. These thinking habits will not only be limited to product managers, but will become a common ability of Internet people.

@Kentzhu also expressed a similar view that some work habits of product managers will become common sense in the Internet circle.

The development of China's Internet products has undergone an important transformation in the past 10 years, turning many professions into common sense. Ten years ago, everyone talked about UCD, UX, and said not to let users think. What everyone is constantly discussing is how to make a good interaction and how to use user scenarios to solve problems. Ten years later, the popularization of these contents has been completed, and many things that seemed unacceptable before have become common sense. For example, we need to be simpler, focus on core functions, and create an MVP.

Secondly, regarding "product manager" as a profession, @BuMian and @SuJie both believe that this profession will develop towards the high end and become a small and elite decision-making position.

@BuMianTeacher believes that products will become the decision-makers of a company’s direction, logic, and structure, and the phenomenon of head concentration of product managers will become more obvious.

In the early days, product managers were required to think about innovation and adapt to new technologies. However, this trend is now becoming weaker and weaker, because there are fewer and fewer new product forms, and more are being improved based on existing product forms. Therefore, the ability requirements for product managers are declining. Product managers will become divided into two categories, either awesome or stupid. The awesome ones will set the direction, logic, structure, etc., while the stupid ones can only turn to operations. And the awesome ones will increasingly be concentrated in large companies, high-quality companies, and companies with special characteristics.

@苏杰 divided product managers into 7 levels, among which high-level product managers have achieved a thorough understanding of business and management and personal self-realization.

I divide product managers into 7 levels: demand refinement and R&D follow-up; proactive exploration and project management; complete product and overall view; product line and team leadership ; successful cases and influence; business understanding and cross-functional management; from one's own success to helping others succeed.

A product manager at the first level, or even the first three levels, certainly won’t have as good a future as a great operations manager, but when you reach the fourth level or higher, operations becomes just one of your responsibilities.

@Kentzhu has higher expectations for the professionalism of product managers.

The position of product manager will be criticized more and more until product managers themselves start to move towards a more professional path.

Finally, when it comes to products and operations, no one is so absolute.

When it comes to specific sub-sectors, it still depends on the industry environment within the specific sector. As the saying goes, Alibaba focuses on operations and Tencent focuses on products.

@龙崎: “As a junior player (who has not yet led a team to manage an entire product line or a business direction), it is important to clarify the industry environment in which you are in. A simple criterion is which product and which function is most important for core competitiveness: for commercial products such as O2O and e-commerce, there are too many to give examples, so operations are more important; for tool-oriented products, such as dictionaries, product managers are generally more important; for some technology-driven products, such as cloud computing, both products and operations should be avoided.”

@曾轶: "In fact, the focus is not on the product or the operation, but on the court confidants."

But no matter what everyone thinks about the prospects of products and operations, everyone still agrees on the coordination between products and operations.

@文士 put forward four key points of product and operation coordination.

When sorting out new business scenarios, operations need to work closely with products to a large extent, ideas need to maintain a high degree of consistency, and the final presentation form must be productized. Let’s put aside the differences in the boundaries between operations and products. At least in the process of cooperation in the same business, the exchanges, communication (surface level) and most importantly business ideas and user cognition of both parties must be on the same channel. At least we need to always understand the cognitive reasons behind the differences of the other party.

1. The terms used in product and operation are very different, especially in the aspects directly facing users. Product will habitually output professional vocabulary, while operation knows how to convert it into language that users can understand. Here, we need to listen more to the operations;
2. A considerable amount of the demands for entry-level and intermediate-level operations come from fragmented users and self-perceived requirements, and it is easy to take it for granted that this is necessary, while mature product managers can understand the necessity of this demand from a more macro perspective. Here, you need to listen more to the product; (This is the reason why many operations and product managers quarrel)
3. Mature product managers plan for the long term and are often negligent in business details, especially those related to initial user perception. This is where operations need to supplement. Although this supplement is largely just a cover-up, it is still something that must be covered.
4. Operations and products must never make enemies. No one is stupid, it’s just that your starting points are different. Once you make enemies, the final outcome in the workplace is that one side wins and gains the right to speak, and then both sides lose cooperation and their thinking is not on the same channel, so they are doomed to fail.

As we move beyond the primary product/primary operation level and enter the high-end field, the difference between products and operations will become smaller and smaller.

@刘飞 mentioned in his answer, "The higher the position in product and operations, the more blurred the boundaries become."

Just as Teacher Su Jie said, in the initial stage of product development, everyone is just a demand manager, and their responsibilities revolve around demand. Whether it is researching users, analyzing needs, or following up on projects, all of this is about executing specific details. At this stage, there is little contact between products and operations, and the boundaries are clear.

After a certain stage, product and operations work will become inseparable. All the Taobao product managers I have met can talk a lot about operational activities and user retention indicators, but rarely talk about project iteration or user experience. Because every functional product on Taobao is a concrete manifestation of operations and business.

The same is true from an operational perspective.

The grassroots operational staff have clear division of labor. There are content operations, product operations , user operations...even new media operations are divided into several groups, each of which is only responsible for a small part of the business. And an operations manager cannot specialize in just one aspect, he must be responsible for the entire thing.

@龙崎 began to think about the essence of products and operations, and believed that the two are different in name but the same in reality.

In the final analysis, both product and operation are functional terms, and involve a large amount of specific work. However, if you really want to move forward, it is not a zero-sum game between each other, but the same as other industries, which is the understanding of business, people, and models.

@Kentzhu also said——

The division of labor between products and operations is becoming increasingly blurred, and a new role will emerge, called product operations. ”

But of course, there was someone who seemed to have interrupted, @Tchaikovsky, who said:

Programmer : "I mean everyone here is..."

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