Product Operation: How to position the product?

Sometimes in the workplace, we encounter products from 0 to 1. For such new products, we must first conduct continuous research and discussion to determine the product positioning before we can proceed to the next steps. The author of this article shares some of his thinking process and experience summary on the issue of product positioning. Let’s take a look.

1. Background

The author participated in a technology-driven product development project. The main goal was to find business application scenarios for the technology and achieve commercial success after completing value verification and product polishing.

As a product built from scratch, determining product positioning is one of the most important issues. This article reviews the exploration and thinking process of the project's product positioning, and summarizes and shares experiences and lessons learned.

2. 3 stages of product positioning exploration

1. Stage 1: Broad and general

When I first joined the project team, I was unfamiliar with everything. I conducted research based on the existing information and formed a preliminary understanding of the project.

According to the survey, this technology has many application scenarios, so it is natural to classify it. After referring to some articles, it is decided to classify the scenarios according to the two major development directions of "enterprise management activities" and "enterprise business activities". This is also the coarse-grained product direction division, and the product positioning V1.0 version has been initially formed.

Later, as I got to know the technical solutions better, conducted research and analysis on competing products, and consulted with my predecessors, I supplemented version V1.0 by introducing typical scenarios in both directions, and the competitive advantages and disadvantages of the technical solutions. However, in this process, there were two issues that puzzled me and have not been resolved: scenario expansion and scenario value judgment (looking back now, aren’t these two issues exactly what product positioning needs to solve?).

The reason for this situation is that, on the one hand, there is a lack of in-depth thinking and no asking of why. The current classification method is just applying other people's conclusions to simply sort out and summarize the current situation, and it is a broad and general division; on the other hand, there is no communication with the actual business parties, and all research is limited to online information search and consulting "outsiders", and the research is "not grounded".

2. The second stage: refinement and focus

The second stage of product positioning exploration starts from the second phase iteration and ends with the output of the third phase iteration plan. During the entire phase, we actually conducted two small version iterations, V2.0 and V2.1, to explore the product positioning. This was a process of gradual refinement and focus.

In version V2.0, the biggest change is the refinement and clarification of the product development direction, which is half of the solution to the two problems left over from the first phase.

Specifically, the product development direction is refined and determined from two aspects: first, multi-party business research + online data feedback + third-party knowledge supplement; second, understanding of the company's strategic positioning.

On the first aspect:

• According to actual research, the core business demands of existing potential customers are similar and can be classified into the general direction of data analysis;
• By observing the actual online data, I found that the current application scenarios can fully bring out the core technical advantages of the product, which solved my previous concerns about this aspect. In addition, when combing the actual business research results based on the actual online data, I found that the data analysis direction can be further broken down by using the duration, behavior characteristics, etc., and divided into two sub-directions of "long/short video" to correspond to different product needs.
• Third-party knowledge supplementation integrates what is learned from books and lectures by industry leaders into the entire process.

On the second aspect, when communicating with the leaders, I learned that the company's future development plan and expectations for this project are all in the direction of big data, which is consistent with the product development direction we have planned.

Therefore, in general, in version V2.0, the product development direction is refined into three aspects along the ideas of the first phase, and one of them is determined as the main direction of current product development; in version V2.0, the remaining unresolved issues are the scenario expansion issues in the other two development directions besides the data analysis direction. The fundamental reason for this is that there is no actual business party to conduct research, and only rough guesses can be made based on online information.

The update to version V2.1 occurred during the annual team business report. By re-examining the project development history and future plans, the scenario demands of two of the development directions were redefined. The two scenarios were mainly distinguished by tracing back to their positions in the product.

Throughout the second phase, I have been thinking about the direction of product development. Through in-depth understanding of the business + online data feedback + continuous summarization, the direction of product development has become clearer and clearer, but it is still a little short of the core point of the problem, that is, I did not realize that the product development direction is not product positioning.

3. The third stage: discover and identify problems, correct deviations and improve them

When planning the fourth phase of product solutions, we summarized and sorted out the requirements and found some new situations:

• Observe the actual product usage scenarios of the business side and discover new needs;
• After communicating with the current business owner and the new business owner about the plan again, we deepened our understanding of each other's demands;
• There are also the needs of business products and data analysts that were previously surveyed.

Combining these three points, we found that even in this segmented scenario, the needs of different people in the same organization are different. Only then did we realize that we need to define the product positioning problem from the perspective of the user group. Therefore, we re-sorted and defined the current demand scenarios according to the idea of ​​"what kind of value to provide to whom", and organized them into the following table:

(As the product is still in the early stages of development, specific details cannot be disclosed)

During this stage, we re-recognized and understood the meaning of product positioning mainly through user feedback and actual research.

In general, Product Positioning V3 continues the division ideas of the previous versions, clearly identifies the core of the problem, and corrects a certain demand scenario; however, after a deep understanding of product positioning, I found that my current understanding of product positioning is still relatively one-sided, and I lack thinking about the commercial value of the product.

Conclusion

1. Summary

From the current perspective, the definition of product positioning is actually very simple: what kind of value is provided to whom, the who here includes users and companies, and the value corresponds to user value and commercial value; but from nothing to something, from not knowing to knowing, this is a relatively difficult process.

Looking back at versions V1.0 to V3, the changes are a reflection of my process of exploring and understanding product positioning. The cognitive refresh is attributed to two aspects: one is the in-depth understanding of products and businesses, and the other is continuous refinement and summary.

Regarding the first point, in product work, many problems cannot be figured out without practical exploration. Compared with the answers obtained through practice, the answers YYed up in the office are not only shallow in cognition, but are also likely to be wrong answers. Understanding users and business more is the most important part of a product manager's work.

Regarding the second point, thinking about some product issues often lasts for a period of time, and the conclusions change over time. Thinking points are sometimes forgotten. At this time, you need to record, summarize, and review more, and constantly sort out and refine the recorded content. If you think more and review regularly, you will find that your work ideas will become clearer and clearer; because in the thinking process, you will naturally look at the problems you encountered at the time from a higher dimension, and you will naturally think more comprehensively, which will also help to form your own way of thinking.

2. Follow-up plan

• Increase your sensitivity to discovering and defining problems. Path to implementation: Increase daily practice of deep thinking;
• Focusing on existing needs, supplement the understanding of product commercial value;
• Conduct more field research, summarize and review more, and increase knowledge reserves.

If there is anything inappropriate in the article, please correct me. We welcome the exchange of ideas~

Author: Smell the Rose

Source: Smell the Rose