Swastika dry goods! "Everyone is a Product Manager" author Su Jie exclusive interview

"Everyone is a product manager" It is both a book title and the most well-known "golden sentence" in the entire industry, and I believe that as a product manager, my friends will not be unfamiliar with it. At the beginning of 2009, Su Jie, then Alibaba's product manager, proposed this concept that had a far-reaching impact on the industry, and for more than a decade, it has helped thousands of people become excellent product managers.

In this issue of G-Guest Interview, we invited the author of "Everyone is a Product Manager", the former Alibaba Product Manager, the builder of the Ali Group's online learning platform, the founder of Liangcang Incubator, the founder of Seven Seals Studio--- Sujie. Let's listen to Mr. Su Jie's experience sharing on the "product manager's growth path".

Hello teacher, it is a great honor for you to accept our interview, please ask the product managers of Gike to introduce themselves and share your recent situation.

Hello everyone, I'm Sujie. I joined Alibaba in 2006, and this year is 2021, exactly 15 years. Let me share with you this experience.

I divide my fifteen-year career into three phases, called "entering the pit", "breaking the circle" and "landing".

The key word in the first phase is "product manager".

I entered the industry as an Ali product manager, and I have done a lot of products related to e-commerce and community, To B and To C. After I worked as a product manager at Alibaba for a period of time, I also did ali product university in the later stage, responsible for the growth and cultivation of the entire system of product managers, so I paid more attention to the group of "product managers".

Some of the ways of thinking, methodologies, that I learned in my time as a product manager have helped me a lot, and I want more people to understand these things, even if he is not a product manager. So my second stage is called "breaking the circle", and the key word in this stage is "product thinking". At the same time, I was in charge of a business called an internal incubator at Alibaba, which we internally called "horse racing," which is actually a set of cultures and mechanisms, that is, how to make innovation work from the bottom up. During this period, he will record what he thinks and thinks, and write an article one by one. These articles are basically assembled into a book every four years or so. I've published a total of four books so far, and we'll talk about that later.

This is actually one of the things I do to promote "product thinking".

Then the third stage is "landing", and the keyword I matched it with is called "product innovation".

Because the "product thinking" of the previous stage is about how to think after all, but we just know the theory and don't know how to do it. I've been doing things that are basically on the ground for the last three or five years. I mainly did two things: the first thing was to set up a good warehouse incubator with a group of friends, mainly serving some start-ups, providing them with all-round support for finding people, money and direction. In addition, it also has a product innovation studio, which mainly serves some start-ups that have reached a certain stage, and some large companies, and innovative business within large groups.

My fifteen-year career can be summed up in pretty much that.

Most of my recent energy has been working as a product innovation consultant, doing some consulting related things, and I hope to have the opportunity to cooperate with you.

Your "Everyone is a Product Manager" tetralogy is the first book for many beginners to start with the product, we can see that the book is written from 2010 to 2020, a full 10 years span, can you tell us about your original intention to create them and how you persevered?

I wrote in my first book that the original intention of creating it was actually very simple.

At the beginning, it was actually passive, and not long after I first started working, the boss at that time asked us to do a weekly report, not only to write what we did this week, what we planned to do next week, but also to write a week's work experience of no less than five hundred words. That's when I started writing about it. I was very impressed, the first time I wrote a thousand two hundred words, I thought, this time after the end of the hair is not too wasteful, so I only cut off half of the hair, leaving the other half behind.

In this way, I wrote one by one at the beginning, and I made up for some daily experiences. Later, I suddenly found that I wrote it into a serial, if it was a serial, I felt that it was a bit of a waste to just put it in the weekly newspaper, so I posted it on my blog at that time, which was still msn's space at the time, and now this one no longer exists. In 2009, I started my own independent blog, and then I used the public account as my main position.

So I insisted on it, even though no one asked me to write a weekly newspaper anymore, but writing has become a habit of mine, and I have been writing until now.

When I wrote for a year or two, and there were almost dozens of experiences, I was approached by the editors of the publishing house.

There are a lot of editors in the publishing house hanging around the Internet, a little bit like the entertainment industry scouts, they will stare at a lot of people at the same time, and they will see me by chance. Then I asked if I had considered compiling and publishing the content I had written. He was actually a kind of temptation, and after observation, he found that what I wrote was quite popular, the feedback was good, and it seemed that under the same theme, it could be systematized, it could be organized into a book. That's how my first book came out.

The book later sold well, and I don't think it has much to do with the content, mainly relying on two factors.

The first is that the title of the book is controversial, but it can be explained, at first someone misunderstood me and refuted two sentences, and then they were too lazy to respond, and found that there will always be someone to help me respond, so there has always been "organic flow". The second is that the time point is good, just the Internet industry, the position of product manager, the rapid rise of Ali this company, but there is no systematic content on the market to see, it can be said that it is the right point, two years earlier and two years later.

These two points actually inspire us to make products.

As for the content, I have seen all kinds of exaggerated scolding, and for common questions, my responses are as follows: a group of "middle school students" cannot say that it is not good because the "primary school textbook" is too basic; for the newcomer, it is more important than teaching him a specific methodology, arousing his enthusiasm for making products.

Later, I got used to it, insisted on writing records, and then unified the theme and organized it into one book after another. Because of this, the four books I have published are closely related to the content of my entire career work, which is reflected in the different emphases of these four books, which correspond to what I am doing at the same time.

Someone would have asked me before what is the relationship between these four books? I gave him an analogy, like the feeling of the first season to the fourth season of an American drama. They have a common context, but each season is about something different and has its own focus. The names of the previous four books were different, and I have unified them this year.

For example, the first book was published in 2010, and I now call it "Everyone is a Product Manager", which is about some basic methodologies, which is more suitable for product managers who are just getting started.

The second book was published in 2013, and was originally called "Taobao Ten Years of Product Matters", which was later changed to "Everyone is a Product Manager Case Edition".

The book was written during my transfer to Taobao, and the idea was to make as many products as possible to experience different products, and then summarize some more powerful methodologies. But then I found that the differences between different products were too big, and I realized that I could not finish it in my life by doing it and experiencing a variety of different products. So I found a clever way to talk to the product manager who made various products, and then in the process of chatting, I learned how the various products are made and what is going on. With so many case studies, I sorted them out and turned them into "Taobao Ten Years of Product Matters".

After the second book came out, I found that I was more interested in the people behind the product than the product, and I had a lot more things to do, plus various coincidences, and I left Ali.

In 2017, my third book, Everybody's Product Manager Thinking Edition, came out. It places more emphasis on product thinking, and as a result the book is broader, and it's primarily geared toward "pan-product managers" (a word I define myself).

In 2020, my fourth book "Everyone is a Product Manager Innovation Edition" was published, the content direction of this book is more down-to-earth, I summarized a set of operational methodologies for product innovation in the book, it is aimed at some product owners, including some business owners, managers, management, executives and other people.

So every book, it's a record of what I've been going through for a few years, and I think it's quite coincidental, basically about three or four years on average. Such a rhythm, a habit, has been formed.

In the end, the reward for me is that "Everyone" seems to have become a meme in the field of product managers, a meme that cannot be bypassed, you can agree, you can oppose, but you cannot ignore.

In your "My Path to Growth with 'Everyone'", I see that you founded a good warehouse incubator and a consulting studio in 2015 and 2018, during which your understanding of "product manager" and "product thinking" has been changing.

Before answering this question, I would like to tell you a paragraph:

Some people say that I have laid out for more than ten years, and the business model is like this:

Write "Everyone", let unreliable people become product managers, mess up various products, and then do consulting to help their company see if the product can still be rescued.

I want to deny the triple: I am not, I am not, don't be fooled.

But I thought it was funny.

In fact, I said in the answer to the previous question that my career can be summarized in three stages and three keywords: product manager, product thinking, and product innovation.

At the beginning, I paid attention to the group of product managers, and found that there were fewer people, so I mentioned product thinking in the hope of influencing more people. Then I found that the light talk thinking did not land, so it naturally transitioned to a more landing "product innovation". It is actually a change in my cognition, but also a change in my actions, which is reflected in the book.

I've been doing product innovation consulting recently, and I have an experience that if you do a product full-time, full-body, all-in, it's actually a depth-first model, and you know the field very well. But if you're a consultant, it's actually a breadth-first model, it's going to look at it more broadly, and then it's going to be bypassed and it's going to be more about methodology.

For example, the two are a bit like the relationship between algorithms and data.

I've always told clients that you have data, you have industry knowledge, you have domain experience, and that's data. I have algorithms, I have methodologies, I have routines. I can use algorithms to make your data more valuable.

So I'm valuable to you, and if I just have algorithms and I don't have data, I can't do anything. So you are also valuable to me, so being a consultant and a client is actually a win-win relationship.

When I first left Ali, for a while, I thought that training was also a very good thing, because maybe everyone would think about how their careers would develop in the future, and they might also think of this path. Say whether it will come out to give lectures in the future, do some knowledge to pay for something. But I later found that training it had some drawbacks:

It is a thing that output is much greater than input, you are consuming your own accumulation, you have gained very little in the process of this training, it is a relatively one-way thing, because your audience is usually weaker than you, and after a long time, you will feel depleted. Counseling doesn't have that problem because the people you're dealing with are awesome too, right? Your communication is two-way, win-win and mutually rewarding. You can learn something new, you talk to executives, you talk to bosses, you get a lot of industry insights and knowledge, and they can iteratively optimize your methodology.

This is my psychological journey, but also some of the experience of career development, here to share with you.

To add another point, as far as the methodology is concerned, it can only help everyone avoid making very low-level mistakes. It is a thing that raises the lower limit, if you want to raise the upper limit, you want to have a particularly big breakthrough, the methodology has its limitations, it can help companies avoid pitfalls, but it is difficult to help companies break through the ceiling.

This is a little understanding of my own.

We have collected the questions of Gike fans about personal growth and product design, and extracted a few of them with relatively high attention, please share them with you.

I. Personal Growth Issues:

1, "focus on self-improvement" is a very important quality of product managers, how can you be like you, from the daily work to improve and grow faster?

I think the first thing you have to do is to form a closed loop of what you do.

What is a closed loop?

For a person, all kinds of information you get are input. You have a cognitive model that processes this information, processes it and then outputs it, and after the output, you get feedback from the interactive object, which is actually another kind of input, and then optimize your model, which is a closed loop.

In fact, the growth iteration of the individual is very similar to the growth iteration of the product. First you have to make a closed loop, not one-way. The second is how to speed up each iteration of the closed loop and shorten the time of each iteration, which I think is very good. Why do I think it's a good thing for young people to choose the Internet, precisely because the closed-loop iteration of this industry is particularly fast, right?

After all, the form of Internet products is simple, there is no manufacturing, no hardware. It can make a person grow very fast. However, you need to see that "fast" is actually a double-edged sword, with advantages and disadvantages, and the disadvantage is that there are too few unchanging things. Do you want to think that after ten or twenty years, this fast, can it still be maintained? Shouldn't you accumulate something that gets older and more popular?

How to precipitate "the older the more popular things", but in some slow industries, such as manufacturing, will be easier to find. You have to grasp this balance, and I think in the early years you had to find that way to iterate quickly. Choosing the Internet during this period was a means. When you reach thirty, thirty-five, forty, you have to prepare your slower thing, your long-term, older and more popular thing.

I have a lot of product manager friends who have switched to enterprise service-level products, which are more demanding on industry experience. This is actually a flexible response method for different stages of your entire career.

2, many small partners who do products have such confusion, is it rooted in a certain subdivision direction, or should we be more involved in different industries, which one can improve themselves faster?

I don't think there's a contradiction in that.

Taking myself as an example, for consultants, breadth is actually preferred, and I will be exposed to a variety of different industries. But if you want to do the methodology, it should be common in many industries, and it should be depth-oriented. So my way of improving is horizontal, vertical, breadth and depth.

I think for you, you also need to have both breadth and depth. Because I don't think breadth or depth alone is enough. You only have depth, no breadth, it is difficult for you to communicate across borders, it is difficult to interact, to cooperate, to cooperate. If you only have breadth and no depth, it will seem very superficial, and others will think that you are very ethereal, right?

So you have to find your horizontal and vertical, both.

Let me give you an example, for example, you can put your depth into planning a certain product, but you can put your breadth into different industries, such as the content industry, such as the education industry, and so on. Both lines are available.

You can analyze your own current situation within a specific time period, such as half a year, a year, or two years. Should you prioritize breadth or depth? I think you have to think about this in light of your own situation. If you're too deep now, then you might be a little broader these two years. If you are too broad and not deep enough, these two years are a little deeper. So I think this is a very personal answer, there is no universal answer.

If you are interested, you can look at two educational concepts, one called the Humboldt model and the other called the Newman model. In fact, it is about whether to become a generalist or a professional.

Overemphasizing one or the other would be biased, so we should synthesize it, right?

At present, whether it should be breadth or depth first, this should evaluate its own situation, mainly the problem of time allocation.

To add another point, no matter how wide and deep you are, I think there is another point, what you have to think about is that you have to string together each of your experiences, and ensure that any of your experiences are not wasted.

I think this is very critical. Every time you change jobs or every time you change directions, you have to think about every experience in my career and how they can be strung together.

I've introduced fifteen years of my career, and I don't know if anyone has experienced it that way. In fact, I am trying to connect every experience, so that every experience of mine is not wasted, every transformation of mine, every time I try to make a new attempt, is actually a combination of all the past experiences, it is definitely not to say what kind of base is newly opened.

3. In this era of serious internal involvement, how can product managers continue to maintain or enhance their competitiveness?

I think when I was young, I really had to work hard.

Not for the company 996, but for their own 996 or even 007, I say, there may be some company owners who will not like it.

I think you have to sneak up on a well at work, dig a well in your own yard.

Work is a bit like if you go to the river every day to fetch water, can you squeeze out your energy and dig a well in your own yard so that one day you can no longer carry water.

I want you to take a good look at it, but that's exactly what I did.

I started working in 2006 and in 2012, my non-salary income exceeded my salary income. Then there is a later resignation, in order to do what you want to do.

How to maintain or improve their competitiveness, I said a thing I recently thought about, you can use as a practical tip:

You can rehearse your own time, and you can look at which of the week's time is your own active time and which is the passive time arranged by others. After the rehearsal, try to improve your active time, if you are too passive I think it is difficult for growth, you will be rolled up. Try to improve your initiative time, even if you need to make an agreement with someone else. Let me give you an example, that is, don't bother me every day from two o'clock to four o'clock in the afternoon, these two hours a day, is the whole time I can't move, do my own work.

I think your happiness will increase a lot in this way, and if you are too passive, you will be very tired, and it will be easy to be involved. Many people are busy with meetings during the day and can't do anything, and at night, they are tired and can't do things, talking about self-growth.

One more thing I want to share out of the inner volume is, can you do something different, don't fight with everyone about the same thing. I think this may be a good way to get rid of the inner volume, just like when I was still working in the company, I didn't compete with everyone for promotion, to get a promotion and a raise, but I went to accumulate another thing that few people do, and the competition was not fierce, right? It won't be rolled up.

So finding something unique, I think, is also a good way to avoid this competitive battlefield.

Second, product design issues:

1. Product innovation is related to the life and death of products, and it is also a technology. What do you think is the most important mistake to avoid when pursuing product innovation?

I think the most important mistake to avoid is to spend too much energy on the wrong product, or to invest too much resources, including manpower and time. After a lot of investment, I found that this direction was wrong, and I think this is the biggest mistake. To learn to stop losses as quickly as possible is also a philosophy of my entire product innovation methodology.

2. Since you engaged in product innovation research, what is the most successful case you have ever seen, and is there anything special about it?

I can't say the most successful cases, but almost all the success cases I have seen, they have been balanced at a very early age.

Let me tell you about two balances.

I think the first balance is called: the balance between the company's goals and the user's goals. A good product, it must be able to solve user problems, it must also be able to meet the company's strategic needs. Both are indispensable. We have seen many products that only meet the company's strategic needs, and the company wants to go in this direction, but it has never found the value point of the user, and then it cannot be done. I've also seen a lot of users feel good, but it's hard to commercialize products, and it's hard to match the company's goals. It was a pity that it was cut off in the end.

This is the first balance, and this balance you have to do well.

The second balance you need to make is that product innovation runs into two major risks.

These are two big risks that you have to pay a lot of attention to at the beginning. The first one is called technical risk, can you make it? The second is called market risk, is there anyone who wants it after making it?

I found that many startups or innovative products are too focused on one side, there are those who emphasize their own technology, there are many patents in their hands, there are many hardcore black technologies, but they can't impress users. Some emphasize the market too much, the user pain point is particularly large, the demand is particularly strong, but can not do a problem can not do a problem.

So these two sides are indispensable, which is also a balance in one aspect.

So I think good products, in fact, are tightropes, in many dimensions to achieve a good balance.

Finally, please give some advice to the product manager among the GZ users.

I'll just give you a very practical little advice.

I think it is possible for everyone to record their work and life from this week, and write no less than five hundred words of experience every week. The most important reader of this article is yourself, and of course it would be better if you were willing to publish it publicly.

Try to stick with it for three years, and you might find it hard. I have insisted on one hundred and fifty articles in three years, so I dare to mention such a demand to everyone.

You stick with it for three years and see what changes you can make. Well, hold on for three years.

The attached picture is the resume chart compiled by Su Jie's public account, and interested partners can pay attention to the teacher's public number: iamsujie to learn more product knowledge.