Product operation: born from pain points, died from growth!

Recently, I discovered a surprising phenomenon: many products were born out of market pain points and survived well in the early stages, but died quickly when they reached the stage of rapid growth.

Many companies also have this situation. When incubating new projects, the company has very thorough early planning and believes that they have strong market foresight, so they invest a lot of manpower and material resources. However, when the project is about to take shape, the product does not grow and is slowly abandoned.

Those who planned the product in the early stages reaped the rewards of both reputation and ability, while those who came in later to do operations were burdened with three major problems: lack of ability, lack of vision, and lack of execution.

Moreover, in order to meet the needs of existing users, products are increasingly afraid to break through conventional practices and even abandon some commonly used functions. Without foresight, there is certainly no potential for development.

After taking over the "mess", the operations staff want to achieve results quickly and gain recognition from others. This urgent mentality makes the operations staff follow the rules and fail to produce outstanding results.

After a product acquires seed users, it will pay more attention to the suggestions of the seed users and plan everything according to the suggestions of the seed users. If it is not careful, it will be accused of not respecting customer suggestions.

If the suggestions of seed users lead the product in the wrong direction, the user growth will be worrying, the team will not dare to expand new breakthrough features, and the company will not be willing to invest more resources. As a result, the team will be trapped in a situation where without user growth, they will not dare to develop new features, and the company will not invest resources, and without resources, it will be impossible to develop new features.

If this cycle continues, the product will eventually be eliminated. To break through this dilemma, companies, product managers, and operations personnel need to jump out of the current pit and re-evaluate the feasibility of this matter from a global perspective, which is something most companies are unwilling to do.

It takes a lot of courage to do this, and when things fail, being blamed can very likely crush a person's final mood.

To do this well requires a review of three aspects, the cost of which is not much lower than redeveloping the product, and will also cause a lot of complaints from people. If the team is not strong enough, it will be difficult to succeed. If a reliable and usable solution can be provided, the product may be able to regain new vitality.

1. Re-measure the market and users

It is also possible that market research and user research were not done properly at the beginning of product planning.

The way to develop products domestically is to see what has been successfully done abroad, and then adopt Chinese characteristics to apply it. The way small companies develop products is to look at what large companies have done and then redefine the distinctive applications.

The success rate of products created in this way is much higher than those with good ideas of your own, but whether such products are really effective still needs to be redefined.

More often than not, we fake customer pain points and focus on the name of the product. We claim that our product solves a certain pain point of the customer, but we haven’t done much research on whether this pain point is a real demand or a false demand.

There is no clear definition as to whether the user group exists and whether the target user group is the target user of the product. "Almost" mentality is not acceptable in the product planning stage, otherwise it will lead to the result of "very different".

2. Re-measure the market size

I was chatting with a friend who is an entrepreneur. He said that the project he was working on had a great market. At the seed user stage, users had high intention and payment rates. However, it is currently experiencing sluggish growth. How should this problem be solved?

I asked him how he knew the market was so big, and he said: feeling!

I believe that many companies also make market size predictions in this way. It seems that there is a good market, but any feeling in the market is not very reliable, and user demand research is also needed.

For some small and beautiful products, it is easy to find the corresponding target population in the early stages of the project, and the overall size of the population is not large. However, when facing pressure from investors and rapid expansion, they encounter some problems, such as weak product user growth, difficult product monetization path, and small market size.

Every year, various companies release a large number of research reports, especially securities companies' market size forecasts can be used as a reference.

When doing e-commerce, all e-commerce instructors will tell you to do blue ocean projects. However, in the actual operation process, many people choose red ocean projects because the market is large enough, the upper limit is high, and the profits obtained are much higher than those of the blue ocean.

Therefore, when measuring the market, do not follow your own feelings or the advice of others, but use scientific research methods to verify the feasibility of the market.

Some people say that Jobs never conducted market research. Because he is targeting already hot markets, his product strength can be maximized, and then he can grab the market from the audience of competitors, so he never needs to do market research. Most companies still need to conduct user research based on competitors, markets, and market segments.

3. Re-measure the target user group

The early seed users are very important, but most people cannot find the right seed users. Once the seed users change, more attention should be paid to the voices of non-seed users. Although seed users will express their true feelings when using the product, most users are not real seed users and can only be regarded as product trial users.

When there are fewer people using the product, we default them to seed users. However, these users are not tolerant during use and only express their attitude from a picky perspective instead of giving suggestions on use. These people who provide strong personal solutions to the imperfections of a product can at best be considered keyboard warriors of the product.

However, if we pay too much attention to the voices of these users during product operation , we may lose sight of the core functions of the product and solutions to the problems.

It is a small and beautiful product, but the seed users did not find it correctly, and many people expressed strong objections during use. A series of problems such as imperfect functions, poor interactive experience, unstable system, etc. were reported to the product personnel.

The harmonious atmosphere within the company's team was also broken, and employees began to blame each other. As a manager, I cannot tolerate this kind of thing happening.

So they re-surveyed the users of the product and found that these users were just pseudo-demand users in this industry. They themselves were not passionate about two-dimensional products at all, but just followed the trend for fashion.

The product started to develop positively only after attracting seed users, and real 2D personnel gave a lot of reasonable and planned suggestions instead of just criticizing after the experience.

If the wrong seed users are found, the entire product life cycle is likely to be ruined, so it is also valuable to conduct research and screening of seed users within a reasonable time period.

4. Redefine the way products solve problems

We believe that the product solves the customer's problem, but the product does not necessarily solve the customer's problem, and the customer may also use the product in other ways, producing unexpected results.

Users’ pain points vary, but their needs remain the same. Paying too much attention to pain points will instead lead to the loss of the ability to observe users' basic needs. Therefore, in the process of product function development, we should pay attention to the effective ways in which product functions solve problems and whether they solve user needs.

5. Redefine user pain points

During the function development stage, what we hear most is user pain points. However, user pain points either do not have a large enough market or have alternative solutions. At this stage, the users’ pain points have been mostly explored. Now we need to pay more attention to user needs rather than the fake pain points imagined by the team.

An APP product that solves the pain point of unclear communication needs between designers and other users. The team conducted a user survey and found that this pain point is painful enough and has a huge market. After various calculations, the product will definitely have a large enough market and can change the industry.

However, after the product was launched, it was discovered that this pain point was a false demand!

The team focused too much on the pain points of the product and forgot the basic needs of users. They just wanted a convenient way to communicate with their clients, without having to annotate sounds in drawings. If we start from the user's needs, there are many ways to solve this problem. Users just want communication to be smoother.

You can communicate remotely over the phone, document images and mark out problems that need to be solved in the design, or go to the customer's site to solve problems. What's worse is that even if these problems are not solved, customers can still accept it.

The customer pain point in the survey became another pain point after the product went online. Users needed to download the APP, take pictures one by one, then mark the sounds on the pictures and send them to the other party. The other party also needed to listen to them one by one before the problem was finally solved.

With so much time, both parties can communicate their needs over the phone, and solving problems is much more reliable than this method. Paying too much attention to user pain points means either the target market is too small to support product development, or the pain points are false pain points, resulting in the failure of corresponding product functions.

All of the above verification methods require reaching users through operational means to obtain real feedback from users. Therefore, you will gain more by focusing more on user needs rather than customer pain points in your product.

6. Redefine product functions

Understand customer needs and plan product functions, but product functions are not static but change as user behavior changes.

After the product acquires users, focus on their usage behavior. Different solutions can be found in user behavior data. Many well-known products in history have undergone behavioral changes during user use, which in turn promoted product changes.

"Viagra" was originally a drug for dilating blood vessels. In the earliest days, it was used to solve the problem of heart disease. Its magic was discovered by great people. As a result, the world has one less drug to solve heart disease, but one more good remedy for some people's "sexual" life.

YouTube was originally a dating website, where users were matched with other users by posting videos introducing themselves and then liking, thumbs-up, or disliking them. The three founders found that the number of other videos uploaded by users was much higher than the number of self-introductions, so they simply overhauled the website, resulting in the current video website with 2 billion users.

Discovering strange user behavior is not necessarily a bad thing for the product. However, it is definitely a bad thing if the team sticks to the old ways and sticks to the original functions.

Changing the core functionality of your product on the fly based on user behavior can lead to great products.

7. Reorganize the path of product operation

The product’s operational path is the last line of defense and is also the most common way for a product to fail in the open.

Many products think they are the best in the world during the planning and R&D stages. However, when they actually enter into operational solutions and allow users to verify the product, all of the product's functions will be exposed. Operations staff must adjust the product's operational direction at any time based on the problems exposed by the product.

When a product is launched on the market, operators are looking forward to making achievements through the product and will do their best to operate the product.

Great efforts may not necessarily bring about miracles, but may also create tragedy. The product is very likely to fail to adapt to the local environment. At this time, the operator needs to stop, observe the achievements that have been made, and then plan the future direction.

Many products that are built from scratch will skip the product verification period during the operation and promotion process, hoping to reach the explosive growth period directly. They work hard to acquire users without retaining or converting users. As a result, the traffic obtained through the channel is lost after experiencing the product.

There was a community software APP before, which solved the last mile of the community. After I downloaded the product and tried it, I gave the product a suggestion and never logged into the product again. Moreover, the product disappeared from the market after only a short period of time.

Faced with pressure from investors or others, users are forced to grow on a large scale. However, product imperfections and operational pressure will eventually bring tragedy to the product.

Most product teams have discovered users’ pain points and created products. However, during the operation process, the boss will be caught in the problem of which came first, the chicken or the egg. If the boss cannot see the growth in user scale, he will not invest resources. Without investing resources, the operation staff will not be able to achieve large-scale growth.

Moreover, the serious accountability within the team can only make operators confined to existing methods and dare not try new methods. Therefore, the team's system has a great impact on the operation of the product.

The boss often puts content such as "Essential skills to add 100,000 users for free" in the operation team, and he always says, "If I had money, what would I ask you to do?" In the absence of money, the boss can’t wait and wants to see results quickly, so most of the products die in the process.

8. Final Thoughts

In the current environment, too many new products are produced every day. Without good operation methods and ideas, the products will eventually die.

Most teams are focusing on customers' pain points. There is no data to support the market size of these pain points. On the contrary, universal needs have better development.

Even if the product reaches the operational stage, it is difficult to find the real direction of development without analyzing user behavior through data. There is a high probability of sudden and tangled problems in the product operation process, and these problems are also a major factor in destroying product development.

Author: Zhang Mu

Source: Operations Officer Zhang Mu