Always pursue a great user experience and add value to your every day.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Everyone is a product manager” (ID: woshipm), author Esther, product development director of Ctrip Business Hotel production line; authorized to release.
1. What is a C-side product?
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory
The “demand” of the C-end product solves the user’s needs and pain points in the life scene.
Although the user needs are complex and diverse, covering food, clothing, food, drink, and play, but implemented in the C-end products, in different life scenarios, users will use different software to meet their needs.
In these scenarios, there is almost no involvement in collaborating with others, and users care about themselves.
Next, let’s look at the typical levels of the five levels of Maslow’s needs:
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Physiological needs: Hungry;
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Safety needs: (Because of the lack of personal safety, I steal the concept) Alipay meets the needs of transaction security;
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Social Needs: WeChat;
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Between social and respect: Ctrip travels with social needs; Ctrip and other features are also eager to be respected to some extent, to meet the so-called compulsive needs, so I am here;
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Self-realization: There is very little internet. It may be close to the services of the Centurion Black Card in the physical industry. It can be called a helicopter to save lives on the island during the tsunami. Such products are still quite great. of.
Second, what is the B-end product?
About “What is a B-side product”, my understanding is “connection.”
B-end products serve the organization. The needs of the organization are not from the point of individual user demand, but a connection and extension of the production relationship. Under different organizational structures, the B-end products must solve the information inside and outside the department and between the various levels.Circulation requirements.
In this context, the B-end products pursue efficiency and efficiency improvement, and solve all the demand points inside and outside the organization under the work scene. These demand points are connected together to form the demand side.
The above picture is a schematic diagram of a typical business travel cloud:
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Inner circle: Business travel cloud system needs to be closely connected with airmail, hotel, train, taxi and other suppliers and control systems;
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Outside: Business Travel Cloud needs to serve corporate travellers and travel managers. At the same time, it also needs to connect the enterprise’s OA, HR, fee control and other systems. It is the connection between the business travel cloud and the external system.
Three, the difference between the B-end and C-end products
Let’s look at an example. C-end products and operations really like to use a word – “ceremonial feeling.”
Ctrip has also used this concept. Specifically, this ritual experience is: when booking a hotel, the user needs to first get a coupon on the hotel details page, and then use it when booking. In fact, this kind of coupon is not limited, it is equal to direct reduction.
But for B-side users, is this really good?
The above also mentioned that the goal of the B-end product is to improve efficiency, rather than adding additional processes. Therefore, when the business travels, our request is to directly check the price after returning the reduction, not to receive the coupon.
Simply summarize the difference between the C-side product and the B-end product, that is:
4. Methodology for B-end products
1. MVP
MVP, the smallest available product.
About the evolution path of MVP, there is a very famous picture on the Internet. The general idea is: If you want to build a car, you should build a scooter first, then bicycles, motorcycles, cars and the like.
For C-side products, it can design product paths like this. But if the B-end product also designs the product path like this, can’t it work?
The answer is no.
Because the B-side product business and logic are extremely complex, the most important thing is the architecture. According to this evolutionary path, each round of products basically has to overturn the previous round of products and design, which is unacceptable in the B-end products.
Or take the car as an example. The correct product design method might be:
There is a frame for a car that can move, at least the four-wheel chassis, engine, gearbox, can be turned, and many functions can be missing. Later, slowly add other ones, such as wipers, seats, turn signals, trunks, and even ceilings. From Alto to Volkswagen to Audi and even Tesla, this evolutionary process is OK.
For products with a particularly complicated and long development cycle, by cleverly designing product routes and going online in batches, you can avoid the embarrassing situation and risks of closed doors, and fast-on-line products can also give customers confidence.
And these are issues related to life and death for startups.
2.Enable
The word “energy” in the past two years is also very hot, and all walks of life have this formulation.
The industry marked with red in the picture is more companies that do B-end empowerment.
For example, the financial industry I used to engage in is particularly fond of talking about “energy”; but in most cases, they regard the B-side customer as “disabled”, and should be “supporting the horse, sending a ride”, but Eventually it evolved into “sending a sedan chair and carrying it away.”
Of course this is also a lot of businessThe industry is completely devoid of the ideas and organizational capabilities of Internet products.
How should it be properly empowered?
I will give you a safe example for your reference:
I was responsible for the “plug-in products” inside the Ping An Group. At that time, I was in the wallet. The starting point was to solve the problem of payment within the group.
In actual work, we found that in addition to the payment business, each family also has financial products and life service related needs, and the wallet has the corresponding ability. Therefore, we also make financial and living products into plug-in forms, which can be either SDK or H5, and output to companies inside and outside the group.
Of course, the richness of plug-in products is mutual, and each subsidiary is both a host of plug-ins and a provider of financial products. Through such a plug-in product group, the resources and flows of each subsidiary in the group are linked together to form a good win-win ecology.
The idea of using a similar plugin can help us with our daily work?
The answer is yes. For example, many customers of Ctrip Business Travel have their own apps, traffic is good, and customers are also crossover.
How quickly can this flow be realized?
We can plug in Ctrip tickets, hotels, train tickets and holiday products separately, and output them to the required B-end customers, and finally reach the C-end end users.
In this way, on the one hand, the B-end enriches the product line and has the ability to make wine and travel products, and these products can bring high rebates; on the other hand, Ctrip can also obtain a large amount of traffic to improve GMV. Is a win-win result.
As early as 2012, I also had a similar approach when Bank of Communications built Mobile Banking 2.0:
In the past, the bank APP only had the financial services such as querying and transferring money, and we first created the “life service” section, and it has become very common since its development.
If the assignment is just to connect the function, it is not enough to satisfy the customer, and at most it can only be regarded as “supporting the horse”.
We also need to consider product customization features and features based on the characteristics of different hosts.
For example, if we export the above tourism plug-in to the bank APP, I will consider increasing the consumer finance scenario:
The attributes of tourism products determine the huge demand for consumer finance, which can help banks to do the staging and build the financial concept of the scene; it also enriches the payment ability of the product itself, and fits the needs of the C-end users, which is just a few words – that is, just said “Send a trip.”
3. Two-way thinking
We all know that coins have two sides. When making a B-end product, it is often the opposite of the customer’s needs.
For example, for a business trip to a hotel, some companies will say that I must let employees save money.
How to save money? – Reduce the difference.
But reducing the difference will make the employee experience very poor, so we first introduced the concept of “welfare” in the industry: the part of the hotel and the difference bid can be returned to the employee as a benefit.
With the welfare fund program, we help companies to guide their employees to save on travel expenses, rather than through simple and rude ways to better reflect the humane care of employees.
On the other hand, after the traditional 70, 80 and then according to the difference booking, the new era of the post-90s employees pay more attention to the quality of travel, consumption upgrades are particularly evident in their bodies.
How can you satisfy the difference and book a better hotel?
We combine personal payments with company-balanced payments to meet employees’ “stay better” claims.
For B-side products, this is very common. Doing more than two-way thinking and experimentation will help us to enrich our product capabilities.
5. Essential qualities of product manager
Finally, talk about the few points that I think product managers need most:
1.Active
A positive attitude and positive action.
No matter how difficult it is, how complicated the environment is, and always make a sunny and cheerful product, this is not much.
2.Special
When I joined Ping An, I interviewed me at the time, the general manager of the wallet and the current president of the car home, Shao Haifeng Shao, who was generally polite. The leader asked me what problems I had. I was embarrassed and asked if there was any success that could guide the younger generation.
Shao introduced me three points, one of which is “special”: forcing yourself to be a little different from others; as long as there is a little special place, you will be remembered by others, such as I am a speciality .
As for what other special points, there is no standard answer, leave it to everyone to think about it.
3.Serve
This is what I learned from our CTO these two days. After dealing with the production accident, he said to me that “the people who are not responsible are more annoying than those who do the bad things”, the technicians are like this, the product manager is also in this way.
This is why I said that the product manager is the closest to the CEO. The reason is that if the product manager is doing well, he will bear the honor; if he is poor, he will bear the responsibility.
4.Pipi
One of the essential qualities of a product manager is the skin, not the glass heart.
For example, some male product managers will not pick up when they are in trouble. Some girls’ product managers will have a pear and rain when they are in trouble. These will not work.
Finally, I hope that product managers will never stop pursuing a great user experience and add value to users every day.