Inter-bank - Postponement to Regularization - The Road from Operation Novice to Senior Manager (Part I)

In this article, the author tells how he spent a year and a half facing difficulties such as "inter-bank" and "postponement to regularization", and successfully grew from a novice to a senior manager.

Many people think that the job of operating is not only low-threshold, but also low-value. First of all, I have to admit that the threshold is really low, and if it is not low, I will not be able to enter, but the value depends on yourself. This has nothing to do with job attributes. So let me tell you how I spent a year and a half facing the growth path of "cross-bank", "postponement to regular", "from 0 to 1", "three times to create history" and "three consecutive promotions" to grow from a novice to a senior manager.

1. Cross-line

(In my experience, you will see your own shadow)

The biggest gain of that job is "optimism", even if you are faced with tasks that sound impossible every day, you can still exceed the quota at the end of the month. This also laid a solid psychological foundation for me in the face of difficulties.

After joining the current company, I have no concept or background knowledge of what is Tob, what is SaaS, and what is product operation. When I first sat at my desk, I didn't know what I was going to do every day, and although I really wanted to learn, my operation department was responsible for the customer's product use, and everyone in the whole department was on a business trip.

I was the only one who stayed in the department's work area, and I had daily contact with everyone – only online morning and evening meetings. During the three-month internship period, I repeated the most sentence in the morning meeting every day, "What did I do today", and then reported to the leader "What did I do today" that night, and repeated this content every day, and no one told me the direction and goal of learning.

At this time, some partners may say, "Isn't there induction training for new employees?" The content of the newcomer's induction training is only 10% related to the requirements of the job responsibilities for me, so I live in a daze every day, and I am very irritable.

I waited until I turned into a regular defense, but I didn't pass the first time, and I was asked to defend a second time every few days. After a few days, he told me, "I'm sorry, you may not be able to turn positive." ”

I asked, "Why?" and the answer was – because your growth in the last three months didn't meet the company's requirements. I am very depressed about this for two reasons: one is that I used to be an excellent employee in the unit, and I have not won any awards/trophies, how can I not be excellent? Second, in the past three months, I have been trying to know what this job requires me, what I want to learn, and what standards I want to achieve, and I have been asking, but no one has told me clearly.

In the end, when I became a regular, I was told that you only had two choices: one was that you would leave directly, and the other was that you would accept a one-month extension and become a regular if you passed the defense.

When I got the news, it was almost the Spring Festival, and it was difficult to find a job during the epidemic at that time, so I gritted my teeth and endured it......

During the postponement period, I was put in charge of a product to do operational research, and no one in the company had studied it before, and they all thought that this product was not so valuable to the company or customers.

If there is no road, then make your own way.

During the postponement period, I went everywhere to "beg grandpa and find grandma", constantly asking, learning, and practicing. In the end, I studied this product quite well, and after understanding the entire business process of the product more clearly, I finally turned it into a regular.

II. Embryonic stage

（虽一头雾水，但一往无前）

After I became a regular worker, no one told me what to do in the first step, but I found a way to grow quickly, and that was to read books, just to understand how to do great people in the industry or across industries. So I got up at 6 a.m. every morning and went to the office around 7 a.m. to start studying, and this habit has been maintained until now.

I was very familiar with the product I was responsible for during the conversion period, and I would do some operational documentation around the product until I had done almost 20 operational documents. Suddenly, one day I was called into the office by the CEO and said that he was in charge of vertical product operations, and when I heard the news, I was nervous and excited at the same time.

Before me, there was no one in the company who did product operations, and from the outside, even within the Tob SaaS industry, the positioning of the product operation position was vague, and internally no one knew what kind of value this position could create for the company.

(Ladies and gentlemen who read my article, you are much happier than I am, because after you join the company, someone will take you, and someone will tell you what the general direction is and what you want to do, and I don't, it's all up to me.) ）

I had insomnia the night after we finished talking, and I was in a state of excitement, nervousness, and fear, thinking about how I should start.

Since it is regarded as a project, I will start from the most basic project management, the "professional" learning style is not suitable for me, the company will not give me too long, it just so happened that I took over the project before May Day, I read 10 books on project management.

I know that as the person in charge of a new project, I have a preliminary idea of what to focus on every day (such as how to set up a project, promote, monitor, report, guarantee, and summarize), but I found that this project is a pilot project, and there is no real project management system.

There is no kick-off meeting, no rules and regulations, no clear instructions, and the only clear thing is to make the result.

Despite all the obstacles and nothing, I knew that this was the only chance I had to prove myself, so I was determined that if I couldn't do it, I would leave.

Only consider how the result is achieved, not human feelings.

So I am not afraid of anyone, not of any difficulties. When I had this kind of mental construction, I started to push forward.

What is the first thing to do? is to understand why this product exists? Of course, the company doesn't have any information for me to learn from, what should I do?

If your company doesn't have it, you will turn to competing products, because in any industry in China, there will definitely be someone who will do it before you, so I will study competing products, and you can ask the product manager for competitive product information, what are our current products?

He will say that there are several competitors based on functional benchmarking, and as a product operation, you must pay attention to the fact that you need to learn as much as possible about the alternatives, not just the competitors.

Knowing the competition allows us to sell with ease, and knowing the alternatives allows us to land with confidence.

Once you really know about the alternatives, you'll be able to know what tools most of your customers are using to manage their business and what results they're achieving.

The product name of the competing product is the SEO keyword, the whole network search, the official account search, every day I have to insist on reading a lot of the promotional content of the competing product, and then make the corresponding notes. Read everything and think about why the competition is so advertised.

Let's take a look at how people understand this business, how their products are presented, and how they are realized. Then in this process, the first version of the product pre-sales PPT was finally made, and the corresponding series of documents were made.

In this way, when I am fully prepared for the work, I will start my front-line communication journey. I can't say it's bumpy, it's quite bumpy.

Because Tob's sales mainly rely on channels, and my company has both self-operated channels and agency channels, a total of hundreds of sales channels. The first thing I ask all channels to cooperate with is to "set a benchmark".

Just before the benchmark was raised, I fought with many executives of the company, and there is a saying that "the status of the rivers and lakes is played", the space is limited, let's explain it in the next part......

Author: Zhang Xing, author of "Compass of Product Operation";

This article was originally published by @不打杂运营 in Everyone is a Product Manager. Reproduction without the permission of the author is prohibited

The title image is from Unsplash and is licensed under CC0

The views in this article only represent the author's own, everyone is a product manager, and the platform only provides information storage space services.