Jobs' Fence

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How did Jobs develop his pursuit of success? When he was a child, he and his adoptive father built a fence in the backyard. His father asked that the back of the fence be carefully painted. Jobs said, "Who will look at the back of the fence?" His father replied, "You will see it." For large companies, what is the back of the fence? It is the page that every user can access. If you don't pay attention, users will see it. This is true for large companies, and of course small companies are also true.

The story of the fence of Jobs is reflected in the book "Steve Jobs" written by Walter Isaacson. The original text is as follows:

OneofthemostimportantthingshetaughtStevewas[that]it'simportanttobeagreatcraftsman,evenforthepartsunseen.Whentheywerebuildingafence,hesaid,"Youhavetomakethebackofthefencethatpeoplewo n'tseelookjustasbeautifulasthefront,justlikeagreatcarpenterwouldmakethebackofachestofdrawers...Eventhough otherswon'tseeit,youwillknowit'sthere,andthatwillmakeyoumoreproudofyourdesign."

I quoted (and modified) this story actually to say the following sentence, the so-called "back side of the fence."

Whether it is a large company or a small company's website, there will be some "historical relics", those pages are so old that they seem to be from the last century, and some may actually be from the last century.

The more historical relics there are, the more it proves that this is a declining website. Just look at Tianya, Kaixin, Xunlei, etc. and you will know why these companies are in the current situation. Even giant companies like Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba are in the same situation.

Tencent has always attached great importance to product experience, but good experience is reflected in star products, on the surface. Not many people pay attention to the back of the product. To give another example, a friend gave me a QQ number last year. I applied for a security code several times, but I got lost in the process and filled out a lot of forms repeatedly, but I still couldn't pass. After more than a year, the process and experience have not improved at all. They tell you that there is a security problem, but you can't apply for security code and change your password, and then continue to bear the security risk. It's such a strange cycle.

Do Baidu's webmaster tools and the advertising alliance backend for enterprises have any user experience? They just implement the functions. In some scenarios, you have to go through repeated troubles to complete a process. The improvement in usability after the product is released is almost zero. What do thousands of product managers do on a daily basis? Do you feel fulfilled in your work because of the employer brand or because of what you do?

As for Taobao and Alipay, the resources that product managers and engineers spent on the homepage and product-related display pages are probably more than the sum of all other resources. For example, the payment page of Alipay that I reported on Weibo, that third-party payment page has not been updated for three or four years. There are a lot of problems in one page, and a large number of users need to use it every day. The pain of users can be imagined.

There are also various so-called "platforms" for third-party developers to use as backends. Can they be used? All the energy is spent on painting the facade, and the quality of the inside is completely poor. Due to space limitations, I will not go into details. If anyone is not convinced, I can take some time to talk to you about your products that are not up to standard.

It’s not that they don’t have the ability to do these things, nor do they have the resources, but they lack such awareness and motivation. Doing such things will not improve their performance or make their KPI numbers more beautiful. Such problems exist in many companies. These things cannot be driven from the top down, but can only be improved spontaneously from the bottom up.

In fact, those relics are not unimportant, but they just don’t seem to account for a large proportion from the perspective of big data. However, users still visit them for certain reasons. What makes users scratch their heads may be a backend submission form, a customer service complaint page, or an outdated business process. For users, it is all their expectations of being able to interact with your product, and even their last hope.

Whether you are working on technology or products, if you leave such relics there without making improvements, your work will not bring you any sense of pride. Work without pride cannot inspire enthusiasm, and you naturally cannot find anything worth challenging. In the end, you will become a craftsman on an assembly line, a donkey pushing the mill day after day.

Go paint the backs of those fences until you're really satisfied.