Product design must be “fine”, while product planning must be “far”. Product planning is not only planning, but also the development process of selecting products. Perhaps the value of product planning is not reflected in the exquisiteness of the user experience and the beautiful display of the page, but it reflects the realization of the best configuration that needs to be achieved in different stages of the implementation of user experience, interaction design and other content. Deep understanding.
Step 1: Analyze the objective basis
Only product planning that suits you is a good plan. Before proceeding with product planning, one must have a deep understanding of the company’s background, resources, and level of competition. At this time, questions need to be considered, such as whether the company has online resources or offline resources, which type of initial seed user group to grasp, how to position the final strategic pattern, and how to play the future operational market strategy… and the product Planning is a response to all the above!
Step 2: Establish the final vision
Only by knowing what you want in the end can you understand how to move towards this vision step by step. The final vision is the value of all outputs and the performance of the product in a mature state. And the “pain point” that people often say is an important part of the vision, which can usually be expressed as: [what kind of people] helped [what kind of thing] through [what way].
The establishment of a good vision is not to blindly draw the cake, but to integrate the “explosive value” with the “touchable execution”. In product planning, the expansion of the vision must be strong, which can be mainly reflected in the horizontal behavior and the vertical extension of the field.
Step 3: Split the product route
When you have the correct perception and vision, but fail to find an iterative route that is most suitable for your own development, the final result is likely to be greatly compromised. From the user level, the better strategy is to attract the user resources of one party to the user resources of the other party; from the functional level, the relatively stable strategy may be accumulated in a pyramid structure, and the latter functional module needs to be accumulated. Standing on the basis of the former; from the behavioral level, the conventional evolution is extended from the behavior point to the behavior chain, and finally connected into a behavior network through interlaced scenarios…
The separation of product routes requires overall consideration of R&D resources and market operation plans. A reasonable product route is not only reflected in the scientific subdivision of the phase cycle, but also in the optimal ordering of the route and the route. The problems solved in the previous stage need to be able to become the basis for the next stage. When everyone has done everything they can think of, the competition lies in different “product routes.”
Step 4: Clarify the competition points at each stage
After the product route is in place, the key points of competition in each stage of the next segmentation route are. Among them, the formation of competitiveness lies in differentiated competition, which is reflected in the differentiation with competitors and the differentiation at different stages of its own.
In this step of landing the final details, all the accumulation of the first three steps is still needed. For example, in the first stage, based on the current status of the resources and conditions that the company has touched in the early stage, start with the behavior point α of user group A, and how to carry the behavior point α into the product, thereby forming a relationship with other parties. Different product exposure, function realization and scene construction, etc., these are the landing of competitiveness! At the next stage, with the basis of user group A and behavior point α, we can consider how to introduce related user group B, and use behavior point α as the connection point between the two to form a new stage of competition. Point… The competitive point at each stage is inevitably drawn out gradually, and the competitive point that matches the pain point will have more advantages.
Carrying out the top-level design of the product not only tested the upper-level vision and thinking, but also tested the understanding and cognition of the implementation details.
