Internet thinking should be a “look up and see the road” C2B model, which must be based on user big data or user direct participation. Without the participation of users, the design of the product is like a “dictatorial voting democracy”. The technical elites understand technology, but not necessarily understand users.
Napoleon once said: Only a riddled army is invincible. This sentence may be a bit absolute (or it was taken out of context by the Chinese chicken soup chefs), but those well-equipped and well-equipped, are on the battlefield. The nearly perfect, neatly arranged troops on the line have been repeatedly slaughtered by Napoleon’s artillery, but it at least proves that troops who pursue perfection too much will be defeated.
In the movie “Bright Sword”, a certain commander of the national army was very unconvinced after being captured and said to Li Yunlong: Our cannon has not been put down from the tractor, and the formation has not been launched, you will take the opportunity to attack… Fight once…Unfortunately, neither the battlefield nor the shopping mall has the opportunity to make the losers fight again, and if they forget Clausewitz’s idea of ”Mobility overwhelms everything” in “On War”, they will certainly do so. There are new failures waiting for them.
This view can also explain to a considerable extent why Microsoft, which once seemed impeccable, quickly dimmed under Apple’s pressure, and why Xiaomi, which was once mocked by many in the industry, rose rapidly.
Elite design
The traditional thinking of many successful companies is that products must pursue extremes and perfection before they are put on the market: first, spend a few months to plan; then, spend a few months to design; and then, spend about a quarter of the entire cycle. Develop in one time; finally, carry out a series of tests, and it is possible to find a test team of thousands or even tens of thousands of people. In this model, all links are filled with top elites, and products that have not been tested cannot be released.
Just like Microsoft, use five or six thousand of the most powerful developers to make each version of Windows—divide into teams, each with five people, and carry out “311” equipment, that is, every three engineers must be equipped with a product manager , Test one by one. In this “most perfect” development model, it is almost impossible to make mistakes.
However, its drawbacks are also obvious. The product development cycle is lengthened indefinitely, which directly restricts the development of enterprises in new fields. In other words, the so-called perfect development process reduces the uncertainty to the greatest extent, but it makes the enterprise lack of flexibility, unable to face the user’s infinite flexible long-tail demand. Therefore, the potentially unlimited business opportunities in these flexible (individual) requirements are also wasted.
Such a model is obviously not Internet thinking, not because it is not fast enough, but because there is no user participation. With the unlimited flexibility of user needs, even using the “perfect process + perfect elite” model can not guess what the user thinks. To some extent, a new product cannot be perfect. Therefore, it must undergo constant trial and error to iterate to a better shape and performance, and continue to approach perfection.
In layman’s terms, “perfect process + perfect elite” is a typical B2C model of “embedded in production”, which is still based on elite designers. The Internet thinking should be a “look up and see the road” C2B model, which must be based on user big data or user direct participation. Without user participation, the design of the product is like a “dictatorial voting democracy”, where the technical elites decide what users want. They know the technology, but they don’t necessarily understand the users, and they don’t necessarily understand the ground. Therefore, this kind of harmonious product lacks personality and dialogue, and will not meet the individual needs of users. It is difficult to reach users’ hearts, and it is even more difficult for users to change from “substituting” to “falling in love”.
God iteration: To have a perfect product, you must reserve room for product iteration.
Faced with ever-changing user needs, how should companies directly hit the minds of users? Steve Jobs is an iterative model of Apple-God iteration.
Apple has a team of engineers that is not inferior to Microsoft, but they do not have the right to vote. They are like Jobs’ hands and feet, just speculating about Jobs’s godlike intentions, and then submitting their designs tremblingly to let him abuse! All control rights It is in the hands of Steve Jobs, he dressed himself as one of the most demanding users, using his own perverted standards to carry out internal iterations of the product. Legend has it that Jobs asked engineers to develop all kinds of apps, and he personally tested them. As long as he didn’t click the three keys to the key points he wanted, he would delete the app ruthlessly, and the developer’s efforts would be in vain! In other words, if you meet his requirements, all users will feel “WOW”!
A Chinese management scientist once sighed that Jobs is not Internet thinking, but God thinking. According to our definition of Internet thinking, this is indeed the case. God’s iterative model does not use the Internet to improve production efficiency and transaction efficiency. The big logic of Internet thinking is C2B, which seems to be inseparable from the Internet’s absorption of user opinions and control of data, but Jobs can not be bound by such rules, because he is a “god” and does not need to follow the rules. .
Free of those mysteries, Jobs actually used his insight into users to make judgments and put the iterative process inside the enterprise. On the surface, he predicted every need of the user like a god, and some designs were not even thought of by the user. But in fact, he is not guessing, but keenly interpreting the user’s inner demands and translating this demand into design language or his own abnormal iteration standard.
To some extent, this interpretation of Jobs is even more effective than big data analysis for users. From big data to the real desire of users, it is necessary to bridge the “algorithm”, but algorithms have their advantages and disadvantages, and algorithms that are not good enough still cannot understand everything. But the Jobs-like “god” can see through desire without having to go through any path. What’s even more amazing is that Jobs saw that almost none of the users thought of it. In their concept, the product would not be like this, but once you make it like this, they will think-Wow! “God” thinking and iteration The way cannot be understood by general laws, but they just know!
Therefore, we can say that this model is “God’s Internet Thinking” or “God Iteration”!
But if the company has no gods, such as companies without Jobs and troops without Napoleon, can they still defeat their opponents in a riddled condition?
Equal community
It is obviously more difficult for Chinese companies to find gods, and the quality of their engineers and other teams is definitely not as good as Microsoft, Apple or other global outstanding companies. However, China has become the other country that has created the most business miracles in the past 15 years after the United States.
Most of these “Chinese miracles” were also born in the Internet industry. Observing these successful people, such as the recent Xiaomi, most of their development processes seem to be full of chaos.
But they have found another way recently, which is to include users in the iterative process.
For example, Xiaomi carefully analyzed user needs and positioned mobile phones as products “born for fever”, focusing on cost-effectiveness. At the same time, various social platforms have been used to establish a comprehensive social platform for the communication between enterprises and users, and between users and users. There are nearly a hundred people in Xiaomi’s team operating this platform, including 30 on Xiaomi Forum, 30 on Weibo, 10 on WeChat, and 10 on Baidu and Qzone. Through its founder Lei Jun and others taking the lead in being active on the platform, Xiaomi has established a value community with a strong sense of identity, turning users into “rice fans”. In this value group, there are 10 million forum users, more than 10 million Weibo fans of Xiaomi partners and employees, and 1 million WeChat users. Not only do they have a huge influence on the outside world, but they also participate in product design iterations. A huge “value community” has been established.
There are many companies that have established value groups. Why can individual companies such as Xiaomi receive so much feedback, and even allow users to participate in product iterations with unimaginable enthusiasm?
First : This community is not the traditional structure of “idols + fans” we mentioned earlier, but a nearly parallel structure. The status of corporate members (including founders) and fans is equal, and sometimes even the status of fans is even higher. For example, Xiaomi’s Lei Jun is not as domineering as Zhou Hongyi of 360, but rather feels like an uncle next door. The reason why you want to lower yourself and increase your fans is because you want to use the community to build an equal dialogue platform, so that companies can directly listen to the needs of users and put their opinions into product improvements. Conversely, if it is a value group of “idols + fans”, idols have a strong right to speak, and the opinions of fans will have nowhere to be released, and they will even give up voluntarily because they are willing to surrender.
In addition, when companies integrate into the value community, this equal relationship will also stimulate them to iterate products. Here, Huang Jiangji, the co-founder of Xiaomi, has a wonderful description: “What we advocate is’Users are our friends.’ Friends sounds like a virtual reality, but they are not. From the perspective of an engineer and a product manager, they are the biggest What’s the pressure from? The greatest pressure an engineer can encounter is that his friend tells him that there is a problem with this product. The designer is most afraid of going to a friend party, and his friend tells him: You designed this thing Why do you use this color? This will start to challenge his taste. The greatest pressure of an employee does not necessarily come from his boss, colleagues or users. If he treats users as only users, he will not be anxious, he will I think this is just work content. But if a friend calls him and says there is a problem with the phone, he can’t make the call, or can’t charge the battery, he will want to drive to his friend’s house and give him a new mobile phone immediately. My own things are not reliable. So we discovered that this power is so great, and the power of friends is an engineering model that surpasses all.”
Second : Although big data analysis is very important, you should believe in direct complaints from users. If big data analysis reveals that many users are particularly concerned about function A, but the most criticized feature on Weibo is function B, you must not hesitate to solve the improvement of function B in the first time.
This model obviously goes against the traditional slogan of “big data analysis is omnipotent” (hehe, big data has become a traditional tool). The understanding of this paradox is that users’ evaluations of products are not “back-to-back” votes, and they influence each other, especially users in the community. So, if your algorithm based on big data does not consider interaction effects (this is too complicated), wouldn’t it be better to listen directly to the feedback of seed users who are opinion leaders? You know, these complaints are likely to change after they are sent. The original evaluations of other users on the product, and in the era of Web3.0, there will be “viral” spread within and outside the value community.
In addition, this kind of direct response to the demands of seed users or the Tucao on social platforms also shows the user-first C2B attitude. Seeing that Tucao gets a quick response, fans will naturally think that they will pay attention to my Tucao next time, which strengthens their love for “organization”!
Gray user iteration
After the establishment of an equal community, user feedback and complaints will of course come as promised. But how to use these opinions? If feedback and complaints are released, will it be a disaster for the enterprise? This requires mastering some technical points:
The first point : choose “small point breakthrough”, do not pursue complicated functions, but grasp a few function points for trial and error. When the enthusiasts come to complain about a point, then almost all the problems of the product can be found and turned into word-of-mouth, thus sweeping the market! In addition, because it is a breakthrough for a small point, it also avoids stretching the front line and causing the company to Such complaints are overwhelming to destroy word-of-mouth situations.
The second point : carry out “gray upgrade”. Even if you choose a “small point breakthrough”, you will not be able to make all complaints rush into it. This will only create chaos and become another kind of “hands-one-vote”, but some users just complain about it or follow suit. They may not I don’t know what I really want.
Therefore, users can be classified. For example, Xiaomi’s approach is to conduct an initial test on the most advanced 1% of users, and re-test on 5% of advanced users after the modification, and then recursively to 10%-so as to avoid the confusion in the test to the greatest extent. In fact, the first 1% of people may be able to find 80% of the problems, and then, in the proliferation test, there are fewer and fewer problems.
Compared with Jobs’ model, more innovative companies formed Jobs with a group of users in the value community, and skillfully put the iterative process into the “grey area” between the “initial use” of the product and the “formal promotion”. Therefore, we can say that this model is a “gray user iteration” model.
It’s hard to say which one is better or worse for the two models. To do “God Iteration”, you must first have a “Great God”. Lei Jun and others obviously realized that they were not, so they chose another path. In fact, even though all product managers are targeting Mr. Joe, they can only approach this “great god” infinitely.
Of course, companies with “gods” are lucky. They are on the “gray user iteration” model, and someone can clearly tell them which way is wrong. After all, “gray user iteration” also has a cost! Therefore, Lei Jun invited Tang Mu from Tencent, who founded the User Experience Center in Tencent ten years ago.
Selflessly dedicated “Rong Zuer”, there is a mysterious “Honor Development Group” among Xiaomi fans, or “Rong Zuer” for short. This group is composed of more than 120 enthusiasts who have applied voluntarily, which is the highest level of fans. In the rhythm of the weekly upgrade of MIUI, the Xiaomi team released a new version on Friday, and the MIUI team collected feedback from Saturday to Monday to fix bugs. On Wednesday, the updated version was handed over to the members of the Honor Development Team for testing and continued to modify. Friday afternoon Release to the outside world at 5 o’clock. “Rong Zuer” has the right to announce to the entire community that this is a bad version and call on everyone not to upgrade. When the “Rong Zuer” is judged to be a bad version, Xiaomi’s engineers will feel particularly shameless, and then take action as soon as possible to solve the problem.
In the iterative process, whether or not to make a certain function, the actual effect of the function after it is developed, and how to improve it are all driven by fans, and “Rong Zuer” guides users to participate in the iteration. As a result, tens of millions of Xiaomi users have become a foreign aid group developed by Xiaomi. Every day, a large number of mobile phone needs, opinions, and suggestions will be passed to Xiaomi through the channels of Weibo, WeChat, and forums. The system of Xiaomi mobile phones will be updated every week, and each update will release several or even a dozen functions, of which one third are provided by users.
Not only is it collecting feedback, Xiaomi also responded quickly. Although it is a “small breakthrough” that has reduced the range of iterative products, Xiaomi will still respond to users’ various new ideas, such as lost mobile phones, how to help customers find them? Or in the dark, how can mobile phones directly change As a flashlight? When an elderly user asked for a version for the elderly on the phone, the Xiaomi team took only a week from receiving the demand to launching the elderly phone function.
In addition to collecting feedback and using it to change the product, the other benefit of this model is that it gives advanced users a sense of accomplishment and substitution, and they are willing to selflessly dedicate their creativity. Once these people have substituted their emotional attention and creativity, they are the most precious seed users and can lead word-of-mouth as opinion leaders.
What needs to be pointed out is that these users of “Rongzuer” are not paid, why do they “selflessly contribute”? Xiaomi co-founder Huang Jiangji explained: “Sometimes users are very simple. If they give in the forum After you recommend a good feature and a good idea, you have made this feature, tell everyone that this idea is his, and make sure that he will help you think of another ten better ideas the next day. The sense of accomplishment is very big. Power.”
