User Operation: How to plan a user portrait system?

The term user portrait is very popular, but there are still few companies on the market that are capable of doing user portraits , and there are also few people with related majors, so there is a lack of professional knowledge system. Next, I will systematically introduce the product planning process of the user portrait system and circle the key points to grasp in the process.

When building a portrait system, the most important thing is to grasp a center and a main line.

One Center

One center, centered on economic development. This is the essence of the country's development, the foundation for the survival of enterprises, and naturally the foundation for the existence of the user portrait department. The essence of establishing a user portrait system is to serve business activities, and it is necessary to adhere to the basic principle of "reducing costs, improving efficiency and generating revenue".

A main line

One main line, the basic process line of product development. At the implementation level, establishing a portrait system is essentially a productization process. Therefore, the construction of a user portrait system conforms to the basic routine of product development and is divided into five stages: demand stage, portrait product planning stage, portrait product design stage, development and testing stage, and operation stage.

1. Demand stage: focus on the integration of internal and external factors and grasp three key points.

The first step is to investigate the needs of the business side, clarify what the business needs are, why a portrait system should be built, and how you plan to use it? This step is very important and should be carried out closely around one center. I have previously written an article about the demand research phase, "Data Product Zoro, the Bumpy Road to Label System Construction"

The second is to take stock of the underlying data and clearly know the sources of user-related data channels and in which tables they fall. What are the data categories? For details, please refer to "How to quickly inventory business and data requirements during label construction?" 》

Third, look outside and see how excellent portrait products on the market are built? What are the commonly used modules in the entire portrait system? What is the construction process of each module? The Straw Hat Boy investigated the three indispensable modules in the portrait system, including the ID system, the label system, and the portrait system. For details, please see "Construction of the ID System in Alibaba/NetEase/Meituan/58 User Portraits", "Dry Goods | Alibaba/NetEase/Autohome Portrait Label System", and "How to Build a User Portrait System? 》

After the demand research is clear, you will have a basic understanding of the entire portrait system in your mind. Then you can analyze it in combination with the actual situation of the company and formulate the next product plan based on local conditions.

2. Product planning stage: focus on both the beginning and the end, grasp the overall structure, and formulate an implementation plan.

Focus on overall planning, including business architecture and product architecture. First, focus on the implementation plan, including product phased plans and personnel coordination processes.

3. Product design stage: clear implementation, grasp process specifications, and focus on functional design.

4. Development and testing phase: standardization of work

5. Operation phase: Continuously monitor the operation results

Subsequent articles will expand on details such as user portrait design, development, testing, and operations. The following will mainly introduce how to do user portrait product planning.

2. Focus on overall planning

To do a good job in user portrait product planning, we must focus on overall planning and draw up a blueprint, including sorting out the business architecture from top to bottom and sorting out the product architecture from bottom to top.

From the framework level, a clear business architecture can help product managers clearly understand who the users are and what problems they solve. What is the value of the product and what is the priority of its functions? And what resources are needed to make this product?

Now, I will introduce how to use the "six-level" method to sort out the business architecture.

The entire business framework revolves around two aspects. One is user demand, in what scenarios do users use portrait services, what problems are solved, or what value is brought to users; the other is portrait product implementation, what resources are needed to realize the portrait product service, and which departments need to cooperate.

1. User scenario value layer

Clarify the target users and know clearly who the portrait system is designed for. Usually the target users of the portrait system include precision marketing personnel, product managers, search recommendation research and development personnel, user operations personnel, customer service personnel, etc. The application scenarios of the user portrait system include precise advertising delivery, intelligent operations, personalized recommendations, etc.

a. Targeted advertising

User portraits are crucial in the process of targeted advertising. Portraits can perfectly abstract the overall picture of a user and provide a comprehensive data foundation for further accurate and rapid prediction of user behavior.

As early as 2007, Yahoo launched the smartads advertising program based on portrait tags. Yahoo has access to a vast amount of user information, such as gender, age, income level, geographic location, and lifestyle, which, combined with records of user search and browsing behavior, enables Yahoo to present personalized banner ads to users. This is the application of portraits on an independent advertising platform.

For enterprises, using user portraits for advertising can accurately reach target users, increase the conversion rate from ad clicks to activation, and reduce advertising costs.

b. Intelligent Operation

Traditional operations use indiscriminate marketing and bombardment marketing methods, pushing the same information to every potential user over and over again. From the user's perspective, users are very disgusted with this kind of bombardment marketing and the user experience is poor; from the company's perspective, this is a huge waste of corporate costs and the hidden costs are huge.

How to push the right content to the right users at the right time and in the right way? This is a problem that plagues operations.

The user portrait platform can use its crowd labeling capabilities to help operations combine the market, channels, and user behavior to carry out targeted operational activities for users. To reach people within the terminal, personalized recommendations can be used; to reach people outside the terminal, push/SMS push can be used.

c. Personalized recommendations

The operator of the application can recommend different content to users based on labels such as gender, age group, interests and hobbies, browsing and purchasing behavior in the user portrait. Such as the personalized article content recommendations on Toutiao, the personalized video content recommendations based on user portraits on Douyin, and the personalized product recommendations based on user browsing behavior and other portrait data on Taobao.

2. Product operation resource layer

a. Product/Service Layer

Once we have sorted out the scenarios in which users use portrait products, the core functions that portraits can provide will also be very clear. The core lies in data collection, user ID identification, label system, and portrait system.

b. Operational management

To realize this huge portrait system, collaboration among multiple parties is required. At the organizational level, it includes the R&D team and the operations team. At the performance level, it is necessary to clearly define the performance goals of the organization and collaborate with multiple parties. At the system level, it is necessary to list the systems related to the portrait system. At the process level, it is necessary to consider the overall R&D process and the connection process between the portrait system and other business systems.

c. Resource layer

Consider who will do it, the cost of server resources, whether it is necessary to purchase third-party data, etc.

The business architecture will be more macro and focus on building the overall architecture from the top down, from the business scenario application level; while at the product architecture level, it will focus more on implementation, and build a user portrait system by taking stock of the current data status from the bottom up to meet the needs of core business scenarios. It includes data collection, ETL data preprocessing, data analysis and mining, portrait system construction, and application level.

1. Data Collection Layer

Data collection requires extensiveness and comprehensiveness: To create a more comprehensive user portrait, you need to find ways to collect all user-related data.

a. Business data: As the business is generated, it includes basic information of users, purchase business data on the platform, evaluation data, etc.

b. Tracking behavior data: some behavior data collected through tracking, such as browsing, clicking, and dwell time, etc.

c. Log data: generally the data recorded in the web log

d. Third-party data: When the business line is relatively single, the user data that can be obtained is not much. In this case, you can consider accessing third-party data, such as personalized data, to further enrich the label portrait.

2. Data preprocessing: Clean and convert some data that do not meet the standards to obtain standard data

3. Data analysis and mining: Perform label modeling on the preprocessed data to obtain labels with commercial value.

a. Unified user ID

Many people have no idea about user ID identification, and often miss this key step at the beginning of building a user portrait system.

To give a simple example, Alibaba is a company with multiple business lines, such as e-commerce, finance, advertising, culture, education, entertainment, equipment, and social networking. If consumer Chopper conducts fund management operations on Alipay, posts his own updates on DingTalk, and browses marshmallow products on Taobao web.

During this process, he logged into different accounts. How do you associate these behaviors with Chopper?

What we need to do here is to unify the ID identification. For details, you can refer to how big companies such as Alibaba, Meituan, and NetEase built it. "Construction of ID System in User Portraits of Alibaba/NetEase/Meituan/58".

b. User Profile

To build user profiles, you can build a data warehouse theme layer in the early stage, bring together tables related to users, and build a user market, including basic tables such as user basic information table, user behavior table, and user transaction behavior table.

c. Label Modeling

Label modeling involves the calculation of different types of labels, such as fact labels, rule labels, and prediction labels.

d. Label wide table storage

Tag wide table storage is mainly used to unify tag data into several large wide tables, such as user basic information wide table, user behavior wide table, user preference wide table, etc.

4. Service Layer

The service layer needs to clearly describe the services that the portrait system can provide to the outside world, including two categories: business services and system services.

a.Business Services

Business services include the capabilities that a portrait system must have, which are divided into portrait dashboards, single-user portraits, group user portraits, similarity crowd expansion, tag markets, crowd insights, tag management such as tag online and offline, tag management, and permission management.

b. System Services

System services are mainly interface services, which group users and connect them to various business systems in the form of interfaces.

After drawing up a grand user portrait blueprint, the next step is to formulate a practical project plan, sort out the version plan, etc., in order to apply for relevant resources.

The construction of an overall user portrait system involves a huge number of aspects and cannot be completed overnight. It should be carried out step by step. In the process of formulating a version plan, it is necessary to combine the current needs of the business and strive to apply it to the business quickly, accurately and ruthlessly, so that we can move faster; we also need to consider the system infrastructure, so that we can go further.

The version plan of user portrait can be carried out in stages, setting the user portrait system construction goals and iterative time plan for each version, such as V1.0, V2.0, and V3.0. And according to the 80/20 principle, we built the MVP version and launched one version first to quickly meet business needs.

As shown in the figure above, there are 4 key review time points during project execution.

The first is the project review. At this time, the project manager/data product manager is required to output the project PPT, which mainly includes the business background demand description, business architecture, product architecture, product version plan, project execution plan, required resources, etc.

The second is demand review, which requires the data product manager to output a detailed demand description document, which mainly includes demand background, product process, functional requirements description, data requirements description, prototype design, etc.

The third is to submit a test demonstration, which requires the data product manager/front-end manager to demonstrate the completed development. Before the demonstration, it is necessary to ensure that the page business process and data reporting process can be run smoothly. Only when there are no major problems can the test be submitted, otherwise it will be sent back for further development.

The fourth is product launch, which requires relevant operations colleagues to output operation plans, introduce product functions and usage to the outside world, collect user feedback, etc.

After making a clear project plan, let’s take a look at who needs to be involved in the overall user portrait plan and what their coordination relationship is like.

03. Personnel coordination process

The R&D personnel who build the user portrait system mainly include operations/business product managers, data product managers, data analysts, data warehouse engineers, algorithm engineers, front-end engineers, back-end engineers, data testers, and functional testers.

Operations/Business Product Manager: Propose portrait requirements, clearly explain the target users, scenarios and values, and propose clear data requirements, including the required tag names, tag meanings and segmentation logic.

Data Product Manager: Analyze the requirements raised by the business side, output product solutions based on the overall consideration of the portrait system, design the label and portrait system, and output functional and data requirement description documents. It is important to note that when designing labels, you need to work with the operations/business product manager to determine the label logic, and you also need to collaborate with the business side during acceptance.

Data warehouse/algorithm/front-end and back-end engineers: Data warehouse engineers are mainly responsible for the design of data warehouse structure, data table design, and the calculation of factual and statistical labels; algorithm engineers are mainly responsible for the calculation of algorithm prediction labels; front-end and back-end engineers are mainly responsible for the construction of the functional level of the portrait system.

Test Engineer: Mainly responsible for system function level testing and tag data level testing.

IV. Conclusion

In summary, the focus of user portrait system product planning is to focus on both ends: one is to draw a blueprint for the overall architecture, and the other is to formulate a clear implementation plan.

On the one hand, we focus on overall planning, including business architecture and product architecture, and build the overall architecture from top to bottom from the business scenario application level; then, from bottom to top, we take stock of the current data status to build a user portrait system to meet the needs of core business scenarios.

First, focus on the implementation plan, including product phase plans, project execution plans, and personnel coordination processes, to ensure that the user portrait system planning is implemented at a certain pace.

I believe that after you carefully study the above steps of building a user portrait system, you will be more comfortable with the operation.

Author: A data person’s private land

Source: A data person’s private land (shujuren_qishu)