On the official websites of some Internet companies, almost all of them can see a module called "Solution". Why is there more focus on the importance of solutions nowadays, and how can we use our own productization thinking to produce a professional solution?
If you have been paying attention to some leading Internet companies recently, click on their official websites, and almost all of them will see a module called "Solution", especially in some enterprises dominated by tools, services, and platform products. So why are more and more people paying attention to the importance of solutions, and how can we use our own product-based thinking to produce a professional solution?
1. The importance of solutions
What is a solution?A solution is a solution that helps a customer/industry effectively solve the current problem by leveraging its own product/service advantages.
Whether you are a demander who is eager to solve a business pain point, or a supplier who has product/service capabilities but is difficult to be recognized by industry customers, a good solution is indispensable for you at the moment.
The solution is like a bridge, deeply connecting the product and the business, so that the product can effectively empower the business, solve the current business pain points, give feedback according to the results of the business, and feed back the product, and continuously precipitate and iterate better functions.
From the description of the solution, it can also be understood that as the producer of the solution, it relies on its own in-depth insight into the current needs/pain points of customers and the industry, as well as a clear understanding of the advantages of its own products/services, and combines the two to form a complete set of solutions. For the receiver of the solution, it is more necessary to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the solution, and judge the advantages and disadvantages of a solution based on their own real business scenarios.
So how do we produce a professional solution from the producer of the solution?
2. Use product-based thinking to guide the output of solutions
Regardless of whether you have worked as a product manager or not, having a product-based mindset will be of great help to your daily life and work. So what is the core of product-based thinking? I summarize it here into two major capabilities:
The core of product-based thinking: empathy and logical thinking ability.
1. Empathy – empathy, always thinking one step more than the other person
The so-called empathy, in layman's terms, is that you can empathize and truly consider the problem from the other person's point of view. At work, a person with empathy can clearly understand what their customers/users are thinking and what their underlying demands are, so as to accurately produce effective solutions. And in life, if you have a strong sense of empathy, you can greatly reduce the friction between people, because you can put yourself in the other person's shoes and know what the other person is thinking and what the other person's current situation is.
When applied to the production of solutions, empathy is an indispensable ability. The most basic role of a professional solution is to be able to truly solve the customer's current problem, and empathy is to help us dig out the real problem of the customer. The reason why we need to have this ability is because sometimes the needs fed back by customers/users only stay in a relatively superficial stage, for example, some customers blindly want to do user recruitment, but they have not thought deeply about what new users want them to do, and have not solved the problem of retention, resulting in the direct loss of a large number of new users.
So for this kind of customer, if you have a strong sense of empathy, you should assume that you are the person in charge of the other party's business, which indicators will you pay the most attention to, what data you care about the most, do you only need to pay attention to the problem of attracting new users? If you think about it one step more, do you also need to pay attention to how new users stay? With this way to communicate with customers, you will definitely be able to tap more important customer needs, and the solution you produce is not just a "user new solution", but should be "new +". New user retention", I believe that customers will recognize your ideas and ideas more.
However, the ability of empathy is not something that can be acquired quickly, and many people think that it is not just empathy, and I can also think about problems from the other person's point of view! This is because in addition to developing the habit of empathy, it is more important to be able to accumulate experience in all walks of life and even various roles, which requires long-term continuous information input and continuous communication. Therefore, before really mastering empathy, you can learn to ask "why?", and let the customer/user tell his underlying needs in the first place.
To give an easy-to-understand example, Xiao Wang and Xiao Lin are two workers in the same company, and one day the boss asked them to drive a nail on the wall, so Xiao Wang took great pains to buy a drill, nails, and gloves...... After a few hours of tossing and turning, he finally hammered a nail into it. But Xiao Lin first asked the boss why he wanted to nail on the wall, and the boss replied that he felt that the wall was a little empty, and he hoped to hang a painting, so Xiao Lin bought a few strong non-trace sticky hooks, which not only solved the boss's need to hang paintings on the wall at a lower cost, but also supported flexible disassembly and movement in the later stage, which was highly praised by the boss!
Through this small example, I believe you can feel the importance of learning to ask "why?" before fully grasping empathy, you might as well try to understand the real needs of the other person in this way.
2. Logical thinking ability – the coherence of the program
The second ability to talk about next is logical thinking ability, as the name suggests, is whether the solution you output is coherent, on the one hand, it determines whether your customers/users are willing to read your set of solutions completely, and on the other hand, it also reflects whether the content of your solution is healthy enough and whether it can be logical and self-consistent.
In the solution, we usually use the "total-score-total" format to produce the framework of the solution, and at the beginning of the solution, we need to think about a few things:
- What exactly is my solution solving?
- Is this problem real for customers/users?
- What is my core idea to address these issues? (try to be brief)
After thinking about the above problems, I believe you can already harvest a more qualified "opening", but you will find that there are a large number of solutions on the market that only stay in the stage of thinking, but it is difficult to implement your core ideas, and what is missing is the combination of solutions and their own product or service capabilities. It is undoubtedly a matter of paper to talk only about ideas, not about execution, so it is also a very important part to fully understand the advantages of your own product/service capabilities.
At this time, some students may say: "I have clearly figured out where the advantages of my product are, and I have also found the customer's pain points and produced solutions to the ideas, why do customers still feel dissatisfied??" This is another key point in the solution: the scenario.
Scenarios can also be understood as application scenarios, which are the part that has the closest relationship with customers/users and the least sense of distance in the entire solution. In this part, you need to combine the empathy skills mentioned above, try to think: "If I were TA, how would I apply it", so that you can really empower your own highlight capabilities to customers/users, so that your solution becomes useful and effective.
In a way, the solution is like a novel, the first few chapters explain the basic story background and character relationships, and attract you to continue reading through fascinating hooks, the middle chapters will continue to enrich the story and character content, so that each character becomes deeply rooted in the heart, and the final chapter will make the final conclusion, bringing a perfect ending to the story, and even leaving some room for imagination......
All in all, a professional solution must be from the perspective of customers/users, accurately find their real demand pain points, and combine their own highlight products/service capabilities, as well as excellent problem-solving skills. I believe that everyone can apply this set of thinking to their own life and work in the future, and constantly improve their abilities, so as to produce more and more excellent solutions.
This article was originally published by @文昱 on Everyone is a Product Manager. Reproduction without permission 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.