Self-cultivation of operators: How can new operators quickly move to high-end operations positions?

I am not a rich second-generation, and I have always been driven by the need to "make a living". Now that you have embarked on the operations career train, you must reach the end and be responsible for yourself, for operations, and for up-and-coming talents. After all, interest is the best way to make a living.

Starting the down-to-earth mode, let’s talk about the self-cultivation of an operator: How can a new operator quickly move to a high-end operation position?

1. Have your own operational knowledge system

Once, a colleague saw my computer and discovered my optimized source tables and mind maps. He was stunned and looked at me with admiration. He noticed something different about me. I was secretly happy in my heart, another fan was gained. But I am unable to organize these tables. Because every day, I often stay up late at night, watching the lights in other people's homes go out one by one outside the window, and then I muster up all my energy to organize, archive, optimize, and improve my understanding of operations.

Since I entered the operations position, I have summarized three operations knowledge maps, which have been widely circulated in the Internet product operations circle. These three knowledge graphs happen to be the three stages in which I update my operational knowledge.

The first picture: A map of website operation knowledge

This was my perception when I first entered the operations position. Now it seems that this picture does not reflect the essence of operations at all. Promotion and content construction are still the mainstream. Of course, operations at that time were basically these things. Traffic is king and content is emperor was the main theme at that time. So even though I am in an operations position, my focus is still on traffic and my concept of users is relatively weak.

Second picture: Optimization concept emerges

The highlight of this picture is that we finally have the concept of optimization. Data analysis and optimization complement each other. But when I was summarizing, I was too greedy and wanted to achieve everything. It seemed that all the work was operational work and very cumbersome. Brought many people into the pit. What impressed me most was that one time, a reader contacted me and asked if he could pretend to own the picture. He said he liked a girl and wanted to use this picture to establish his own image. I authorized him without saying a word. I told him to sign it at will and to make chasing the girl his first priority.

The third picture: Focus on the essence of operation

Finally, after a period of operational pain and experience, and as I grew older, I learned the principle of simplifying things and grasping the core points. And based on the existing operational knowledge, we strive to summarize the truest aspect of operational performance.

2. Kitsch

Readers have asked me, Han Li, why are you so low and tacky. I say that being vulgar is human nature.

I generally look down on people who talk about human nature before they are even 30 years old. I think people who have not experienced great ups and downs should not talk about human nature, but study "vulgarity" first. I am a vulgar person, so I often flatter myself.

Han Li, you are amazing. You won first prizes in both soft and hard pen competitions, and they were personally selected by Zhang Xianliang. The Youth League Committee Secretary patted me on the shoulder and said.

Later I boasted to everyone that this award was not voted for by teachers and students from the whole school, but was judged by Zhang Xianliang.

Later, I was still not satisfied, so Zhang Xianliang personally gave me the award.

Later, Zhang Xianliang also invited me to visit Zhenbeibao Film and Television City.

The lies get bigger and bigger. My courage is growing. When I meet people who are not familiar with Teacher Zhang, I start bragging: he is the chairman of Zhenbeibao Film and Television City, where "A Chinese Odyssey" and "New Dragon Inn" were filmed. When I meet literary youths, I mainly play the literature card. I say it is the author of the Trilogy of Love (three novels), "Greening Tree", "Half of a Man is Woman" and "Get Used to Death", and she is a first-class writer in China.

This is endorsement, or in plain language, the art of gilding the lily.

Later, Zhang Xianliang passed away. I was really sad for a while. Gradually, Zhang Xianliang had become my benefactor. I even believed in myself.

One night, a classmate of mine who was a reporter called me and asked, "Do you have Teacher Zhang's phone number? I want to interview him." My heart ached and I said, "I not only have a phone number, but also a WeChat account. Whichever is more convenient for you?"

Until Zhang passed away, I had never met him and only took a photo in front of his calligraphy works. Just because of a word from the Youth League Committee Secretary, I fantasized for many years and made up countless stories.

Why do I always need to rely on external forces to gild myself? Because I’m not confident: I don’t have a high-sounding official title, and my operations department is far from being treated the same as products and marketing. I don’t have the endorsement of BAT. In fact, I had two chances, but I gave up in the end. Because there is a thought that keeps circling in my mind: the bigger the company, the more detailed the division of labor, the less you can experience, and you can only be like the capping machine in the brewery, taking a bottle and putting a cap on it. This may be my bias.

But I have been hanging around in small and medium-sized companies and startups , and I have learned and experienced a variety of things. In addition, I spend a lot of my spare time on building my personal website. For example, building your own website, writing a blog, creating a Weibo account, using WeChat, experiencing circle of friends marketing , opening a Taobao store to experience e-commerce ... and enjoying every one of them. During this process, I found that I had developed a skill. When I received a new project or a new product, I was full of interest and did not stop working. Secondly, I could quickly find a breakthrough point. In other words, I have developed the ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Change itself is characterized by the word "vulgar".

3. Learn operations from experts around you

Friends who have chatted with me may know that I am very slow in replying, and sometimes I don’t reply at all. It's not that I'm gloomy. Because I think the masters are actually right next to you. I occasionally tell some operations people to attend fewer salons and training meetings and read fewer operations-related articles. If you have the time, ask your colleagues out for tea and a chat. In fact, operations experts are right next to you.

Let me talk about how I learned operations.

Ever since the word "operation" was included in my job title, I didn't know what operations were for a long time? Just follow the instructions of the leader. The leader said that Book Reading Day is here and we should plan an event, then I started to think about how to organize an event related to Book Reading Day; the leader said it was the end of the month and sales for this month were far from reaching the target, so we should do a promotion, then I started to calculate how to maximize sales and offered a 20% discount; the leader said... then I did it, the leader became my nerve center and I turned into a robot.

Later, I started looking for some articles about operations to read, but there were very few. At that time, articles about operations were basically extinct, and no one liked to talk about this topic.

Later, the more I worked, the more confused I became, and I felt that I should figure it out on my own. I began to observe myself deliberately: What am I doing in my daily work? What was I thinking about while doing it? How do I struggle when browsing the website on a daily basis? Especially when it comes to shopping, I find that every shopping website is so confusing and it seems that no shopping experience is smooth. I always hesitate for a long time, so I started to think about how to make users buy at the first visit without any more hesitation.

Later, I deliberately observed the evolution of my shopping thoughts, and I found that most of the time, I didn’t consider the shopping experience or the complexity of the process. I seem to care a lot about price, and experience is not the most important thing to me.

Next, I began to observe the leaders and how they gave orders. The leader will occasionally help us with training. At one point, I had a sudden realization: when selling self-study courses, you need to increase sales and optimize your products. The leader said that there is a funnel principle in Internet products. Reducing one step can lead to more purchases, so we need to add a purchase button on the homepage of our courses. This was heavily criticized at the time. The heads of various channels felt that adding a button on the homepage had too strong a commercial flavor and would easily drive users away. My thought at the time was: It seems unreasonable for users to place an order when they come to the website for the first time and haven’t yet understood the website, because users need to think for a while.

However, my leader had a high position and enforced the rule. One month later, the sales of the self-study channel increased by 10%. This surprised me, because the leader was still a leader. I secretly asked him how he knew this. The leader forwarded me an article, and I saw that it was an article from a product manager website. It suddenly dawned on me that operations are not just operations, and that we need to draw experience from other jobs.

Since then, I have started to learn a lot about other job experience and skills, reading a lot about products, data, customer service, sales, and even learning from traditional industries such as advertising and planning...

Since then, my mind has been opened up.

4. “Doing operations” comes first, “understanding operations” comes second

I have seen a case:

A teacher who teaches sketching thinks that his students’ drawing is terrible. So they did an experiment: they asked students to draw Picasso's paintings upside down. To his surprise, the finished product was very good. He asked his students why this was the case when the painting was done upside down but not when it was done right side up. Students said: We don’t know what we are drawing when we draw it backwards.

It suddenly dawned on him: Aren’t these just two different ways of thinking? One is lexical, analytical, and sequential, while the other is figurative, perceptual, and stimulating. Anyone can switch to another way of thinking in images.

Why do I give this example? I talked about operations four times a few years ago (and wrote four articles on how to understand operations), and some readers still ask me what operations are. I began to think deeply about this topic. It wasn't until I looked at the sketching teacher's test that I suddenly realized it.

So, if you want to learn real skills in the operations circle, you must first look at operations from outside of operations. Don’t worry about questions like “what is operation” anymore. Step out of it and do things first. The more you do, the more you will understand operation.

5. Think outside the box

During a training course on innovation, the teacher asked us to do an experiment. There are 6 people in a group, and each person draws a component of the face of the person next to him. When I draw a nose, no matter whose it is, it's always in the shape of the number 3 pointing upwards. This is the symbol system and memory system of childhood.

Conventional thinking has a powerful force. Even though you know the "reality", when you really pick up the pen, your hand will involuntarily draw an upward 3, which has no characteristics at all. In order to break this inertia of thinking, I began to try to practice breaking the inertia of thinking. I found that signature design is a good way to practice. I practice with each person's name and try to express the same name in various ways.

For example, when a person is doing homework, he uses conventional thinking and is very methodical. Otherwise, if he writes too messily, he will easily be scolded by the teacher. But when writing your own name, you can write it in a flamboyant and elegant manner. Signing is being true to yourself.

Ultimately, you have to remember one thing: learn to deliberately avoid your symbol system or cognitive notes, start from reality, and say goodbye to ideals. So, when you read other people's articles that are full of useful information , you find that you can't use them at all in reality. This is because the useful information articles have clamped your thinking. The author of the article said that he succeeded by doing this, but when you copied it, you found that it was far from the case. Therefore, useful information articles can only give you inspiration, because the products are different, the forms are different, the resources that can be used are different, and the people are different.

This also explains why some products with the same model successfully made it to Nasdaq, while others have never made any progress. The environment is different.

For example, many people wrote about the points system, so I started to observe and found that the points system can only be used by mature products. It seems inappropriate to use the points system for new products right from the start, as it can easily make the first batch of fans impure.

Therefore, creating a points system is valuable, but not the most important thing. Any points system is only intended to extend the user life cycle in the short term and should not be used as a mainstream operating method. The mainstream operating method is always to find a model that can run efficiently on a daily basis.

6. Interest comes first

I was chatting with a few friends, and after the chat I posted an article about "How operations can get results from copywriting ". A friend shared this sentence in his circle of friends:

"Teacher Han Li is operating with his life."

To be honest, when I saw this sentence, my eyes were wet. I clicked the thumbs-up button and accepted this argument frankly, because this sentence really proves my operational accomplishment: my deep love for operations.

"I bought your favorite minced meat and sour beans rice bowl."

I gave him a sidelong glance and said nothing.

"I also bought you your favorite Diamond cigarettes."

I quit smoking, I said to him angrily!

"I also bought a thread-bound copy of Jin Ping Mei, in traditional Chinese characters."

I still don't care

"Why don't we talk about operations?"

My eyes lit up: Help me up.

Later, I calmed down, thought about it carefully, and found that the deeper reason was: I am not a rich second-generation, and I have always been driven by "making a living". Now that you have embarked on the operations career train, you must reach the end and be responsible for yourself, for operations, and for up-and-coming talents. After all, interest is the best way to make a living.

I have been observing a great character recently, named Luo Fengchen, who is a colleague at work.

When I first met Luo Fengchen, I discovered that there were men in the world who were uglier than me, and I felt a sense of mutual sympathy for him. Later, we finally got an opportunity for business cooperation. He was responsible for the technical development of APP push , and I was responsible for the operation of this product. I got close to him and began to observe him, and summarized his three main characteristics: left-handedness, big appetite, and lustful.

It just so happens that I am left-handed when playing billiards, I have a good appetite, and there are a lot of beautiful women in the operations department. I started to prescribe the right remedy to win his favor.

For example, when eating, he ordered mutton soup with steamed buns and a plate of mutton and two steamed buns to take out. I saw that this guy was quite smart, so I followed his ordering ideas and ordered tomato scrambled eggs and tomato and egg rice. I also asked the restaurant owner for raw tomatoes, and then pretended nothing had happened.

When playing billiards, I deliberately let him win 5 out of 6 shots. This way he starts to become arrogant. When people become arrogant, they are in a good mood. At this time, if they make a request, it will usually be fulfilled immediately.

Also invite him to the operations team building, let him get to know more beautiful girls in the operations department and boost his enthusiasm.

After getting to know each other, I would inadvertently learn some Push product knowledge from him. Since I am making a push product, I often push some ideas to him that one should enjoy life while it lasts. Constantly establish the image of Li Ge as a great and glorious person.

Once, Jiang Xuerong paid me online to chat about operations late at night. He envied me because I often had beautiful women chatting with me and paying me, and he insisted that I give him half of the money, otherwise he would ignore business development. I suggested that we call our neighbor, Mr. Wang, to play Poker together.

During that all-night playing Poker, I witnessed with my own eyes how obsessed he was with push products. While playing cards, I don’t know what he ate, but he kept pushing out strange smells, and he had a strong business vibe. My neighbor Lao Wang and I were completely defeated. His card skills were average and he won purely by pushing the cards, which showed a lot of strategic intentions.

When asked if he did it on purpose, he said that in his eyes, everything was pushed. His ambition is to focus on Push for 60 years.

This is interest. As long as you are interested in something, you will always stand out from your peers quickly.

7. Be down-to-earth

Nowadays, the operating circle is "the mountains and rivers of the motherland are all red." The good news is that operators have become very humble because they have experienced the vicissitudes of life and gone through psychological torture. I have secretly observed my colleagues who are now successful in the operations circle, and very few of them act like big shots.

This is what I want to say: operations must be respectful. Since you have entered the circle, you must go deeper into the human world, laugh at the world, give operations a unique personality, and maintain a down-to-earth style. You cannot copy high-end knowledge from abroad or books, which can easily drive the profession of operations crazy.

What is down-to-earth: Only sing "The East is Red" and don't sing the "Internationale".