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Although the middle office is hot, it still lacks the practice of real guns and real guns.

Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “InfoQ” (ID: infoqchina) , the author He Shaozhen.

There are more and more articles about the “Jingjinger” in the market, but there are many concepts and few dry goods. After all, although the middle school is hot, it still lacks the practice of real guns. And just the author of this article is a practitioner of the middle school. His team spent a year building a middle platform. Although the medium-sized project was stopped because of the company’s strategy and organizational structure adjustment, there were too many gains, sentiments and reflections. I shared this article with a sense of China. Interested friends.

Amazing year

The beginning of the story

In March 2018, I officially became a product manager in the middle of Taiwan. In the past one or two months, I have had many communication with Sunner on the development of the middle office. We want to be an intermediate education product in the field of online education – EduOS, as the name suggests, is an online education operating system. The teaching tools of offline education include tables and chairs, blackboards, chalks, projectors and other teaching equipments, which are combined into a classroom of the physical world. The goal of Aidus is to build tables and chairs in online education so that they can be freely combined into an entire online teaching management. System (LMS) and form the standard.

This is a challenging job:

First of all, at that time, Zhongtai was a new concept in Internet companies. How to make a middle platform in an Internet company, the industry does not have much mature experience to refer to;

Secondly, the chimney-based teaching system in each business line has been running separately for a long time. Building a middle platform on this basis is like changing the engine in flight. (Of course, not every business runs. It is also fast, and this is the basis for Zhongtai to be able to manage among various business products.

The book published by Ali in 17 years, “Alibaba’s strategy in the middle of Taiwan” is the only theoretical basis we found at that time. The practice of Ali Zhongtai for several years, and the 17 years we have worked internally through a team of several people. The sexual exploration finally made us explain that this can be done when applying for the project.

The Zhongtai project was officially established. I became the first product manager after the project was established. Sunner is the responsible person and product architect. We plan to build the middle office in two years, so that Idos can support the development of various business lines and quickly incubate new business. However, after one year, at the end of February 2019, the Zhongtai project was stopped due to the adjustment of the company’s strategy and organizational structure.

I still remember that clearlyIn the day, everyone in the conference room discussed the future of the middle-office service that has been running online. I think there is a set of tagged in the countless code base in the cloud, and then it has not been updated again, which makes people feel embarrassed.

The harvest of the year

Reviewing this year, we made these things:

1. Completed the transformation of the middle school in many teaching services. These include some underlying basic services, such as account number, permissions, on-demand, live broadcast, etc.; also include some modules with teaching logic, such as live lessons, question banks, questionnaires, and so on. Each service can be made separately and made into a product that can be directly used by end users, similar to CCtalk, Questionnaire, and these services and modules already support each business product.

2. Summarize some standard specifications and routines for product design, product development, and project management in China. In accordance with these standards and routines, products and technicians without intermediate experience can also quickly develop medium-sized services and be used by business products.

Of course, we also have some things that have not been done, including:

1. The closed loop of the middle school teaching system. We have done some independent teaching modules, but we have not been able to fully combine these teaching modules with the standard of the Taiwanese, to form a course that can be systematically studied.

2. Quantification system for the value of China. Only by doing a good job of quantifying the value, we have completed the practice of the middle office in the business world, and the experience can be extended to the inside and outside of the company.

3. Exploration of commercialization of China Taiwan. I personally hope that I can make Zhongtai a commercial enterprise service, not just an internally supported product. After the stoppage of the Zhongtai project, I am still educating the ToB industry. I often wonder: If a mature Zhongtai can help the current problem? Now it seems that in the current domestic business environment, a good middle office, the value of its internal service is still much higher than the value of direct external output, fortunately, Sunner suppressed me. I want to be quick to commercialize.

If we can have two years, I don’t know if we can reach the initial goal, or do we know if there is still a chance to continue in the future? But I am almost certain that: China and Taiwan will become more and more important when the Internet and traditional industries are deeply integrated. In addition to calling the name of the middle, it may also be called platform, middleware, shared services, and so on.

In addition, for me personally, I should say my harvest this year.A lot:

1. After entering the Internet industry, small steps have become the norm. During this time in the middle of the stage, I was able to temporarily release the pressure of the business, to design the product structure, abstract, draw UML, and spend time thinking carefully according to the almost idealized standard. I am not such a person, this is considered to be deliberate practice.

2. As a newcomer to the online education industry, I have the opportunity to participate in all the education businesses involved in the entire business, including K12, Adult, ToC, ToB, and let me have a better online education industry. A comprehensive understanding of the interests.

3. Having got to know a bunch of good and interesting little friends, everyone has to do challenging things together and have the memories in this article.

are talking about China, what is China?

The concept of the middle station

中台 is a very hot concept in the IT industry in recent years (it is best to add a “IT industry” limit, because there are business colleagues who thought that I was studying cross-strait relations, haha), there are many articles from the product , technology, organization and other perspectives to explain what is the middle. For a new concept of rapid change, it is difficult to have a standard definition. A senior executive in Ali Zhongtai mentioned that Ali is still a distance away from the middle platform he defined.

The definition is very cautious, but many times I don’t give definitions and I can’t continue to talk, so I have also defined the “software platform for serving a vertical field” to the middle office in an internal sharing. In making this definition, I refer to the concept of cloud computing. Cloud computing is a general-purpose service, so what is the difference between central Taiwan and cloud computing? According to IaaS/PaaS/SaaS, the field of service is becoming more and more vertical. Referring to this method, I will define the middle station between PaaS and SaaS. The main reasons are as follows:

1. PaaS provides a service where a client’s programmer uses a PaaS service through secondary development to finally complete a function for the end user. The versatility of PaaS needs to be very strong in order to get a large enough market, such as IM, video cloud services, etc., so PaaS often has no interface.

2. The service provided by SaaS does not require customer development, only the service is required, and it can be used directly by configuring it in the management background. However, SaaS services are often targeted at a segmentation area, and their customization capabilities are relatively weak. Even if it’s like nailing, it’s the most common service in the enterprise, and it’s the opening of corporate services.Ecology, target customers are also mainly covering small and medium enterprises. Large customers with strong customization needs often need to use the IM PaaS service to develop internal IM tools from the main.

3. PaaS and SaaS are positioned outside of the service and must have a very low cost of ownership. Even for PaaS services that need to be accessed through technology, the access costs must be low enough, the interface is clear, and the documentation is complete.

4. The middle office is first positioned as an internal customer of the service company. Due to the limitation of this scope, the versatility of the middle office can be realized under many constraints, and the serviceable field is wider than SaaS. For example, even if it is the same e-commerce, the sites of Taobao, Tmall, Juhua, Feiyu, Feifei are different, and Ali Sharing Division serves multiple businesses in the middle and middle floors. In addition, since the users of the middle office are internal programmers, everyone has a similar background and can communicate frequently, so the cost of service access can be made higher than that of PaaS for external customers.

中台VS First Principles

A lot of information will refer to these two examples when introducing the concept of the middle platform:

1. The strategy of the US special forces plus the aircraft carrier: a special force within 10 people is investigating at the forefront of the battle, making independent decisions, and once the target is discovered, quickly call the powerful medium-sized aircraft carrier group to destroy it. Strike.

2. Finnish famous game company SuperCell has developed phenomena-level mobile games such as tribal conflicts and royal wars. The entire company was more than 200 people, and it was acquired by Tencent for 8.6 billion US dollars. In SuperCell, a game development team averages 3-7 people, but there is a powerful mid-game support that can develop 50 games in parallel and then generate one or two classics through “internal horse racing”. It is said that Ma Yun, after leading many senior officials from Ali to visit SuperCell, returned to launch the strategy of Dazhongtai at the entire group level in Ali.

At the same time, I want to compare another concept of “first principles.” The first principle is also a very hot word in recent years, and it has become a big killer for subversive innovation. One of the most typical examples is Elon Musk. The Silicon Valley Iron Man, who is also in charge of Solar, SpaceX and Tesla, is redesigning and manufacturing the Falcon rocket from the most basic physics principles and is leading the human race to Mars.

In the above example, both the first principles and the middle platform bring innovation and success, but in fact the two are in some sortThe extent is contradictory. The first principle is often to break the original experience, jump out of the comfort circle, and think from the bottom logic. And 中台 is to abstract and share the common abilities, solidify the successful experience, and invest limited manpower into innovation.

The principle of first sexuality is the essence of the operation of the physical world. Without the constraints of time, the whole world can be derived. If the earth is to perish, only a piece of paper information can be preserved. On this piece of paper is the first principle of earth civilization. Based on these, it is possible to reshape the Earth civilization, but it may take tens of millions of years.

But the functioning of human society is often time-bound. If I only know that 1+1=2, I need to complete calculus, and I may have to spend my life. Therefore, relying on the experience of predecessors and one’s own experience is the basic element of the efficient operation of human society. It is placed in the IT industry. These experiences are called Zhongtai. Experience can often lead to efficiency improvement, cost improvement, quality improvement, but also can bring bias, inertial thinking mode, as well as the middle platform.

Why do we have to be in the middle?

With the publication of the book “Ali Zhongtai Service” in 17 years, China and Taiwan began to enter the field of more people, and gradually became popular in 18 years. But at that time, there were not many articles and sharing on the Internet. I remember that when I was preparing to share in the company, I did not spend much effort to read almost all relevant content.

By the year, in 2019, the heat in the middle of the country rose rapidly, and the level of popularity was somewhat similar to the 16-year VR, 18-year blockchain. At the same time, I also heard that there are still business companies that have not yet figured out the business model of their core business. This is actually not clear why it is necessary to solve the problem of building a middle platform or a middle platform:

First of all, China Mobile is a shared service that supports multiple business products of the company. If your company has only one business product, you can only do a good job of architecture design. There is no actual business scenario of multiple business products. Input is difficult to make directly in the middle of the stage.

Secondly, the goal of the middle office is to improve the research and development efficiency of business products, but in order to achieve this goal, need to reduce the efficiency at a certain time, the length of time depends on the system. The gap between complexity and team abilities.

When the company needs to develop the second and third products as the business develops, there may be two ways to build the middle platform in this case:

1. The new products and technology architecture are inherited from the current products, constantly adapting to the new products by optimizing the current product architecture, allowing the Zhongtai service to naturally precipitate. The precondition for this situation is when doing the first product.The service architecture design is done well. Even so, in the second product, it is very likely that there is still a detour, which cannot satisfy the desire of new products for rapid iteration and trial and error. But when it comes to the third and fourth products, it will get faster and faster.

2. The new product and technology architectures are all redesigned, so each product is about the same speed and the highest level of flexibility. But each product is difficult to borrow technically from the previous products. When the team members change and the products are more and more, the maintenance and development of multi-branch highlights the problem of insufficient manpower. At this time, it is necessary to build a middle platform. This is also the problem we faced at the time.

My business unit has been in development for many years and has five business product lines. These five product lines started from a product line and gradually developed over time. As with most R&D teams, when dealing with a rapidly changing market environment, we were not able to do the underlying accumulation of the system, but instead chose a path that seemed simpler at the time: copied from a set of code Another set of code to support new products.

After many years we have five separate systems to support five business products. I can’t judge what the entire department would actually develop if it did the underlying system architecture. I only know that when five products are going to run fast on five systems, the complexity and cost of research and development are too high. In order to solve this problem, we decided to be a middle platform.

Of course, we can have another option – cut down most products and focus on one or two. But everyone knows that in fact, the real difficulty is not to decide what to do, but to decide not to do anything. This decision is actually more difficult than doing it in the middle. In addition, as a mature company, it is necessary to have a product matrix that can form a synergy to support the entire company’s strategic advancement, so multi-product parallelism is an inevitable choice for the company to develop to a certain stage, and doing the middle platform is never Standing in the perspective of one of the products to solve the problem, but standing in the perspective of multi-product synergy to see the company’s strategic development.

From the perspective of corporate strategy, Alibaba’s Zeng Ming put forward the idea of ​​watching the decade and making a year in the book “Intelligent Business”. In an increasingly complex and rapidly changing market environment, companies have been unable to achieve a five-year accurate plan and implement it. It is necessary to look at the final thinking of the decade to see what the industry will eventually look like, and to develop the company’s vision and direction.

Develop a plan by doing a one-year method, quickly landing some things, and then quickly adjust the direction according to the effect, update the plan, and move toward the final stage. To achieve this, the accumulation of basic capabilities is very important, and the central Taiwan is also a very important part.

From the perspective of the product team, a built-in intermediate platform can bring straightThe value is:

• Cost savings. When new features need to be developed, it is likely that this function has been provided in the middle of the platform. The product manager provides configuration parameters and the R&D direct access service can be used.

• Improve efficiency. In the development of new functions in the middle of the platform, only need to refer to standards and documents, a newcomer can also quickly get started, and this new feature can also be directly used by other products, resulting in compounding effect.

• Quality improvement. From two perspectives:

• Design quality. The middle-class team is usually divided into functional modules. Teams that are responsible for a certain functional module are often more willing to break through some difficulties and become the team that knows the most functional modules. For example, the most popular teaching method in the field of education is the live class, and the live broadcast function is a functional module with a high threshold. In order to make a live broadcast function suitable for business development, it is necessary to have a deeper understanding of cloud computing, computer network, live teaching methods, live broadcast operations and other aspects. This requires the team to have a certain degree of accumulation, not a few people from a business product research and development team can quickly come out.

• R&D quality. The services of the middle office are often provided to multiple business products, and failures will cause large-scale problems. Therefore, quality assurance is often the lifeline of the service of the middle office. Every service that sinks to the middle office will not only undergo routine testing, but also have stricter requirements on the code review, unit test coverage and other indicators to ensure high quality delivery.

How do we do the middle of the stage?

Product design level

With the growing popularity of China and Taiwan, how to become a mid-level product manager has also become a new career development hotspot. Recently, I have also seen an online mid-level product manager course. The product manager of the middle office is a type of product manager of the B-end. It has the general requirements of the B-end. For example, it is good at abstract modeling, has certain R&D technical skills, and understands UML. I will not start here. However, in terms of the characteristics of the medium-sized service products of the central office, there will be some different requirements for the product managers of the middle and the middle. In my personal experience, I think three things are very important:

1. How does a mid-level product manager design a good user experience? Due to educationThe requirements of the service of the station are from the front-end to the back-end (the specific reasons are introduced in the technical part). Therefore, the functions designed by the product manager of the education center need to directly face the end users and also need to maintain a good user experience.

   

   In the above picture, the capability requirements of the business product manager are biased toward the market side. The ability requirements of the mid-level product manager are biased toward the R&D side, and the green part is required for both types of product managers. Education in Taiwan has always had requirements for product managers, and must go to the source of demand not only to take second-hand demand. In terms of personal ability, the difficulty of this is that it takes a lot of effort to familiarize yourself with different scenes.

   The product manager of the middle office is divided into functional modules (such as question bank and live broadcast), but the actual usage scenario is the whole process of the user using the whole product, and does not only look at a certain functional module, so each module The product manager needs to understand all the scenarios of all the supported businesses in order to design the relevant modules. At the same time, the education industry is fragmented. The scenarios before the different services are quite different. How can a mid-level product manager of a module quickly know all the scenarios of all services? This is a problem.

2. Where is the dividing line between the product manager and technology of the middle office? Maybe this is not just a question to be considered by a mid-level product manager, but for a long time in education, my question is stronger than ever before. There are too many product designs in the middle of Taiwan, which can be considered by R&D personnel with product thinking, but more often, it is necessary to organize the R&D personnel to design the product manager with a step-by-step technical approach.

   An extreme example: In order to reduce the difficulty of configuration management of each business product at each end (front end, back end, mobile end) accessing the middle office service, I have considered improving the scattered code in the middle office service. Configuration management in the middle, centralized management and flexible configuration. In addition, it also expanded the need to support the future payment of the Taiwanese service. In order to describe the requirements clearly, in addition to describing various scenarios and functions, the PRD I wrote describes how to use pseudocode. Although the level of pseudocode may be despised by the research and development colleagues, it achieves the purpose of clearly expressing the problem.

   This article I don’t intend to advocate pseudo-code in PRD. The main thing I want to explain is that the mid-level product manager should not expect to have clear boundaries with technology. It should be firmly step by step, and also Bring product thinking to the technology and build a bridge.

3. How does a mid-level product manager design a new functional module that meets the needs of all parties and promotes it in eachUsed on business products? In addition to requiring product managers to have strong professional skills, they also need to have strong initiative, communication skills, and even business abilities. Every effort is made to plant the seeds of the Taiwanese companies. The relevant experience is described in the section “The Challenge of the Medium-Taiwan Strategy to the Organizational Structure” in this article.

Technical level

At the beginning of the design of the middle-office architecture, we have positioned that education in China needs to provide more than just back-end services. On the one hand, there is not much difference between pure back-end services and PaaS services; The service attributes that the station hopes to provide are very strong, and the service complexity is much higher than that of common IM, video cloud and other common PaaS services. If it is completely used through the back-end open interface, the number of interfaces will be very large, and the called logic will be called. Relationships can also be complex and the cost of use can be much higher than common PaaS services.

So we hope that the education center will provide front-end and one-end services, and finally show the front-end modules/components to the users. Ideally, the front page of a business product can be used as a front-end module of a functional service in the middle of the system. This approach maximizes the value of the service in the middle, but it also brings great difficulty to the design of the service in the middle. After a year of repeated suffering, we have also compiled several design principles:

1. Unification of data structure is the bottom line

Ideally, the education center will build a module, and each business product can be used perfectly. However, in reality, no product manager and R&D have such capabilities. Repeatedly, it is necessary. Even sometimes, the education center needs to do a function that is not clear in requirements. (I usually oppose the new functions of the middle office to complete the business products. Demand verification, ROI is too low). When faced with such a situation, the bottom line that must be adhered to is the unification of the data structure. R&D students know that data migration is a big pit, so as long as the data structure is uniform, any logical and interactive changes are acceptable.

2. The common boundary of the front-end interface

The unification of the data structure and the sharing of the back-end services are easy to agree on the idea, and the hard part is only executed. But the idea of ​​a unified front-end interface is in a heated debate from start to finish. For product managers and designers of a ToC product, they are often very sensitive to interaction and vision, which is the most important reason why ToC products can retain users at first sight.

But in order to achieve reuse, the middle-station service is often difficult to meet the needs of each business in the details of the interaction and visual layer. And at this level of user experience, there is often no one who can convince anyone. For a design product manager, you can’tControlling the design in the interface of your own product is simply being shackled. So the debate on the front-end interface unification is fierce. I can imagine that I have a swing in the position of this matter. After the entanglement of multiple cases, we promoted a few things, dare not say that the conflict was resolved, at least improved the problem:

1. Promoting an interactive visual specification that updates products across the division. There is no doubt about the establishment of the specification. In the case that the interaction specification is not perfect and is not strictly enforced, many times the product manager needs to worry about some interaction details: for example, how should the number of words in the edit box exceed the limit? And so on. When the interaction specification is perfect and the Axure component is made, the general product manager has the possibility to upgrade to a product designer. Based on the specifications and components, a highly completed interactive draft can be made. The visual specification is the condition for the unified brand image of each product in the whole business department, and it is also the basis for unifying the front-end components. It is ok to design a consensus at the front-end component level.

2. Differentiated according to the user’s foreground and management background. The user foreground is used by the end user, and is also the entrance of a large number of C-end users directly contacting the product. Users of different services often have different needs in interaction and visual. The management background is often used by some special users, such as administrators. The number of such users is relatively small and the background operations are not so frequent. And such users have the attributes of the B-end user in the operation management background, and are often operated within the department, and the sensitivity to the function is higher than the visual experience.

   Therefore, the education center can be kept as uniform as possible in the front-end interface of the management background, and the user front page will be considered to let the various business products do it themselves. Of course, it is easy to find a counterexample, so it is only a guiding direction in the design process, not a theorem.

3. Differentiated according to the age level of the target user of the business. The business unit has products for users of different ages, such as adults, K12, and younger children. The younger the user, the higher the interaction and visual requirements, the iQiyi also launched the Chibabu for children. The entire interaction and vision have been redesigned. Therefore, the education center should be as common as possible in the adult-oriented products, and do not consider the reuse of any front-end interface with products for the younger generation.

3. Front-end and back-end direct connection

The users of the education middle-office are the programmers of other business product lines of the department. Although they are all internal users, it is very important to reduce the user’s use cost. The organizational structure section will be described in detail. In order to promote the use of education in the internal business, it is necessary to minimize the userThe cost of use.

In the first year, when we set up the service verification feasibility of the mid-level training team, the service architecture was designed like this:

The back end of the business product is obtained from the back end of the education center, and then assembled to the front end module of the education center through the front end of the business product. This kind of scheme is actually equivalent to the development of a module according to the division of labor to two teams to develop, in theory, can meet the needs of any business. In the early days when the demand was not so certain and the business was relatively small, it was feasible to explore in this way. But when there are more business products to access, this architecture will bring a few troublesome problems:

• The front-end and back-end of the business products need to be directly connected to the front-end and back-end of the education center. It is necessary to have a deep understanding of the interface of the education center, and the access cost of the service is very high.

• Because there are too many interfaces exposed in the back end of education, it is easy to change during subsequent updates, resulting in code changes and regression testing for all connected business products.

In order to solve the above problems, we changed the architecture design of the front and back directly:

In this way:

• The front and back ends of the education center are directly interacting and can be run independently.

• You only need to access the front-end layer, and the access cost is greatly reduced.

• As long as the limited interface guarantees stability, the upgrade of the education center is not perceived for business products.

Directly connected architectures will increase the difficulty of implementing features in certain situations. For example, when you want to display data that is not available in the backend service in the education front-end module, you will face the problem of having data. But the overall benefits are far greater than the difficulty of increasing, we also basically determine the structure of the direct connection between the front and the rear is the preferred way to educate the Taiwanese service.

Central Taiwan strategy for organizingConstruction challenge

Is the support of the top management important?

I have read an article “Re-understanding the strategy and dilemma of the China-Taiwan-China-Taiwan platform”, which provides a good introduction to the needs of the China-Taiwan organization at the organizational level. The most important one is that the middle platform is self-topping. Next, the middle office must be supported by the top.

As with most commercial divisions, the KPIs of my division have been quantifiable revenue data. In the long period of time when the middle-office project started, we did not directly help the KPI, and even hindered the KPI in the local time.

Most employees are hard to stand at a certain height to do a plan of “watching for ten years, doing one year”, especially when one thing and the immediate KPI are difficult to strike a balance, the work of the middle office will be affected. Challenges in all aspects. Therefore, the firm support of the top is the first necessary condition for the strategy of the Taiwan-China. The value of the middle office is conditional. After the completion of the construction, there is still a chance to enjoy the results. This judgment also needs high-level completion.

In addition, the high-level also needs to promote the construction of some norms, such as interactive specifications, visual specifications, and visual front-end component specifications. Under the constraints of these specifications, the difficulty of setting up service in the middle office will be greatly reduced.

Is support for each business product important?

High-level support is the foundation, but in the actual work of China and Taiwan and business products, countless collisions need to be promoted by the influence of the Taiwanese platform. Therefore, how to get influence in various businesses and promote access to services is also crucial. So how to promote business products to access the China-Taiwan service?

1. Direct benefits are labor cost savings. For a single business, what they are most concerned about is the cost that can be saved by accessing the mid-station service. This calculation method will be introduced in the later section “Quantification of the value of the middle platform”.

2. Instillation of ideas. In addition to the direct support of the senior management, the responsible persons of the middle office will occasionally give brainstorming to the business leaders and partners on various occasions, and advocate the idea of ​​sharing services.

   The first thing that must be pulled is the R&D staff. Good R&D staff is code-clean, even if he has to write disgusting code in some cases. If you talk to them about abstraction, architecture, and reuse, nature will produce intimacy.

   Face business product managers often need to exchange – I can support your partial customization needs in the middle-end function design, but you have to promise to access another service, I can even Manpower helps you to access.

3. Form an ecosystem. When iOS and Android have become the world’s two largest mobile operating systems, no matter how much developers want to develop according to Windows Phone standards, they can only choose iOS or Android, which is the power of the ecosystem. In the same way, after the middle station unifies the basic services of each business, no matter how personalized the upper-level business functions are, it cannot jump out of the limitations of the basic services.

   For a business, it is almost impossible to abandon the underlying services of the middle platform and rebuild a system. This is not worthwhile. No matter how strong the subjective will of the product manager, it is difficult to get support under the pressure of ROI. Of course, each product initially needs a batch of seed users to achieve a cold start. The middle-office service also needs to have seed customers to polish the products. So who should we cooperate with? Everyone is accustomed to looking for strategic key business products and making benchmark customers. However, in fact, the key business products are often manpower-rich and run fast. It is very difficult for a medium-sized service that is still not perfect to directly cooperate with such products.

   The key businesses don’t care about the cost, and they don’t care about the quality. They care more about speed. This is in contradiction with the positioning of the Taiwanese platform itself. Therefore, the middle-station service should instead seek potential business products for cooperation. Such businesses have the desire to express themselves and win attention, but they are suffering from insufficient resources. They are very willing to use the power of the Taiwanese to do things.

   Of course, the risk that China and Taiwan need to support such a business product is that this business product may not be long before it is cut off by the boss. Therefore, how to choose a product with potential, this is the place where the responsible person in charge of the central Taiwan can have a keen judgment in strategy.

Keep power and do important and urgent things

Because Internet companies have been convinced for many years that they are “unbreakable,” teams tend to do the most obvious business value when doing prioritization. There are a lot of important and urgent tasks that are left behind and never mentioned again. However, there are different requirements for the middle-class product team. The mid-level products must retain their strength and always do some basic and important non-emergency matters.

It is as if the company wants to do it for a long time, in addition to the continuous investment in business, we must retain enough manpower to do basic research. Recently, Huawei’s Hess chip and Hongmeng operating system are the best examples. .

When we are in the middle of the stage, no matter how much pressure the external business needs, we should always maintain a small team to do the basic components and specifications. For example, in the set of business products, the permission system can still run, but some functions can not be perfectly supported, we follow the RBAC way.Designed a new role privilege system, provided data migration methods, and finally laid the foundation for new business module functional development.

Quantification of the value of the middle platform

Even if we all believe that one thing is correct, value quantification is still one of the most important things. The mid-stage is a ToB service that is essentially a cost-saving and efficiency improvement, but because the middle-class customers are programmers of internal business products, the quantification of this value becomes more complicated than a CRM system for sales.

The central office is a shared service provided to multiple business services. Any one of the central office services can save costs for the business. Therefore, the more access is made, the greater the overall cost savings. At the same time, because each business has different priorities in the entire business department, the value of the medium-sized service that is accessed by high-priority services is even greater. This is intuitive, but how do you quantify this value? Provide the following calculation methods:

Assumption:

• Priority factor for each business in the business unit = a1, a2, a3….;

• The cost saved by the middle-station service after being accessed by a certain service (People’s Day) = The cost of the self-developed service of the service + The operation and maintenance of the service itself – The cost of accessing the service of the service to the intermediate-station service.

It can be inferred that the cost savings for the entire department after each service is developed is:

• Total cost savings = (a1*business 1 savings + a2*business 2 savings + …) – mid-stage development costs – data migration (adaptation Layer development)) – Zhongtai operation and maintenance.

Because the middle-seat team has to face the needs of multiple businesses at the same time, according to the above formula, we can also get some basic rules for judging the priority of demand:

• Departmental strategy, which is the coefficient of priority for the business. Obviously the demand priority from strategic business is higher than other common business;

• The level of demand is reliable. This includes two levels:

  Is it a core requirement? Is it a pseudo demand?

  Is the business that makes the demand reliable? Is it possible to be killed soon?

• The degree of fit with the goals of the Taiwanese platform. This is also very understandable: CRRC is not a business outsourcing team, and China and Taiwan need to have their own ideas and plans.

It should be noted that although there is such a calculation formula, we do not directly quantify each function in actual work. The main reason lies in the fact that during the one-year formal establishment of education in Taiwan, the team has been exploring the routines of the design of the middle and the middle, such as how to better meet the demand, quickly access, and do not perceive the business at the operation and maintenance level. . Only after these discussions have been clarified can the medium-sized service be able to significantly help save costs. Therefore, quantification is only a reference for a few core members of the team to do planning, and is not directly published as the value generated.

Green mountains and green waters, goodbye to rivers and lakes

It has been almost five months since the dissolution of the education group in the middle of the group. When I wrote this article, I recalled the year of Zhongtai and I was filled with emotion.

Thanks to the two directors, Sunner and Genify, Sunner, as the head of the middle-office business and product architect, personally built the underlying foundation and business abstraction of the entire education center, including many unique names including “Ados”. It was all taken by him. He is my direct teacher. His belief in the success of Idos is the most important reason why I can persist in the last few times. Genify is the R&D leader and technical architect. From the abstract business model to the actual executable technical solution to the formation of technical specifications, there is still a bridge between experience and imagination. He is this one. bridge.

Thanks to colleagues who have fought together and have not had time to work together. These thoughts and recollections belong to each of us. Thanks to the department boss, without his support, it is impossible for the middle office to establish a project. The green hills are not changed, the green water is flowing, and he is goodbye to the rivers and lakes.

Author: He Shaozhen, Netease has a senior product manager at MOOC China University, focusing on online education and corporate services.