Products also need to understand operations丨Read "Operations from Scratch" in 3 minutes!

Chapter 1: Some truths about operations

1. Operating products is a tough job. We need to follow through with operations. We should always understand two principles:

1) Never expect to operate a useless product, let alone imagine that such a product can be revived or even succeeded through operation;

2) Never assume that a product’s design is so perfect that it does not need to be operated. Even if the product can be self-operated, it still requires continuous operational guidance.

2. Open career development path

Specialist - Backbone - Supervisor - Manager - Director - VP - CXO

3 If you are an intern

The work of operations is gradual, so it does take a lot of time and effort. A good operations person is rarer than a good product manager because product managers can rely on luck, but operations people really need to produce results - I reiterate that I do not mean to belittle product managers (yes, I think the author is a product hater...).

Chapter 2 Operation is a basket

1. Operation is a basket

The core tasks of operations can be summarized into two points:

1) Traffic construction

Traffic building is to improve the website's traffic indicators through various promotions, diffusion, marketing , and activities. What we usually call PV, UV, registration conversion, and SEO are all in this link.

2) User retention

After you have traffic and users, most of the operations work is about how to continuously and effectively promote user activity and retention, and to discover valuable or even high-value users.

Operational work classification

1. Content Operation

Content operation refers to creating, editing, organizing and presenting website content to increase the content value of Internet products and produce operational content that has a certain promoting effect on user stickiness and activity. Continue to produce content that is valuable to users and ensure that users can obtain this information on the site

2. User Operation

User operation refers to developing operation plans and even operation mechanisms based on user needs with the goal of increasing the activity, retention, and payment of website or product users. Open source (attract new users), save money (prevent loss and recover lost users), maintain (retain existing users), and stimulate (promote user activity and even conversion to paying users).

3. Event Operation

Activity operation refers to driving short-term improvement of one or more indicators through conducting independent activities or joint activities.

2 Operation is a scumbag

First of all, it’s the mentality.

Let’s be clear about a few things: operations are not a panacea. It is absolutely impossible to have no operations. Operations and products are not separated. Operations and many positions are close partners. The highest level of operation is self-operation.

Then there are the skills.

1) Sensitivity to data.

2) Imagination and creativity.

3) Oral and written communication skills.

4) Communication skills.

5) Execution.

Finally, it’s the mindset.

1) Divergent thinking: Starting from one point, expanding thinking, and ultimately generating multiple solutions rather than a single solution.

2) Reverse thinking: This is a way of thinking that reverses cause and effect. The result can be inferred from the cause, and vice versa.

) Structured thinking: This is a system-level way of thinking. It usually does not adopt a case-by-case solution of treating the symptoms but rather allows the system to solve all similar problems.

Chapter 3: Unveiling the veil of content operations

1. Initial matters of content operation

Content operations involve a lot of details, which at least include the following:

1. Content collection and creation

2. Content presentation and management

3. Diffusion and transmission of content

4. Content effectiveness and evaluation

Content Supply Chain - Treat Content as Your Commodity

The network structure consists of raw material suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers and final consumers involved in the product production and circulation process through linkages with upstream and downstream members.

In the early stages of content operations, the order in which we solve content operations problems should be:

1) Content consumer positioning (website positioning + audience positioning + operation goals)

2) Confirm the source of content (collect or find content creators)

3) Establishment of content standards (what content to include, how to present content, and standards for judging content quality)

Content initialization - building website and product values

Content initialization is to fill in some content under the constructed content framework before users enter, and these contents are the core part of the website or product in the early stage of content operation. These contents represent the values ​​of the website and the product.

2. Content Operation in Continuous Operation - Taking Zhihu as an Example

So when a website or product enters the formal operation stage, it is necessary to establish some standards:

1) Content quality screening

2) How to expose and present good content

3) Establishment of continuous push and recommendation mechanism

4) Path and mechanism selection for achieving “self-operation”

Present good content to users

The presentation method is nothing more than active discovery by users and active push and guidance by operators to users.

When choosing a delivery channel, consider two factors:

1) Give priority to whether the channel covers the push object.

2) Timeliness of push content

The goal of the analysis is to form conclusions, which will include:

1) What is the quality of the channel?

2) How many of the push notifications sent through various channels reached users?

3) What is the user's attitude towards push notifications? How many users open and read the push notifications?

4) Among the users who received and viewed the ad, how many of them came to the corresponding landing page of the website or product?

5) How many users finally completed the conversion we expected?

6) What experiences and lessons have we learned from these data? How should we improve, enhance and maintain them in the future? We should implement them into specific measures and try again next time.

During the entire push process, we need to pay attention to one thing: avoid user interruption

The path and mechanism selection of self-operation

The so-called "self-operation" means that through the establishment of some mechanisms and rules, the users of the website abide by these mechanisms and utilize these rules, so that the daily operation of the website no longer relies too much on the guidance of the operators, and the means and goals of user autonomous operation are realized.

In the case of "self-operation", the website operators only carry out operation management and achieve operation goals through daily work such as organizing activities and responding to customer complaints.

3. Content operation of public platforms

How to operate content on public platforms?

1. Position first.

2. Test quickly and get feedback.

3. Cultivate user habits.

4. Adhere to the long-term content operation policy.

5. Keep interacting with content consumers.

6. Sing less pop songs.

Chapter 4: Do an interesting activity

1 How to plan an event

First of all, please give me a reason to do the activity.

1. Time reason

2. Reasons for the product or commodity itself

3. Social hot spots, entertainment hot spots, news hot spots, etc.

4. Create your own hotspot

Another key to event planning is the placement of publicity channels. We need to know where our users often hang out so as to choose the delivery channels. As for how to choose, you can refer to past data. If there is no data, you can look at the searches and sources of Baidu Index-related activities as a reference.

2 How to write an event plan

A standard event plan may include but is not limited to the following:

1) Event theme: A part of the event copy that allows users to understand the theme of your event and whether it is attractive to them.

2) Target audience of the activity: Make it clear which group your activity is targeting, so that users can understand it, you can grasp it, and leaders can recognize it.

3) Event time: the start time and end time of the event, the time when the rewards are issued and the time when they are received.

4) Event description: This is a part of the event copy that allows users to understand and decide whether to participate and how to participate.

5) Rule details: Part of the activity copy is understandable to users and developers. Part of the content is displayed on the front end, and the other part lets developers know how to implement the activity.

6) Distribution channels: To make it clear to the market or to yourself, there must be a distribution time, selection of distribution channels, and budget.

7) Risk control: Let developers understand your risk links and whether there are corresponding measures to solve them.

8) Monitoring indicators: Covering most relevant indicators, including monitoring of delivery channels, monitoring of user participation, monitoring of reward distribution, etc. It can help you find problem points when viewing the data and inspire you to solve these problems.

9) Cost estimation: How much does an activity cost and how much does it cost per person. It doesn't have to be very accurate, but you must be aware that there are activities that don't cost money, but if you do, you need to understand the capacity of an activity, how it will help the indicators, and how much money you need the company to support you in order to gain these benefits.

10) Effect evaluation: Where there is cost, there is benefit. The purpose of your activity is helpful to the indicators of the website/product. You need to consider how to reflect it and get the approval of your leaders.

11) FAQ: You can prepare a separate document and provide it to customer service or relevant personnel to help resolve any confusion users may have when participating in the event. FAQs should be detailed and standard. If the event is large-scale and FAQ alone is not enough, you need to prepare customer service training documents in advance and actively communicate.

Reports on campaign performance can be short or long, but typically include the following:

1) Activity overview: briefly retell the activity theme, target audience, time, and content.

2) Activity effect statistics: describe the activity effect after the activity ends.

3) Promotional effect statistics: Statistics on the effect of each delivery channel, and master the relevant data on traffic and conversion rate brought by each channel.

4) Reflection and summary: What experiences and lessons have been learned from the activity and publicity effects, how to adjust and improve them next time.

3 What to do after event planning

The first thing to do after completing event planning is to confirm resources.

When the page starts visual design and development starts writing code, operations personnel should have a good chat with testers about the online checklist and testing tasks.

1. The work plans and time nodes of each line, whether there are any delays, and what is the completion progress.

2. The degree of completion of demand realization, whether there are any missing demands that have not been realized.

3. Check the resource preparation of all parties before going online

The event has finally been launched as scheduled. Don’t worry. Please review the daily data. If you find any abnormalities, please report them in time and contact us for resolution. If the event effect is not good, you must find a way to find the problem, adjust the copy, increase exposure, and increase the prizes. No matter how many solutions you have, use them all!

The event is over, let’s quickly write a summary of the event. Whether it is success or failure, only the distilled experience is the treasure of event operators.

4. Things about lucky draws and red envelopes

When the operator chooses lottery as the reward method, the next question is how to balance it, which is what we call the setting of prize explosion rate.

Usually, there are two ways to set the prize explosion rate:

1. Fair explosion rate

2. Adjust the explosion rate

Chapter 5 Three Things About User Operation

1 User Operation Work Content

Open source mainly refers to the expansion of the user scale, usually focusing on the number of registered users. Therefore, the main tasks of open source are:

1) Select the registration channel and method

2) Improve registration conversion rate

Throttling mainly refers to maintaining the user scale, usually focusing on the number of silent users, so the main tasks of throttling are:

1) Clearly define the criteria for churn

2) Establish a loss warning mechanism

3) Recover lost users

Promoting activity mainly refers to increasing the frequency of users using the website or product, usually focusing on user retention rate and user activity rate. Therefore, the main tasks of promoting activity are:

1) Define the criteria for user retention and user activity

2) Improve user retention rate

3) Improve user activity (user behavior, product usage frequency, etc.)

Pay-by-transfer mainly refers to capturing the needs of high-value users (or core users), getting them to pay for the website/product, and finding ways to keep paying. Usually, the focus is on the number of paying users (depending on the form of the website/product, the definition may not be consistent, but when it comes to pay-by-transfer, that's it!). The main tasks of pay-by-transfer are:

1) Get active non-paying users to pay through a series of actions

2) Use mechanisms to encourage paid users to continue paying

2 About open source

The registration channel is currently in an extremely open state, and the opening of the registration channel means that the traditional exposure-guiding registration is gradually being replaced by joint login-filling in information-registration conversion.

There are several principles to grasp here:

1) Treat users as fools. Use simple and clear graphics and text to tell users what you are, what you can do, and where to start the experience.

2) Display core functions, core values, and core gameplay to the greatest extent possible.

3) Demonstrate secondary functions, secondary values, and secondary gameplay in stages. Don’t try to cram them all on the user.

4) Adjust the copy and improve the guidance sequence based on data performance.

5) Make it interesting and don’t make users feel annoyed. The steps should be simple and the process should be short. Few people have the patience to click several times before they understand what you want to say.

6) Guidance should be tied to user behavior. Every feedback from the user can tell you whether he understands what you are saying to him. Every bit of feedback can provide some motivation to keep going and complete the process.

3 What to throttle?

At its core, throttling is about three things:

1) Clearly define the criteria for churn

2) Establish a loss warning mechanism

3) Recover lost users

The simple principle is:

1) Give users everything they want

2) Keep giving them everything they want

3) Try to give them everything they might like

4) Avoid losing their interest.

4. What do we do when users churn?

The first thing to do to win back a user: Let the user know that you want to win him back

Letting the user know that you want to win him back has two meanings:

1) Through what channels and how to tell him that you want to win him back (we will discuss this together in the second point)

2) The loss of a user means that you cannot contact him through channels within the system, so it must be channels outside the system. There are many channels outside the system, but the most used ones are still the following:

a. Email

b. SMS

c. System push information (Popup, notification bar)

The second thing: make the user feel that you care about him, not just want to win him back.

The third thing is the most important: recovered users need more guidance and care

Chapter 6: One, Two, Three About Data

1. Data analysis methods, misunderstandings and ways data lies

1. Data usage method

1) Master historical data

2) Inferring patterns from historical data

3) Predict data by reversing the rules

4) Learn to disassemble the data

2. Misunderstandings of Operational Data Analysis

1) Don’t use a single type of data to evaluate the overall situation

2) Don’t exaggerate accidental events and think they will lead to inevitable results

3) Avoid using conclusions to infer causes

4) Avoid data-driven thinking

3. How operational data lie

1) Stretch chart

2) Modify the coordinate axis data

3) Deliberately select favorable samples

4) Difference in sample size

2 Jump out of the data to see the data

When we discuss data analysis, what we actually want to understand is not just the data, but the people behind the data.

There are several steps or principles:

1. Abandon your preconceived positions.

2. Dig deep into user behavior and system events.

3. Try to think from other people’s perspective.

4. Integrate key data.

3. Discussion on core operation data

Content Operation Core Data

For a website or product, the core content operations include:

1) Content display data

2) Content conversion data

3) Content stickiness data

4) Content diffusion data

Core data of activity operation

The core data will include (for example):

1) Number of shares on each sharing channel, number of clicks on sharing links, and conversion rate of successful registrations on each channel

2) Total registration-success conversion rate, bounce nodes of user registration, and bounce nodes of the guidance process after user registration is completed.

3) The total number of old users who participated in the event, the distribution of sharing channels according to the number of times they were used, the daily behavior of old users who used 2 or more sharing channels (e.g., the behavior one month before and after the event), etc.

User operation core data

1) User registration data

Registration Data may include, but is not limited to:

a. The scale and growth rate of registered users

b. Channel quality - what are the registration channels and what is the registration conversion rate of the channels?

c. Registration process quality - number of users who have completed registration, statistics on user dropout points in the registration process

c. Registered user behavior tracking - user behavior statistics after completing registration

2) User retention data

The retained data may include but is not limited to:

a. The scale of retained users and the conversion rate of registration-retention

b. User login time and frequency

b. The time, duration, frequency, etc. of users using products or website services

3) User activity data

Active data may include, but is not limited to:

a. The scale and growth rate of active users, and the conversion rate from registered to active users

b. User behavior statistics after login

c. The frequency, content, and behavior of users using products or website services

4) User payment data

The payment data is easy to understand, and generally includes:

a. The scale of paying users, growth rate, and conversion rate of registered-paid/active-paid users

b. Payment amount, frequency, etc.

c. Daily behavior tracking of paying users

5) User churn data

The contents of the churn data are also easy to understand, and generally include:

a. The scale and speed of lost users

b. Daily behavior tracking of lost users

c. Analysis of reasons for user churn

d. Lost user recovery strategies and effect analysis, etc.

Chapter 7 Operations Meet Products

1 When operations enter product

They are a pair of brothers and also a pair of rivals. There will be a struggle for priorities and scramble for resources between them, and there will also be coordination and cooperation between the two sides to achieve common goals.

The best point for operations to enter the product is before product design. According to the development goals of product design (including target users, target market, and stage planning), we will do early operation tool design, operation goal decomposition, operation entry point selection, operation roadmap creation, and operation strategy planning.

Operational tool design

1) Content requirements sorting

a. Content management backend requirements sorting

b. Arrangement of content source channels

c. Arrangement of content quality and effect evaluation standards

2) Organize the needs of activities

a. Organize the activity types and activity time nodes

b. Organize the needs of the activity background

c. Organizing activity goals

3) Requirements for operational data collation

a. Requirements for basic operational data collation

b. Requirements for core operational data collation

c. Requirements for key operational data

Operational goal breakdown

Based on the product version launch rhythm and functional positioning, break down the operational goals at different time nodes to form monthly, quarterly, and annual operational goals.

Operational entry point selection

The selection of operational entry points is dynamic and needs to be tried and adjusted based on the performance of operational data.

Operational strategy planning

The target users of the product, their preferences, hot spot analysis obtained from market research, trends, difficulty of technical implementation, and timing are all the basis.

Based on these bases, plus the dynamic adjustment of the entry point, an operating strategy will be formed.

Operational roadmap production

If we do all the things mentioned above, we will form a road map and have a general understanding of what operations will do, what goals to achieve, and what resources are available at each stage of the product.

2. Linkage between operations and products

Product managers are constantly studying how to get users to “Don’t Make Them Think”, while operations managers are always asking users to “To Do One More Thing”.

We can call it: two sides of one body, two in one.

In the development process of a website or product, this two-sided state always exists. Although they face different directions and fields, in actual process, they always exist as a two-in-one entity.

Whether you are a product manager or an operator, how can you achieve two sides of one body and two in one? My experience and perception is that you must have the same goal.

3 What do we mean when we talk about operational goals?

Without KPI, operations will be blind and we won’t know what to do. But, what are we talking about when we talk about operational goals?

However, operational goals are not just KPIs, or in other words, operational goals are not all quantifiable standards.

Which modules will be affected by operational indicators?

1) Product positioning. What is the entry point for operations, who are the users at the entry point, what is their consumption level, and what are their interests.

2) Product quality. Including functional indicators and performance indicators. When people come, we must catch them, and when we catch them, we must keep them.

3) Product support for operations. To retain people, we need not only product functions and product experience, but also operational tools and event design.

4) Marketing promotion . Who will it be open to and in which markets will it be launched?

5) Business cooperation. Can joint operations achieve twice the result with half the effort? Should business cooperation be exclusive? And so on.

6) Financial budget. Whether it is the number of users, turnover, income or revenue, they all face the problem of single user

The maintenance cost, how much the financial budget is, and whether it can support the achievement of operational goals.

7) Business model. Budget is cost. Can the existing business model support the costs? Is it necessary to seek investment ? At what stage should it be sought? After the operational goals are broken down, they will become very clear.