How to become an excellent user growth operator

As a front-line user growth practitioner, what qualities and abilities are required? This has always been a question of great concern to students who want to engage in user growth.

We might as well set our goals higher and start by discussing how to become an excellent “growth trader”. I believe that through the previous introduction, everyone can clearly understand what user growth is doing. Let’s summarize the ability model of an excellent growth trader below.

1. Three essential thoughts

The word "trader" comes from the stock market and refers specifically to a profession that operates assets for large investors or investment institutions. If the users, traffic, funds, etc. that user growth needs to face are regarded as assets that flow over time, what user growth practitioners do is similar to "operation", and the goal is to achieve asset growth. A similar usage is also used by operations traders. For ease of expression, we also use “growth traders” to represent the core practitioners of user growth.

In fact, it doesn’t matter what it is called. The key is how practitioners can achieve user growth. The concept of user growth has been around for many years and has become increasingly popular in the past one or two years. How to become an excellent growth operator and how to transform into a growth operator have become very hot topics. Many students also choose user growth as their first job.

Let’s discuss what personal qualities are needed to become an excellent growth trader from both the thinking and action aspects. "Si" represents the ability to think, reason, think patterns and business abstraction ability, etc.; "Xing" represents the overall execution promotion, technology application, and ultimately the ability to implement growth strategies and achieve results. A trader needs to be a thinker, but he must also be a practical person and have the basic qualities to solve problems independently and lead a team to solve problems.

The abilities required for "thinking" are incremental thinking, user thinking, and business thinking.

The reason why incremental thinking is put first is because when it comes to user growth, what we ultimately need to focus on is the increment. As a practitioner, you first need to determine whether the product direction has growth potential and how big the growth space is. This depends on a clear understanding of macro trends and sub-sectors. Public macro data and industry data can be used as a reference. If necessary, you need to pay attention to professional reports in some sub-sectors and financial reports of key companies. Incremental thinking also requires practitioners to have a rational brain. As mentioned repeatedly in previous chapters, data growth and strategy effectiveness are not the same, and we need to do our best to do attribution.

Only by accurately quantifying the incremental contribution of a strategy to growth indicators can the effects of the strategy be amplified and replicated. Obtaining increments requires the use of many data analysis methods, the most common of which is the randomized controlled experiment method. Understanding basic experimental methods and discerning experimental conclusions are the key to having incremental thinking.

User thinking is placed second because it is the cornerstone for the effectiveness of almost all business behaviors and business models. It is not limited to user growth, so it is not highlighted in the first place. In the previous article, we spent a lot of space to introduce the global perspective of user growth based on user value. Only when users gain value will they continue to use products and services, further bringing about natural, healthy and sustainable user growth through word-of-mouth. The core of user thinking is to look at problems from the user's perspective.

In user growth, many methodologies are based on the enterprise and product perspectives, and many growth models are established based on this. These models are indeed effective, but in my opinion, the effectiveness of these models is based on improving user value. When thinking about how to grow user scale and business revenue, we need to think more about why users use or why users do not use our products. When thinking about how to improve the path conversion rate and purchase completion rate, you need to think more about why users interrupt the process and jump out of the page, and what kind of mood changes the users represent behind these breakpoints.

Finding problems from the user's perspective and designing targeted solutions is finding the solution from the root.

Finally, let’s look at business thinking. Businesses are not doing charity, and any product strategy needs to generate commercial benefits. The ultimate goal of user growth is undoubtedly to increase business revenue. Even in the relatively short history of the Internet, there are countless examples of companies that have declined due to unclear business models and untimely iterations, from former industry giants such as Yahoo and Baidu to small startups that 99% will "die." Business thinking is critical. Whether at the beginning of product design or in the user growth stage, "whether it is conducive to the operation of the business model" is the lifeline for judging whether a strategy is executable.

The most basic business thinking is reflected in the attention and understanding of business revenue models. Many Internet practitioners do not care about how a company or product makes a profit, and think that is something only the commercial sector needs to care about. This is obviously wrong. Internet products that rely mainly on advertising or merchandise revenue will inevitably introduce advertisements and value-added services, and will always sacrifice user experience to a certain extent. This is a path that cannot be circumvented. Just like the development of industrialization, it will inevitably cause damage to the natural environment to a certain extent.

Business thinking requires us to think about a better integration between commercial revenue and user experience, and how to create better advertising formats and value-added services that can better enhance user value, rather than simply using "no ads" and "no krypton gold" to gain a large number of initial users.

A product strategy that does not consider commercial revenue is like being in a greenhouse. Growing fast in the early stages does not mean growing big in the end. Therefore, user growth practitioners must not think about growth strategies without business thinking. Business thinking does not require us to improve ARPU and GMV in any strategy, but to focus on monitoring and optimizing these two indicators as core indicators to determine whether a strategy can be sustained in the long term.

2. Three essential capabilities

After introducing the three mindsets required for "thinking", let's look at the three capabilities required for "doing", namely data capabilities, technical capabilities and marketing capabilities.

In the business world we face, almost all Internet companies have completed digitization, and many traditional industries are also actively undergoing digitization transformation. The reason why data is important is that all user behaviors will generate data, which can provide the most direct and accurate reference for business decisions. Understanding the data production chain, analyzing and mining the data, and ultimately applying it to user growth strategies constitute data capabilities.

We can obtain a lot of data, but accurate data is a prerequisite for subsequent analysis and application. First, we need to know how data is generated, transmitted, and stored so that we can determine whether the data accurately depicts user behavior in a timely manner. Because the analysis work caused by inaccurate data is meaningless, several key links such as data collection, reporting, and storage need to be clearly designed and guaranteed to be monitorable. In addition, since technical solutions cannot be changed frequently, forward-looking designs are also required, such as ensuring that the required fields are collected, storage costs are affordable, and access efficiency meets the requirements of subsequent applications.

Growth traders may not have a clear understanding of the technical details, but they must have data awareness. It's like a chef who doesn't care how the ingredients are grown and transported, but he needs to be able to judge whether the ingredients are fresh, how to process them, and what ingredients are needed to make a good dish. Data capabilities naturally also include data analysis around user growth goals. It requires the ability to independently complete basic data queries (such as SQL) and the ability to operate common analysis tools (such as Excel perspectives, SPSS, etc.).

Application scenarios of data capabilities include insights into growth opportunities, exploration of growth strategies, and production of experimental conclusions. We have already introduced this part in our previous article. Students who are interested are recommended to read historical articles. It is important to emphasize that the main goal of data analysis is to produce feasible strategies and drive product decisions, not just to produce analysis reports and statistical conclusions.

Looking back at the three waves of the Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution, and the Internet Revolution, the improvement of technological capabilities has been the primary driving force for change. In recent years, we have witnessed with our own eyes how the popularization of mobile networks has driven the popularization of smartphones, bringing about earth-shaking changes in the lifestyle of all mankind. In the user growth segment, technical capabilities first refer to the understanding of relevant technologies in the key links of strategy implementation.

The purpose is to know which links have the possibility of improving efficiency and accuracy. For example, the application of many algorithm models in user growth can bring significant improvement to the strategy effect. Secondly, technological capabilities are reflected in keeping an eye on possible technological changes in the world in the future, following trends in a timely manner, and adjusting growth strategies.

We may not know the specific details of the technical implementation, but we need to know what kind of scenario changes the new technology may bring. For example, we have seen that the popularization of 4G has broadened the carriers and scenarios of video playback. So what changes and opportunities may the 5G network, which is in the early stages of commercial use, bring? Will it be driverless cars brought about by low latency, cloud gaming possible, or something else?

Marketing ability is a recognized essential ability for product managers and user growth work. Marketing covers the level where products and services ultimately reach users, but the effectiveness of marketing strategies is not only reflected in the visible images and text on the surface of the interface. Understanding user needs and in-depth knowledge of consumer behavior and psychology are the keys to effective marketing strategies. The marketing capabilities that growth traders need to possess are mainly the understanding and application of these issues, knowing what users need, and the psychological state and decision-making process behind completing a key behavior. Marketing ability is often lacking among students with a background in product or data. Systematic study of consumer behavior and psychology can make up for this shortcoming.

Figure 1 Six-dimensional capability model of growth traders

To sum up, an excellent growth trader needs to possess the growth trader capability model consisting of three mindsets and three abilities shown in Figure 1. Different roles in a growth team, including product manager, product operation, data analysis, etc., have different requirements for abilities. For example, for a product operator who mainly focuses on user operations, the requirements for user thinking will be very high, and secondly, incremental thinking will be strictly required; the requirements for data capabilities and technical capabilities can be appropriately lowered (as shown in Figures 2 and 3).

Figure 2 Typical capability reference for product operations

The understanding of a growth operator can be compared to that of a growth project manager. He needs comprehensive capabilities, which can be simply summarized as "understanding users and business." Only by understanding users can we understand their value and know how to improve it; only by understanding the business can we gain insight into business opportunities and find the most influential growth goals. To achieve this, the user thinking and business thinking required in the above capability model are extremely high.

In addition, "trader" means being able to carry out practical operations, refusing to talk about it on paper and refusing to get bogged down in details. Therefore, the requirements for data capabilities and marketing capabilities are also very high. Due to the large number of matters, some specific execution can be assigned to team members, but understanding of technology trends and data capabilities can bring more possibilities to the team, enable insight into opportunities, and seize macro opportunities. Therefore, the ability requirements for an excellent growth trader can be found in Figure 3.

Figure 3 Typical capabilities of excellent growth traders

The title of this article, "How to Become an Excellent Growth Operator", holds out the beautiful expectation of comprehensively improving user growth capabilities. It is hoped that readers who are determined to engage in user growth can set the highest standards as their own improvement goals. Although there are currently few people who can meet this ability, the corresponding market value is also very high. It can be said that almost all Internet companies and some leading retail giants are also struggling to find excellent user growth operators. It is very certain that the systematic improvement of the above capabilities will bring us extremely high marginal benefits. Since "operator" is not a specific job title, it corresponds to a high-level user growth position, or even a user growth team leader with some management work.

This article is a personal opinion based on many years of experience and observation. If there is anything wrong, please discuss and improve together.

Author: jinlei886

Source: User Growth Practical Notes (ugnote)