Talking about the focus, difference and collaboration of products and operations

Editor’s note: This article comes from WeChat public account “Products meet operations” (ID: alden_xu), author Xu Kuangpeng.

In many companies, there are often many conflicts between the product and the operation of the two major lines. We often hear product managers complain that “you look at my well-designed products, how to operate like this!”. I often hear the operation say, “This product is doing so badly, how does this work for me!”

Products and operations, born to be a pair of love each other, but they are dependent. The industry often said that products set up and operate singing. This sentence can quite show that a product to be successful, both inseparable from the product, can not be separated from operations.

First, the evolution of product and operational relationship awareness

Review my understanding of product and operational collaboration in three phases:

When I was responsible for the Ctrip tourism food business in the early years, the product and operation team in the department were relatively far apart. The core focus of the product was how to build the food channel page, how to optimize the information structure, display the selling point information, and how to proceed from the user interest point of view. Do a good job of POI display and display; and the focus of the operation is to build a gourmet talent system, pull the seed UGC, promote evaluation production, and so on. The two teams interacted relatively little, each focused, busy, and there were not many conflicts that needed coordination.

Talk about the classification, difference and focus of product and operation

In the No. 1 shop and the Jingdong period, as the person in charge of the front-end product, I was able to strongly feel the frequent collisions between products and operations. In addition to the eternal priority battle, typical conflicts such as:

  • Operation wants to develop a richer and more promising resource. Products want to clarify the positioning of each resource, do more than do more;

  • Operation hopes that all resources will be greatly promoted when the operation is promoted, and the product hopes to properly retain the entry of the user with fixed habits;

  • Operation wants to expose the product as much as possible (such as clicking the homepage to kill the item to enter the list page instead of the single product page), the product wants to set the product access path according to the user’s psychological appeal;

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  • Operation hopes to promote sales through the shaping of price perception, and the product hopes to foldDeduction of authenticity ensures experience…

In a nutshell, operations pay more attention to short-term sales, and products are more focused on long-term user experience. Of course, this is also my value as a product director.

Talk about the classification, difference and focus of product and operation

When Amazon China was responsible for the whole station product and central operation, my own product thinking has been greatly integrated with the operational appeal, and it has also clearly reflected in the work guidance of the product and operation team. The operation has really entered a realm of harmonious cooperation and complementarity. Of course, this also benefits from Amazon’s powerful underlying data system, which enables clear multi-dimensional data support behind all actions, and there are no more and better subjective disputes.

Talk about the classification, difference and focus of product and operation

Second, classification and focus of products and operations

1. Product

Products are essentially long-term effects that require an in-depth understanding of the company’s business model and business nature.

The core of product manager thinking is often the following:

  • Who is our user? What are their characteristics? Why do they need our products?

  • What are the special concerns of our users, and what are they really not really concerned about?

  • How can I guide the user to be lazy, easy to get started, and simpler to think about?

  • How did they use our products? What time is it? Are there sensitive factors? How to make a decision?

  • Are we making money by selling or selling services directly, or building a social relationship chain, or realizing traffic through user size and stickiness?

  • At the moment, is our core appeal to expand the scale, or to pursue sales, or to pursue profitability?

  • How do we build loyalty? Why are users coming? whyLoss?

  • Where is the real pain point for users? Why are they excited?

  • Who are our competitors? In contrast, where do we remember the user? How to differentiate from competitors?

Product managers need to combine the business environment and industry characteristics, analyze user psychology and core appeals in depth, find pain points and excitement points, design products that meet user psychological demands and solve user pain points, and realize the company’s business model and interests.

In terms of design, the product pursues the user’s habits while pursuing the innovation of the play method, attaches importance to creativity, and attaches importance to the “Wow effect”. It is particularly important that products with different purposes should be designed with different targeted KPI systems, such as sales product evaluation conversion, sticky products considering revisit frequency and activity, social product evaluation forwarding rate, propagation radius and exposure conversion rate. ,and many more. Indicators cannot be simply generalized.

When it comes to product classification, in addition to vertical domain classification and to B, to C, from the working level, the products are also divided into the front, middle and back. Below is a simple definition that I combed.

  • The front-end products: Everyone is a user of various websites and apps. It is easy to understand the front-end products. It is mainly responsible for interacting with the C-side and requires a deep understanding of the users. Psychology, guide users to use the path, manage user behavior, create usage scenarios and core lines, create a variety of front-end channels and pages, and complete consumer guidance (in a broad sense, purchase of services, content reading, purchase of financial products) All belong to consumption). Simply speaking, the direct interaction with the end user can be considered as the foreground scope.

  • 中台产品: The Taiwanese platform has different definitions. Commonly, there are business middle stations, technical middle stations, and data middle stations. Take Alibaba’s definition of large and medium-sized Taiwan as an example. It contains core units such as commodity center, user center, store center, evaluation center, trading center, and search center. It combs and abstracts various core data of the entire platform and models it as Each system model encapsulates the core business logic, shares data resources with various front-ends (such as Taobao, Tmall, PC, Mobile), standardizes the core elements of the foreground display content, and supports the front-end flexible display configuration. There are also defined systems for various business management teams, such as the promotion definition system, the activity page building system, the advertising system, the commodity entry system, the report statistics system, and so on.

  • Background products: interaction with the front-end user, middle platformThe partial business logic is different, and the background is generally more technically implemented and the underlying architecture. For example, rights management system, cluster management system, security encryption system, wind control system, data statistics system, and so on. I am the background of the front-end products. When I talk about the products, I will be more inclined to the front-end products and user analysis. I also ask the brothers in the middle and back-end products to forgive the bias. I agree with the idea that products are set up and operate singing, but I don’t agree with the idea that products have children and run children. In my opinion, it should be the product and operation to have children together, raise children together, and work together to carefully brew and implement the “children”.

The industry does not feel absolute in the distinction between the middle and the back, and the boundaries are not absolutely clear.

2. Operations

Operation, relative products, pay more attention to short-term medium-term effects, more is to give full play to the value of existing channels and tools, and make a final blow to users to achieve immediate business goals. And as a daily job, carry out continuous inventory of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly trends, customer demand changes, actual sales/visit data, and adjust and replace goods, content and copy at any time to achieve a continuous best effect.

Take a simple example of selling goods:

The product needs to be carefully considered: how to design the shelf, three or five layers, white or red, square or round, how to lay the user shopping line to let customers quickly find the goods to complete the purchase, or let the customers go shopping The more you want to stay in the store, stay longer.

Operational work is similar to the daily distribution of goods on the shelves. What logic is used to choose what goods to put on the shelves every day, what goods are placed on the first floor, the density is sparse or sparse, how to display price tags, which kind of promotion, Whether the promotional items should be highlighted in yellow, whether the goods are arranged according to the category, or by the crowd, or according to the scene, or by price, after yesterday’s sales, today decide which goods to withdraw, which goods plus display pits, Etc., etc.

Operational work is more routine, and it is necessary to quickly adjust the operating strategy based on yesterday’s or even real-time sales data to control the pace and intensity to achieve the best sales results.

Operations are also divided into many different directions, such as:

  • Product Operation

    In the e-commerce platform, commodity operation is a very basic and core operational position. This function is often found in the sales team. It requires an in-depth understanding of commodity knowledge, is responsible for selecting products, and is setting and continuously optimizing the categories at all levels. Category, establish a commodity library, replace goods according to seasonality and consumption trends, establish basic information of goods, collect and sort out the characteristics and highlights of goods, summarize selling points, explore effective sales and promotion models, and propose and optimize the display of the front desk. suggestions.

  • Event Management

    After these years of education on Taobao, Jingdong and other platforms, Chinese consumers’ buying habits have been highly promoted and driven by activities. According to statistics, about 90% of the sales of e-commerce platforms are from goods that are in the promotion. For this reason, e-commerce platforms are often full of activities of all sizes, all year round.

    When I first started the docking operation, and later took over the operation team, I especially wanted to find a book to learn about the operation of the event. However, I have not found a particularly good book on the operation of the event. This post created the miracle of the Double 11 and set off a wave of climaxes in a series of large and small promotions. It is a consumer focus and attractive to me. Through these years of actual combat and the learning and cooperation with a single operation from different platforms, I gradually understood the operation of this post, and later talked about the relevant steps in the e-commerce growth process system that I summarized. In the article, I will expand it further.

    The activity includes big promotion activities and daily activities, and the activity operation is to design the activity calendar, determine the activity goal, decide when and what theme activities, what kind of categories, what kind of rhythm to use, what to use Kind of hoe. Design the specific activities of each activity stage, such as warm-up period, lead-in period, peak period, and return period, design the main venue and the venue layout and content of the event, determine the assault rhythm of each category, and decide when and why the category is invested. Resources, how to combine marketing resources with the resources provided by manufacturers and stores, push the overall effect of the event to a new high, and so on.

  • Content Operations

    On content-based platforms, such as knowledge websites, news websites, audio and video websites, online education websites, microblogs, and public accounts, content operations are the soul of websites.

    In the e-commerce website, content operations play an important role in improving the stickiness and guiding purchases. Of course, the more popular video and live broadcasts in recent years are also crucial for e-commerce to guide shopping.

    The core appeal of content operation is to build a content system, grasp the content direction, be responsible for content production, recommendation, reading guidance, stimulating social and communication, and managing the use of content resources.

    The core problem of content operation is to build a virtuous circle around the production and consumption of content, and continuously improve various types of content-related data, such as content quantity, content pageview, content interaction number, content dissemination number, etc. . Among them, the establishment of pre-seed content and the precipitation of seed users are particularly important.

  • UseHousehold operation

    User operations are also a core part of CRM. Its core content is to build a user system, loyalty system (mainly membership system), manage user acquisition channels, lay out user growth paths, design and manage user’s life cycle reach and communication content, and make differences based on user multi-dimensional characteristics. User operations, reduce churn rates, and recall lost customers.

    The essence is to build a virtuous circle around the user’s entire life cycle and maximize output. Its core metrics are customer acquisition, activation, retention, dissemination, frequency of visits, and individual user output.

  • Product Operation

    To be honest, my function with this job position has been in a state of confusion. It does not have an authoritative definition, nor does it see any books or articles that really make this position clear. In the actual work, I saw that the product operation is done by the docking of organizational resources; the analysis of the dimensions of the products; and the optimization of the demand for the products on behalf of the operations team.

    I personally think this has been completely covered by the functions of product managers and operations staff, whether it is data analysis, resource organization, product analysis, or business communication. So when my team generally does not have this position.

  • Page Operations

    Most apps have a large number of front-end pages such as homepages, channels, and categories. The functions responsible for the operation of these pages can be collectively referred to as page operations (also referred to as home page operations, channel operations, category operations, etc.), and are responsible for various analysis of page traffic efficiency and sales, such as analysis. Source of traffic, whereabouts, loss, conversion ability, customer classification, corresponding shopping guide preferences, inventory of hot products, shelves, promotion settings, daily activity generation, picture design demand communication, picture replacement, marketing copywriting Doing, optimizing, class optimization, splitting, integration, etc., is based on a large amount of daily and meticulous work, and has a real-time impact on the consumer experience and final sales.

    In the setting of KPI, CTR, traffic distribution effect, click value, conversion rate, sales, PV per capita, churn rate, etc. are often evaluated.

In addition to the above common operations, there are often many subdivisions, such as channel operations, comment operations, application store operations, community operations, WeChat Weibo operations, new media operations, etc., which are basically subordinate to the above. Some big direction.

There are many commonalities behind products and operations. For example, they all need to have a deep understanding of user psychology and consumer motivation, know how to create and capture consumers’ shopping impulses; all need to have an in-depth interpretation of the data, and excellent data understanding practices.Inferior and rapid adjustment; all need to carry the core business demands, and strive to achieve the business objectives from different angles in a different direction.

III. Practical examples of division of labor between products and operations

The following is a mobile home page product as an example to illustrate the product and operation focus I understand:

1. Product thinking about the home page:

  • How should the home information architecture be designed to support the most user-friendly, semi-precise, and idle users on the homepage?

  • How does the home information architecture differentiate the browsing path for price-sensitive users, quality-oriented users, and solution-based users?

  • How to design the first screen of the first screen to minimize user loss?

  • How should each column entry and combination be placed, and how to place the fist and hook product locations, allowing users to increase the depth of access (per capita access screen) as much as possible?

  • What information should be displayed at each column entry to maximize channel clickthrough rate (CTR)?

  • How do I effectively increase the number of clicks per user on the homepage (or increase the number of per-person visits) and increase the value of clicks (the amount of sales per click)?

  • How do you combine the visual heat map and the mobile thumb click feature to assign core business resource fields? How to use the homepage traffic residual value (to the bottom of the user who still wants to finish)?

  • How do I create a personalized homepage?

  • How do you design a rich marketing resource and properly control the timing and objects to balance the user experience?

  • How do I properly set my inventory to increase my ad exposure and clickthrough rate without resentment?

  • How do pop-up rules be set to reduce user interference?

2. Operational thinking about the home page:

  • What are the resource allocation rules for the business? Which business line is allocated according to what principle?

  • How do the entry efficiency algorithm models for each line of business be developed to provide efficiency through multi-dimensional integrated feedback access, sales, customer acquisition, and stickiness? Which portals are efficient and which are inefficient, and how do you reward efficient portals?

  • What are the marketing resource application and usage rules for the homepage (for example,The icon is red, who is it to whom, and what rules apply?)

  • Which location is there to place what marketing material?

  • What criteria does the material need to meet?

  • Do you need a horse in the field? How to design the horse racing rules?

  • The channel’s homepage resource bit exposes what products or discounts have the most click potential?

  • Is the traffic distribution reasonable? Is there a reasonable proportion of traffic that is effectively directed to the corresponding business segment?

  • What effect does the new online section or feature have on the overall traffic efficiency of the homepage?

  • Is there any fluctuation in the core data of the homepage last week? What is the cause of the fluctuation?

  • Is the weekly or monthly KPI of the homepage operation reached? If it is insufficient or exceeds, what is the reason?

Four, summary

Talk about the classification, difference and focus of product and operation

Let’s make a final summary:

  • Products set up, operate singing;

  • The product is based on the long-term design stage, and the operation is focused on doing the day-to-day operations;

  • The product builds a user-friendly stage based on understanding the excitement of the user’s pain points. The operation completes the final blow to achieve sales based on the user’s decision-making factors;

  • Products create a long-term experience through the stage architecture, and operations generate impulses through exciting programs;

  • Product and operation co-writing, product re-concept, operation and play together to create a big show;

  • Products and operations work together to continuously optimize the entire theater from stage to performance to create an increasingly exciting future.

  • The appeal of products and operations is also full of conflicts and compromises, requiring corporate management to carefully balance the balance to achieve the best business results.