How to accurately position online education product operations?

The author currently works in an online education company as an operations manager. I have been working in front-line product operations for more than two years. I am currently responsible for business process streamlining, course product approval, and personnel development in operations positions.

Because I have worked in the front line and led an operations team, I hope to summarize some of my experiences and thoughts on the operations of online education products as a way of sharing and helping more operations students find their own job positioning.

The following series of articles will briefly introduce the overall direction of online education product operations from the perspectives of the job positioning of online education product operations, the overall role division and business flow of education and training projects, the analysis of course product planning elements, the construction of a comprehensive product system and an indicator system, and the basic workflow of product packaging and promotion.

When it comes to the product operation position in an online education company, many of my classmates are both confident and unconfident about it.

• The reason for self-confidence comes from participating in the teaching design, which is like becoming a particularly good teacher, able to guide students to learn knowledge or master skills according to their own ideas.
• The reason for the lack of confidence is that the high-sounding terms I talked about with my product operators on video platforms and e-commerce platforms seem to be a bit unreliable.

So, today we will take some time to briefly analyze what the product operation position is for the online education industry.

The online education industry is an industry that focuses heavily on content consumption, and there is a very long lag time between user payment behavior and actual consumption behavior. Moreover, the biggest difference between course products and physical products is that course products can be heard and seen but not touched.

Therefore, in addition to lowering the consumption threshold at the front end of user experience, there is another critical issue that needs to be considered when guiding the consumption of course products: how to enable users (or students) to learn knowledge that is more suitable for themselves at this time and place during the consumption process, and to be as satisfied as possible with the course products.

Based on this, two directions have emerged in the operation of online education products: course product operation and platform product operation.

1. Division of labor between the two operating directions

As for course product operations, their work can be summarized in one sentence: designing courses for the right audience in the right time period. This sentence sounds easy, but it is actually very complicated to do, because there are several requirements behind it:

• You need to have a good understanding of the learning time cycle for the educational product line you are responsible for, and be able to predict students' learning reactions;
• Understand the basic knowledge structure and practical application scenarios of this educational product line;
• Understand the user profiles of the target audience and paying groups of the education product line;
• Be able to effectively manage the corresponding education product production team, especially the courses or lecturers collected through external cooperation.

These requirements are more difficult to quantify with data than other operational work. This type of job is mainly reflected in the titles of subject operations and strategic operations. In terms of the ability requirements for operations students, more emphasis will be placed on the professional background of the industry to which this education product line belongs.

For example, the operation of financial subjects will require applicants to have experience in preparing for the CPA exam or to have a major in financial subjects as their highest academic degree; the operation of K12 subjects may require applicants to have worked as a teacher or to have a background in education or psychology as their highest academic degree.

The reason is simple. Operational work skills (data analysis, event planning, user segmentation) can be gradually mastered through individual practice or mentoring, but the understanding of professional content cannot be reproduced in this way.

As for platform products, their work is more inclined towards operating the platform to acquire customers or generate revenue. As for platform operations themselves, you can try to get started with this job if you have some general skills. If you have a global product mindset and work experience, you can try to gradually do cross-platform or multi-platform operations management.

However, the online education industry also has some challenges that they need to think about and how to break through:

• The platform has a high demand for information updates, but how to achieve the expected results in terms of course content output and product output;
• The revenue cycle and user growth cycle of course products are relatively stable, so it is not easy to achieve a breakthrough against the trend;
• Sometimes, the reasons behind the changes in data reports cannot be accurately located;
• Sometimes there are certain obstacles in communicating with the team that produces course products.

There have been too many predecessors and experts who have summarized the growth thinking and basic methodology of platform operation. There are also many successful experiences on how to operate a platform. I will not presume to teach them here.

But one thing is certain, these two positions need to be closely integrated to achieve the corresponding results, because the course products are highly dependent on the platform, and the completeness of the platform functions and the sophistication of operations will directly determine whether the course products can impress students. The platform also needs a steady stream of course product content as support to maintain or enhance user stickiness.

2. Several common product operation division models

1. Course operation dominates the overall product, and platform operation intercepts content distribution downstream

Under this model, the content and products of the entire teaching and training line are produced by one team, which is responsible for the quality and progress. Other comprehensive operation departments (APP, mini programs, Weibo and WeChat, and video platforms) control the right to speak in the distribution link and are responsible for related work.

The comprehensive operations department proposes content requirements for different teaching and training lines and obtains corresponding deliverables. This model places higher demands on students who operate the courses, because they need to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the rationality of content presentation and demand on different platforms in order to achieve efficient collaboration.

2. Develop courses based on teaching methods or user source terminals, and the course operation and platform operation are implemented by the same team

This model has extremely high requirements for the company's overall teaching capabilities and is easier to achieve the expected goals of refined operations.

The company's management team will form teams based on the teaching mode (recorded classes, live classes, offline intensive training, dual-teacher classes) or platform form, implement overall teaching output and operational output, and require the corresponding team to be responsible for the GMV or ROI within its jurisdiction.

This model has relatively low requirements for students in operations positions, but higher requirements for the teaching team. It is necessary to consider whether the developed teaching content can gain an advantage in internal and external competition.

3. Develop courses based on user payment progress, and the overall business is implemented around user payment status and renewal path.

This model requires high cross-team collaboration, because the upstream team needs to ensure conversion rate and GMV, and also provide renewal space and guarantee for the next payment round. Moreover, the requirements for courses and platforms will be higher in the later payment rounds.

From the perspective of the operations staff's work requirements, this model requires a better balance between user experience and renewal space. Because online education course products need to provide users with a relatively complete experience from a design perspective, whether it is the subject or the stage of study, they need to ensure a certain degree of completeness.

But there is a contradiction here. After the integrity is verified, the user's subsequent payment space and payment motivation need to be re-explored. If the integrity of the user's experience at this moment cannot be guaranteed, they will be even less likely to believe in the value of subsequent paid courses.

These methods are based on the organizational structure and the internal composition of the teaching team, and all have their merits. The division of labor and performance appraisal should be implemented according to the specific circumstances of the business and cost control, and the project leader or even the company management needs to consider how to achieve it.

3. How to design a course product package from a platform perspective

Having said so much about the organizational division of operations and other things, the author will now briefly introduce how to design a new course product package from a platform perspective based on a real planning case from previous work experience. The more detailed influencing factors and content of course product design will also be reflected in the author’s subsequent articles.

1. First task: clearly define the expected purpose and goals of the course package and adjust the goals based on historical performance data

The student who raised the demand is in charge of operating a mobile APP that focuses on answering questions. When giving the demand to the author, he did not clearly state the specific purpose and goals. He only expressed that the current channel activity and conversion are poor, and that a new product needs to be planned to activate user purchases.

At this time, operations personnel are required to refine indicators based on the information provided by the customer and retrieve historical behavior data to verify whether the customer's description is accurate. Based on the activity and conversion rate described in the article, the author has retrieved the following indicators:

• The DAU of the platform in the past 7, 15, and 30 days is divided according to the time when new users were added, and the granularity is divided into the current training year and other training years based on the annual test and training cycle. Due to the particularity of the online education business, users often need to distinguish their intentions based on different exam years rather than natural days.
• The conversion rate of new users on the platform in the past 7, 15 and 30 days, and the threshold consumption amount is set to be greater than or equal to 12 yuan. Because 12 yuan is the pricing standard line for a long-term traffic-generating product on the platform, it can be used as a reference for willingness to pay.
• Details of consumer products for all orders on the platform in the past 7, 15, and 30 days.

Due to business confidentiality, the author will not display relevant data here, but only analyze the conclusions simultaneously: According to the historical performance of the data, the daily active data shows a stable and slightly downward trend, and the overall conversion rate of users is above the average, but the platform's ARRPU value is significantly lower than the business performance of other platforms in the same period.

Therefore, new products need to increase prices without overly damaging conversion rates, and course prices cannot be too high to avoid causing users to be overly resistant to paying.

2. Step 2: Evaluate the target platform’s positioning within the business scope and the existing features that best suit what kind of content to display

The main functions of this platform are basically as follows: supporting chapter-based exercises, daily check-in exercises, periodic test assessments, time-limited mock exams, and other functions that focus on practice interaction. Listening to recorded courses and live broadcasts can ensure basic experience.

Moreover, within the business scope that the author is responsible for, the platform is mainly based on converting new traffic, and there are no high revenue requirements in the short term. Combining these two points, the basic content combination of the course package should be mainly exercises, with a small amount of explanation courses.

3. Step 3: Inventory existing teaching resources and determine details such as pricing, cost issues, internal information synchronization, and launch time of the course package

The execution of this step requires a prerequisite. The operations staff needs to have a product content ledger that they are responsible for, recording information such as teaching progress, internal evaluation of teaching instructors, service levels, supply chain processes, and accompanying material costs. We will also briefly explain the establishment of product content ledger in subsequent articles on overall product planning.

Let's go straight to the conclusion here. By reviewing the relevant content, the final course package is as follows: the price is 158 yuan, the discounted price is 99 yuan, and the course package is a combination of exercise exercises and lectures. A set of self-study exercise books will be given away when purchased.

4. Step 4: Product packaging and delivery, and subsequent data follow-up and business diagnosis

At present, all the course details, pricing information, and product costs have been finalized. The next step is to sort out the copywriting and selling points, and prepare various materials for the launch of the platform port (details page, banner images of each port, trial courses, course agreements), etc. The operations students and the students responsible for packaging can divide the work.

For subsequent data monitoring and diagnosis work, it is recommended to conduct regular data queries, including: sales data (course revenue, average order value, number of users), behavioral data (banner clicks, material page views, conversion rate) and other data. It is recommended that the statistical work be completed on your own data statistics platform, and the display indicators, calculation cycle, screening conditions, window period, data subscription recipients and other details should be given to R&D colleagues, or the work of establishing standards can be completed independently.

The above is some of the author’s superficial thoughts on the positioning of online education product operations based on his previous work experience.

In subsequent articles, the author will share the people and things in the entire online education product operation work from the perspective of project team operation management, although they do not belong to the operation position, but are closely related to the operation work. From the perspective of operations-driven business, we will discuss how to formulate key KPIs for each business position.

Author: Hickey J.

Source: Hickey J.