With the deepening of digital transformation, B-end products are also facing upgrades. This article summarizes and analyzes how to build B-end products from 0 to 1, I hope it will be helpful to you.
background
With the continuous advancement and implementation of the company's digital transformation, the success of digital transformation is more and more obvious in the financial report, which also enhances the confidence of the management in digital transformation.
At the beginning of 23, I received the task of reconstructing and upgrading the sales system in the market field to support the terminal sales business and provide "digital artillery resources" for the front-line sales business, so that those who hear the artillery fire can command the artillery fire. The management has great expectations for this system upgrade and refactoring, and if it is used well within the enterprise, it will launch commercial products in the future.
Although I have 6 years of experience, 3 years of work experience in a large Internet company has allowed me to precipitate product planning and design capabilities and 3 years of work experience in the company, which makes me very familiar with the business. This time it was to lead the team to build a domain system from 0 to 1 that was not very familiar, so planning in advance can get twice the result with half the effort.
In order to live up to the expectations of the management and the trust of my subordinates, I first sorted out the roadmap of the construction in the days before the construction of the product to ensure that the product can be achieved on schedule with quality and quantity.
I divide the entire product construction stage into six steps or stages, product planning, demand research, product design, solution delivery/implementation, product operation, and iterative upgrading. The work done at each stage and the corresponding outputs are described in detail below.
B-end product construction 6 six-step method
The first step is product planning: know yourself and know your opponent, and get twice the result with half the effort.
The second step is demand research: dig deep and accurately take the pulse.
The third step is product design: efficient and practical, excellent experience
Step 4, Program Delivery/Implementation: Timely delivery and quality assurance.
The fifth step is product operation: value creation and deepening maintenance.
Step 6: Iterative upgrades: fix defects and optimize the experience.
The first step is product planning: know yourself and know your opponent, and get twice the result with half the effort
In the product planning stage, there are two main actions, the first is the research of the industry, and the second is the research of the customer group.
Although I have precipitated the business operation, I have a relatively shallow understanding of the current situation and development trend of the CRM industry, so industry analysis and research is still a very important step. Industry research actions: I mainly investigate from four aspects: policy environment, market size, competition pattern, and development trend.
Customer group analysis here is mainly for an in-depth understanding of the customer group, B-end products and C-end products are very different from the analysis dimension, B-end products should be subdivided from the dimension of the market, including the industry, enterprise nature, scale, geography and so on. The dimensions of the C-side may include age, gender, hobbies, income, and so on.
Combined with industry analysis and customer group analysis, we can often leak excellent products of the same type or competing products, here we often conduct in-depth analysis of this product, which can be analyzed from five levels: strategy, resources, capabilities, scenarios, and feelings.
To sum up, product planning is to understand what the form of the product to be realized is from a macro perspective, and the more detailed or valuable the information obtained here, the more insight into the industry can be formed, and this step is also very important for commercial products.
The second step is demand research: dig deep and accurately take the pulse
In the construction of B-end products, demand research is a key step to ensure the success of the product. It involves a deep understanding of business needs, pain points, and expectations in order to design solutions that solve real-world problems.
In the early stages of requirements research, the product team needs to conduct a comprehensive analysis and diagnosis of the user's business. This includes understanding the industry context, market positioning, competitors, business model, and internal operational processes (market positioning and landscape are largely completed during the product planning phase in order to be able to communicate smoothly with the respondents at this stage). Through interviews, questionnaires, workshops, etc., collect business data and feedback from research respondents, and identify bottlenecks and pain points in business processes.
After analyzing and diagnosing the business problem, a detailed summary report needs to be prepared. This report will summarize all the findings, problems, and potential solutions. The report should clearly articulate the root cause of the business problem and the specific impact of those problems on the customer's business. In addition, the report should present a preliminary product concept that will serve as a basis for subsequent discussion and development. Identifying the customer's key business processes is a core part of the requirements research.
These processes are often critical to the success of a customer's business, so the product must be able to support or optimize these processes. By mapping the customer's business processes, the product team can identify areas where the product needs to focus and where it may need to be automated or optimized. In the survey, many requirements will be sorted out and defined for the priority of requirements, and the commonly used B-side requirements methods include MoSCoW, Kano model, value and complexity matrix, cost-benefit analysis, strategic alignment, etc., which will not be discussed here.
The third step is product design: efficient and practical, excellent experience
The product design stage is divided into overall design and detailed scheme design, and complex systems will have multiple product managers responsible for different modules to design. The product design leader often needs to design the product architecture of the system as a whole, and the product architecture diagram and product roadmap need to be presented.
The role of the product architecture diagram can clearly describe the product blueprint, abstract the complex system, and the abstracted modules show the relationship between the modules, which helps the product team and the business side understand the composition of the overall system, and for complex systems, the architecture diagram can help manage complexity by breaking down the system into smaller, more manageable parts. This decomposition allows the team to focus on specific modules rather than being overwhelmed by the complexity of the overall system. The product architecture diagram can align UI, technology, project and other nodes to the overall cognition of the system and improve collaboration efficiency.
Presenting stakeholders with a product architecture diagram can help them understand the idea behind which the product was built and the value proposition, which is essential for building trust, managing expectations, and gaining buy-in.
Step 4, Program Delivery/Implementation: Timely delivery and quality assurance
After analysis and mining, the requirements are gradually transformed into product solutions, and at this stage, the product manager needs to write a PRD, that is, a product requirements document. General product documents mainly include version number, overall overview and demand background, flow chart, structure diagram, interactive description, permissions, buried points and so on.
At the time of delivery, the PRD document is usually sent to technical colleagues in advance, and then the project manager will organize a requirements delivery meeting, where the product manager needs to explain the solution, and the front-end and back-end engineers, ETL engineers, test engineers, and UI/UE will all participate, in order to pull all the nodes together at one time. After the implementation of the solution, the engineer and UI/UE will continue to communicate with the product manager in order to make the implementation of the product to the satisfaction of users. When it comes to project management, many companies will set up project manager positions, some companies are part-time product managers, and some are part-time technical experience.
The fifth step is product operation: value creation and deepening maintenance
B-end products need to be operated like C-end products, and B-end product operation is more focused on value operation. The general process is pre-launch publicity and post-launch product training, which allow users to know and use the product. With the use of the product by the user, the role of burying in the product will be highlighted, the data diagnosis of PV and UV, and some efficiency data will also highlight the value.
As a simple example, when I was in charge of the design of the product plan of the to-do center, I designed a report on the timeliness of to-do approval, which was used to analyze which scenarios were approved correctly, which flows to the poor approval timeliness, and which people had low approval efficiency. Use this data to empower business units and feed back the business.
Step 6: Iterative upgrades: fix defects and optimize the experience
After going live, through data operation or user feedback, product managers need to devote part of their energy to iterating on products that have already been launched. How to grasp the accurate iterative requirements, the first step is often through the buried data to analyze and use. The second step is to communicate with the user, and it is best to sit next to the user and see how the user uses the product. Through continuous optimization of products, the products are more useful, easy to use and durable.
This article was originally published by @Sean on Everyone is a Product Manager and is not allowed to be reproduced without permission
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