Years later, when I face those young product managers, I will remember that I was engaged in a high-paying job. It was 2000. After graduating from university, I worked as a search engine PM on an IT website in Beijing. At that time, I could buy a one-square-meter house in the Asian Games Village for a month’s salary. Ten years later, my friend recruited PM and the monthly salary offered was the same as mine for ten years. The same as before, the difference is that at this time the young PM can buy a one-square-meter house in the Asian Games Village with a year’s salary. I was confused about this, so I consulted my HR colleague. The HR colleague told me that ten years ago, product managers were a scarce job type, but now they are not.
In ten years, Beijing’s house prices have risen 10 times, but the salary of the best PM has risen by at least 50 times. So when you click on a V on Sina Weibo, you often encounter certified product managers. Many PMs have a dream: to change the world with their own designed products, and at the same time earn a lot of money, but an entry-level salary that has not changed for ten years, but it makes people feel the reality is skinny.
If you are a PM and are following a major, it proves that you are not only a lucky person, but also excellent in product design. This article is for your reference. If you are still working 9 to 10 in an ordinary small company, or working at the grassroots level of a large company, but you have a dream in mind and dream of changing the world with your own products, then this article is written for you . I share it here, hoping to be valuable to more dreamy PMs, and hope to make the world a better place through your hands.
The “Nine Steps” of product design described in this article, the main framework is derived from a few shining people who have designed products for billions of users from scratch. I have practiced for a long time in a product with 1 billion PV. With constant revisions, in a blink of an eye, it has been captured for 16 years. Fortunately, I have worked with many PMs recognized as the top in China for many years, and now I explain it under my own understanding. The “Nine-Step Method” is written for pan-Internet products, and is suitable for large-scale products as well as for new features in products. The method of use is that PM provides written answers to the following nine questions one by one during product design, and analyzes and discusses with the team one by one.
Step 1: Which core requirement does the product satisfy the user?
The key to product design is to figure out what the core value of the product is and what core needs are met by users. In practice, 70% of PMs often forget this, because “meeting user needs” has almost become a formula that every PM can open their mouths, so they often forget it. We often hear that “Weibo should strengthen SNS attributes”, “WeChat should open up O2O”, and “Community information should flow faster” are the most typical examples of forgetting user needs. All these formulations are taken for granted. If you don’t think from the user’s point of view, if you don’t understand the user’s needs, you will be doomed to fail.
In fact, even if PM uses this one, it often does not help. Because of careful analysis of “meeting user needs”, you will find that it is actually a wordless book. First, “user” is a virtual group concept, PM can not find a specific person to represent the user; second, “user” actually does not know what they need. Therefore, in practice, users are always represented by three kinds of people: PM himself, hypothetical typical users, and PM’s executive leaders. But today, those who don’t leave their hands on iPhone, Weibo, and WeChat knew they needed this a few years ago.
User needs are always captured and created by geniuses. Just like what is popular in the fashion world the next year, those luxury consumers and fashion critics don’t know. Only genius designers can lead the future. The big things in IT history were either created by geniuses or hit by super lucky guys. Online game “giants” used to practice the truth of “meeting user needs” very carefully, investigating users very seriously, what they want and what they want, and finally found that “users” do not exist at all. Those labeled as “users”, In fact, I didn’t know what I needed, so the product failed completely.
Fortunately or unfortunately, most of us don’t need to invent an iPhone like Joe’s gang leader, nor do we have the opportunity to create and lead the trend of the times just like Kim Jong-un. So, if you just want to make a new feature of an existing product, or want to design a new gadget, there are two more practical ways than to understand the “user needs”:
1. Crazy love for your products
2. Try to solve the biggest pain point you encounter
The most basic characteristic of a PM is to love their products. If you don’t love your product, the suggestion here is to immediately switch to the product you like, even if you get half your salary. Burning for the products you love, how interesting life will become. 10 years ago, my friend, in order to obtain such a job, did not care about the location (no matter the world, no matter how high or low it is), no matter how high or low it is, no matter how high or low it is, no matter how high or low it is, no salary. ), the result is the world’s greatest Chinese product. Three years ago, I had a subordinate, an ordinary little boy, who was rated as the lowest PM in a big company by his job title, but with the same passion in mind, with a young heart, he almost rivaled WeChat. , Affect the product of the moment.
According to the first step of this “nine-step method”, if you are an in-depth user of Weibo, then please think about the recent three-column structure revision of Sina Weibo. What core needs of users are met?
As an in-depth user of Sina Weibo, I often use my mobile phone in front of my computer to browse Weibo because the PC does not give me a better browsing experience. Unfortunately, the core requirement of “poor PC user browsing experience” has not been resolved, but has worsened after the tri-column revision. If you don’t start from the needs of users, it will lead to a different story. When you revise the version, every PM should first consider what core needs of a user you have solved. You may change the world or kill millions of users.
The main point of the first step is “a core requirement”, with special attention to “one”. For products like Weibo, making the browsing experience better is the core requirement. How the system loads faster, how users produce high-quality information, how to eliminate spam, and how to improve the visual experience are all issues that need to be solved urgently. PM should never dream of inventing, subverting existing products, or adding some new features that they think are very fashionable. Only by grasping the “most core demand” to improve bit by bit, one percentage point to one percentage point can be improved. Quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes.
Step 2: Compared with similar products, what is your uniqueness?
If step one solves the problem of “what’s the use” of the product, then step two solves the “what’s the use of others”. This question seems simple. In fact, compared with 70% of PMs, they often forget the “user needs”, and even up to 90% of PMs in large companies will not consider “why should others use me”.
Why do so many PMs do not consider “why should others use me”? The biggest advantage of large companies is that they have money, people, technology, and users. They can quickly push products that have proven demand in the market to users. At the same time It also brings users a not bad experience. It is precisely because the products of large companies are born with such advantages and become the winning magic weapon that PMs are accustomed to, so they do not need to consider product positioning, so the biggest advantage often turns into a disadvantage in the end.
One night at the end of 2011, I was in Foshan, Guangdong, and went to pinch my feet after dinner. As usual, I asked the young technician what website she usually visits, what hobbies she has in her life, and what she plans to do recently. The young girl replied that my recent dream is to buy a Xiaomi mobile phone. At the time, I was so surprised that the tea cup in my hand almost fell to the ground. At the end of 2011, I only saw Xiaomi news on the Internet, and there was not even a real phone on the market. But in Guangdong, thousands of miles away, a foot-washing girl on the roadside of a small town regarded Xiaomi mobile phones as their dreams in life. I quickly asked her why, she said, “Mi mobile phones cost more than one thousand yuan, but they are as cost-effective as Apple.”
This is positioning, this is the uniqueness of the product.
Common examples on the Chinese Internet: from news, portals, e-commerce, and video sites to the current group buying, security software, browsers, Weibo, and mobile phones, 99% of them are indifferentiated competition. Few people consider What is the uniqueness of similar products compared to you”. Obviously, those who win late have a deep understanding of this problem and extraordinary control skills.
According to the second step of this “nine-step method”, if you are a deep user of WeChat, please consider what is the “uniqueness” of the product “Moments of Friends”.
When WeChat is designing the “Circle of Friends” function, we must consider its uniqueness compared with Weibo, Qzone, and the school. In the case of severe homogeneity of SNS products, how does a secondary function of WeChat win, and what is its uniqueness? This is the primary problem that the PM team must solve.
I personally think that this uniqueness is “privacy”.
In fact, the essence of social networking is “privacy sharing”, the process of getting to know each other, to friends, close friends, even couples, and finally husband and wife, the process of deepening the relationship, that is, the process of sharing privacy step by step. Why can’t Weibo be an SNS, because broadcasting platforms like Weibo are not inherently private. In terms of privacy positioning, WeChat Moments uses a simple method to solve Facebook’s complicated privacy settings. Whether it is the insight of the WeChat PM genius to see this, or if it happens by chance, people have to admire it. If WeChat Moments can do a better job of “privacy sharing”, then this product has a promising future, and there will be a chance to compete with Facebook in the future.
Step 3: Decompose users. According to the core value of the product, users are broken down into different roles.
Step one solves “what’s the use”, step two solves “what’s the use of others”, and steps three to seven solve “how to use it better”. The key to better use is to become a user and think from the user’s perspective.
Perhaps geniuses can gain insight into user needs, but geniuses also have a growth process in their insight into user needs. We have seen that Qiao Gang master also crawled out of failures. The grasp of the user’s needs is like the Buddha’s enlightenment: cut an apple, cut to the end, find that it is empty, so enlightenment. User needs turned out to be a wordless book. To understand, there needs to be a process of peeling apples.
The process of breaking down users and becoming users is a process of peeling apples, and a PM must practice. Different products and different dimensions have different decomposition methods. It doesn’t need to be too complicated in the initial stage, but you must not have only one kind of user in your mind, and that is not to cut apples, but to cut stones. PM should at least use the thickest line to classify users according to the core value of the product.
Such as:
UGC products: users who see, users who write;
Forum: browse users, post users, moderators;
B2C: browsing users, trading users;
E-commerce: sellers, buyers;
New products: seed users, growth users;
Old products: initial users, growing users, declining users, lost users;
and many more. The core of this process is to capture the most important roles.
What needs to be pointed out is that the division of roles is related to the degree of operation of the product. For mature products to enter the refinement stage, a more detailed breakdown of roles is required.
Simple use of Weibo as an example: If the role is divided into X-axis and Y-axis according to usage and life cycle, the use of Weibo can be users who browse information, users who post information, and can also be divided into more details, such as posting information Users can also be divided into individuals, certified individuals, companies, media, big V, etc. The life cycle of Weibo can list seed users, initial users, growing users, declining users, and losing users.
When we intersect the X-axis and Y-axis, we get a lot of characters. The Weibo characters listed above can get 30 kinds. Of course, some of them are meaningless. Few products and PMs need to decompose dozens of roles. In most cases, we can take out the most important roles.
Step 4: Become a user.
Each type of role answers the following two questions:
Question 1: Why does this character use this product?
Question 2: How does the character know and reach this product?
After disassembling the roles, PM needs to substitute himself into the role and play cosplay, an imaginative role-playing game.
When answering “why does this role use this product”, we will find that the core needs of users begin to decompose. As I mentioned in the article “WeChat Business Models and Entrepreneurship Opportunities” (http://t.cn/zjaphLW), the core needs of users are first-level requirements. A product will only have one first-level requirement. In addition, everything else It is a secondary demand, and there are three and four levels below the second level. For example, a Weibo user sees Weibo with a first-level requirement (browsing), posting a Weibo is a second-level requirement (expression), and posting various functions in a Weibo is a third-level requirement.
When we analyzed the core needs of Weibo users to “browse the information they care about”, the first role that was decomposed was “browsing user” and answering “why would the browsing user use this product”, we found that this was because There are “users who post information”, why do users post information?
After decomposing the Weibo role and why the role uses the product, we will find that Weibo users have multiple needs:
1. Demand for information
2. Expressed needs
3. Social needs
4. The need for self-realization
These needs are pyramid-shaped, with the number of users decreasing gradually, and the top is “self-realization needs”. These roles are the big V users of Weibo. Their purpose on this platform is to realize their self-worth, so they produce the best quality information and determine the ecological environment of the entire Weibo. This is the uniqueness that distinguishes Sina Weibo from other products. The bottom line is “requirements for information”. These roles are all users of Weibo. They truly represent all of Weibo, including the dream and future of commercialization.
The second question to be answered is “how does the role know and reach this product” is a product operation question. Good products are inseparable from operations, and many products even win with operations. In the early days of Sina Weibo, in order to invite a potential big V, you can send someone to Hong Kong for two weeks, just to give this celebrity an iPhone and teach him to use his mobile phone to use Weibo. Being able to accurately see how one’s core users know and reach this product, and implement high-execution operations, is the key to the success of Sina Weibo.
The example of Sina Weibo tells us that in differentiated competition, as long as you have a distinctive feature in product or operation, and can use this feature to the extreme, so that competitors can’t catch up, you can do it. Success in the market.
Step 5: Determine the role achievement. Determine how the product meets the sense of accomplishment of different roles.
How each type of role continues to grow and be satisfied in the process of using the product is the key to the continuous growth of the product. On this point, 90% of PMs have fallen into a misunderstanding.
When I was addicted to BBS in 1996, an adaptation of the lyrics “You on the same Internet” was popular on the Internet. I remember a line like this: “At that time, the sky was always short, and it was ten thirty in a flash. You just think about it. When can I upgrade, even if my vision drops by 0.1”. I once wasted four years of college in order to get the first place in experience on a bbs, so virtual achievement hurts others.
In the past 16 years, simple and direct point incentives have been mastered by domestic PMs, which is a time-tested and carried forward method. The innovations are endless, and it can write a history of Chinese Internet innovation.
Classical QQ upgrade system, lighting up various icons, various titles and points system of Discuz, various titles, badges, and props of online games, fans of Weibo, points, expansion, world rankings of tool products, etc. . At present, there are no products that are motivated by user points, but they have become alternatives, such as WeChat.
It is this short, flat and quick method that is particularly suitable for the psychological characteristics of Orientals, which makes many PMs ignore the core of the product. The misunderstanding that 90% PM falls into is excessive gamification of the product.
The most important achievement of a product is: the user’s sense of accomplishment when his core needs are met. When irrelevant incentives interfere with his core needs, his true sense of accomplishment is reduced.
Free online games, Taobao, and search engines are the most outstanding products in the world because the achievements of core users are directly related to the most sensitive indicator income. Baidu’s recent search hint suggestion has a new feature. When the user searches for the same keyword for the second time, the search hint for this word will turn blue. This is the achievement the search user has achieved: query information is more convenient and search engines understand you. On the contrary, if a search engine launches a feature, when users search, a floating layer pops up: Congratulations, your experience value has risen by 10 points, then the most direct result is an immediate decline in revenue, because it interferes with the core needs of users.
Products with unclear business models do not have sensitive quantitative indicators, and PM ignores the core needs of users. When excessive gamification, the achievements of secondary roles immediately dominate, such as Sina Weibo’s disruptive incentives for browsing users. Therefore, the key to this step is to pay attention to the core needs of your core users, so that the core users can obtain core achievements in their core needs.
In terms of role decomposition, Sina Weibo’s secondary demand role, that is, the role of “user who publishes information”, has achieved some points very well, especially the innovation of comment mode and fan concept, far better than Twitter. Laid the foundation for the success of the late game. For products like Weibo that can be broken down into dozens of roles, it is a huge challenge for PMs to grasp the relationship between the whole and the part when sorting out the achievements of various roles.
Step 6: Determine the key points in the process of satisfying user needs.
Decompose each type of role from the entire process of “learning about the product, using the product, satisfying the needs, leaving, and coming back”, and depict the key steps and key pages.
This step is a key step to test the PM’s execution skills. Whether the PM can do this step well has nothing to do with talent, but only with whether it is hard work or not.
E-commerce companies have the best control over the process of satisfying the entire user needs. The reason is simple, because every step is money. Excellent e-commerce companies, such as Tmall, Taobao, JD.com, and PM will definitely have clear quantitative indicators for users where they came from, how they used them, how they left, and how they came back. Because PM understands that if one key point is done well, income will rise, and if one key point is not done well, income will fall. This is directly related to bonuses, but it is not messy.
This is the advantage of a product with a clear business model. The level of business value is directly proportional to user needs. Both search and e-commerce have the best business model, which is to realize the business value while meeting the user’s first-level needs. Both business value and user needs can be found as a sensitive measure of “income”. If your user experience is good, your income will rise, and if your user experience is poor, your income will decline. There is no more effective way to improve user experience than this.
This step is painful cosplay. We assume that a simple new B2C product has at least four simplest roles:
1. Browse users
2. Trading users
3. Seed users
4. Initial users
For the four simplest roles to describe the process of “learning about the product, using the product, satisfying needs, leaving, and coming back”, there may be 20 key points and more than a dozen key pages. Therefore, if there are too many plays, they will enter the play. According to the Buddha’s philosophy, the product manager cuts the apple, and finally finds that the apple is gone, and he becomes a user.
Step 7: Improve the conversion rate of key points.
When PM finds about 20 key points, how to increase the conversion rate of each key point and the key page is the phased goal. When I was the general manager of Tieba, in order to understand how new users came in, I registered more than 80 accounts online to see what could be improved in the registration process. Therefore, an ordinary PM has to try dozens of times at least on every key point, so as to find the feeling and find an effective way to increase the conversion rate.
Many people have heard the principle of “one more click loses half of the user”. Although the actual loss rate of different products is different, it is basically a considerable number. At the core key point of all forms of products under the “ordinary role using products”, for many years, portals, search, and IM have used at least two pages: the portal homepage and content page, the search homepage and the result page , IM’s buddy list page and dialog box. The user demand chain of e-commerce is relatively long, and more pages are used. However, Facebook and Twitter use only one page to meet the core needs of users and maximize the conversion rate. Li Xingping invented hao123, which practiced this interactive revolution seven or eight years before Facebook and Twitter.
It must be mentioned that after Facebook and Twitter, the most influential innovation in the history of interaction is the search open platform (Aladdin), which satisfies user needs on the current page of search results, eliminating the need for users to jump to a new website and check again. time. This is the invention of China’s most successful and wealthy PM.
So, never think that the conversion rate has been the highest, maybe you can bring a revolution in another way. Baidu’s Aladdin and Twitter’s left-right column-style revision are all innovations that have been developed for the core needs of users. In this mobile era, more areas not covered by predecessors are waiting for PM to explore.
Step 8: Form a closed loop. Let the product grow by itself.
The previous PM’s phased goals have been completed, and the eighth step is to calm down and consider the closed-loop problem. Closed loop is the cycle of product self-growth.
Taobao’s credit evaluation system is a closed loop. Buyers buy products, merchants provide good services and get praise, and if they get praise, they will get more new buyers. New buyers buy products again, and merchants have the opportunity to get more praise, forming a cycle. PM’s job is to discover, design, and ensure the smooth operation of this closed loop. For example, the negative reviewer is this closed-loop killer.
UGC products are often a closed loop. Users release high-quality information, high-quality information attracts new users, and new users also release high-quality information. More new users are attracted to form a closed loop. Spammers, Spam, low-quality information, etc. are all killers of this closed loop. For many UGC products, PM spends hard work to make it work normally, but the degradation of information will spread to the entire cycle like a virus, causing the product to wither and finally die.
More products are not closed loop, such as Alipay, dictionary APP, IE browser, Flash games, Microsoft Office software and so on. The increase in the number of users has not brought about the self-growth of the product. The difference is that now many tool products have also found their own ring, such as cloud input method, the more users, the easier the input method to use, the better the input method, the more users, forming a cycle.
The era of mobile, cloud, and big data will provide the possibility for more products to form a closed loop. Only by forming a closed loop, this product can grow and evolve into an organism. Many small closed loops will eventually form a large closed loop, and many large closed loops may eventually evolve into an ecosystem. For example, Ali, Baidu, and Tencent are actually an ecosystem. Multiple ecosystems may evolve into a super ecosystem, such as what the Ali department is doing. Of course, the term ecosystem is a favorite term for strategists or critics. Product managers only need to care about those small closed loops, pull and adjust those that hit your pain points.
Even though the end of humanity is coming in 2012, from the point of view of physics, there is no essential difference between a piece of ice that melts into water. It is just a ring of one form and a ring of another form. What PM has to do is to become a singer who plucks the strings. With countless closed-loop vibrations, the entire universe will play music for you.
Step 9: Do it fast and iterate quickly.
When Google and Baidu interviewed PM, they all asked the same question: The product reached the scheduled release date, but found that there were still imperfect functions. Would you choose to go online or continue to polish until it is satisfactory?
A big boss once answered this question wrong, but out of hundreds of questions, only this one was wrong, so he still became the biggest technical BOSS of Google and Baidu. What’s your answer? PM always thinks of too many things, but users think very little, or even don’t want to. The world’s best PM Facebook CEO Zuckerberg simply calls users “idiots”. There is one in China. A genius PM describes becoming a user as an idiot. He hopes that the distance between PM and idiot is only 0.01 cm.
If you have been fortunate enough to listen to the teachings of the two most successful and richest PMs on the Internet in China, you will notice that these two people who are thousands of miles away will emphasize two same principles, one of which is: Do it fast, go fast Iteration. Perhaps this is the secret to becoming the richest man, because they know that if the opportunity is missed, it will be gone. If you have noticed both principles, and you are under 30 years old, you have a good chance to make a lot of money while changing the world like them.
But now there is a misunderstanding in the rapid iteration of the mobile field. Many insignificant APP upgrades frequently prompt users to install new versions. This is by no means rapid iteration. Rapid iteration is just a means, the purpose is to better satisfy the user experience, so product upgrades should give users an experience beyond expectations, and make users look forward to and wait for your upgrade. It’s okay to publish a small change, forcing users to upgrade, wasting company bandwidth, and wasting user traffic. Such PMs should pay for their mobile phone bills. The rapid iteration of APP, please learn from WeChat and Sina Weibo. They are Jiaozi born in the mobile era.
Nothing is constant, and the speed of the world is changing too fast. How many apples must be cut to realize user needs? So what I said is always wrong.
Conclusion
“Nine Steps” of Product Design
Step 1: Which core requirement does the product satisfy the user?
Step 2: Compared with similar products, what is your uniqueness?
Step 3: Decompose users. According to the core value of the product, users are broken down into different roles.
Step 4: Become a user. Each type of role answers the following two questions:
Question 1: Why does this character use this product?
Question 2: How does the character know and reach this product?
Step 5: Determine the role achievement. Determine how the product meets the sense of accomplishment of different roles.
Step 6: Determine the key points in the process of satisfying user needs.
Step 7: Improve the conversion rate of key points.
Step 8: Form a closed loop. Let the product grow by itself.
The ninth step: Do it fast and iterate quickly.
The above is the nine steps of product design that the product manager must read. I have sorted it out separately for you. Now please open the notebook of your computer and answer the above nine questions one by one according to the product you are designing. The team analyzes the discussion one by one. If you do, you will believe that everything you think is wrong, because after a month, you will need to do it again. This process is painful and lonely. The person who changes the world is the loneliest person in the world.
But I believe that as long as you do this, your hands will make the world a better place. Please share this article with other product managers who dream of changing the world. Only more closed loops can take on countless closed loops.
