Source: Kevin's World-Changing Moments
Because I've been so busy lately, I don't have time to write original sharing. Especially for entrepreneurs in the technology track, there will be new problems to solve every day, from technology, user experience to market size are interlocking.
I have been a product manager and a software product entrepreneur for 8 years, and from the new product I started to do in 2023 to now, I will share some of my product thoughts every few months, and today I want to talk about some of our recent versions of the product, there are some experiences that can be shared with you, I wrote 3000 words, I hope it can help you.
MVP product design for product managers
When I was in the offline salon, I was asked by a peer product manager: "If you are a product manager and the boss of the company, your natural needs are different from going to work, you can do what you want, and you can't do it if you don't." ”
Actually, no, technology is from the boss's point of view, you still have technical partners, which is essentially an equal relationship, the same as upstream and downstream colleagues at work.
To promote a demand, you still need to come up with a specific demand demonstration to explain the feasibility of your product design plan, such as which scenario the demand comes from from the user, corresponding to the potential market size and paid value.
Whether the new product function design is used or not, and whether anyone pays for it, is not limited to whether you are the boss or the product manager.
Of course, in the process of starting my business, I have been using my own "Simple Design" methodology, and the product design based on MVP is also able to grasp the functional design of the same pain points as the competition.
User requirements under the MVP
Therefore, product planning becomes very important, from the beginning of the demand research to be clear about the priority of the requirements, we can split the core needs of users through product strategic planning, and then specific to the function, the functional priority is differentiated.
As shown in the figure below, I explained the product framework of product planning to students in my class, and we split the unit functions of a page.
Cloud Wood Bird "My Original Page"
The unit function behind the product page
It is important for MVP product design to combine the advantages of your own team to do product design, and you can't completely follow the competition, as shown in the figure below, is our Yunwood Bird new media companion product iteration plan
Cloud Wood Bird product planning
Because our own team started from the WeChat official account to do content operation, and considering the technical cost and development resources, we also decided to give priority to other functional modules under the WeChat official account channel in the 1.0 stage.
Many product development specifications and processes of large manufacturers are not necessary for small teams
The product managers and R&D personnel from the big factories have a habit of starting only when they have everything in order, just like the chef of a five-star restaurant, to make a luxurious dish, everything must be prepared before they can start.
It would be an "insult" for him to suddenly use ingredients from a street stall to make them.
In fact, students from large factories do the same software development in small teams, if they follow the way of large factories, the research and development progress of the team will slow down, and the cost will increase.
For example, some large factories come out to start a business, and they are used to providing the latest Apple computer configuration to all employees, which is actually unnecessary. You can wait for the company to stabilize its cash flow in the future before providing it.
In addition, for example, adding a test environment and a pre-release environment to your own R&D environment, and adding a code acceptance process before testing, which greatly increases the R&D time and cost.
This leads to the extreme discomfort of the team, after all, the quality of the personnel of the small entrepreneurial team is not as good as that of the large factory, so if you want to do the above steps, you must learn or even be familiar with it.
There may be students who have not been in a large factory and have never heard of the pre-release environment.
Because I suggest that the small team of product managers start a business is the first speed at the beginning, although it is like "barbaric" development, but the small team is for the online needs, only when the functions are almost online, and there are users to use them, to achieve the commercial closed loop, and then optimize the product series.
Because the time and energy of team members fluctuate periodically, it must be the most enthusiastic time for everyone at the beginning, and the team's combat effectiveness will decline over time. If you keep investing in endless research and development, it is difficult to get a guarantee of speed.
In addition, the innovation, speed, and flexibility of a small team to turn around and change direction at any time are unmatched by large manufacturers.
In addition, large manufacturers have strict review and review systems for product launches, which makes it difficult for products to be commercialized if they want to really promote them to users.
For example, the foreign product clubhouse was once on fire, but some large domestic manufacturers wanted to imitate it, but they couldn't solve the problem of content moderation, so it couldn't be really announced.
Entrepreneurs who are product managers must be prepared: be a long-term iterator
The career experience of product managers is often not too long, and the new products incubated by a large factory are at least more than half a year of research and development time, and they have a chance to be commercialized in 1-2 years
However, during this period, due to the pressure of assessment and resource return, the team members will continue to change, but the polishing, iteration and trial operation time of a product will start in at least one year.
During the period, the change of a product manager leaving makes it difficult for the product manager to know the full picture of the product lifeline, and then encounters some product leaders who do not pay attention to the whole life cycle, and finally the product is constantly overturning and redoing the same functions.
In order to have such an opportunity to accompany the whole life cycle of the product, it is difficult for even the product director, because the cost, commercialization, and product development resources of the product are always the boss.
Therefore, whether or not to continue to invest resources is not up to the product director. So it's hard to see a product manager going from 0 to 1 and then from 1 to 10.
Whether a product can be done well or not cannot rely on product research and development alone, which is to return to the essence of entrepreneurship. That's why some people say that Internet people eat youth, and the main reason is here, because entrepreneurship itself is 99% of failures.
Now, as an entrepreneur, I am very aware of the preciousness of every line of code and every design drawing, so I take the exact needs as the basis, reuse it if I can, and try to cut the functions as hard as possible.
In this way, it becomes a long-term iteration to be able to have a molded product.
Clarify the product positioning before starting the product design
Recently, there is another thought, that is, as a product manager, you must first clarify the product positioning before starting to do product design. Positioning can involve many aspects, such as for industries, businesses, and groups.
And the new media operation tools we are doing now are for B-end enterprises. Naturally, to meet the scenario needs of B-end users, in new media operations, the core needs of B-end users are management, for account, content, data analysis, and team management. The C-side focuses on the user's content creation, single article, and account data analysis.
It is equivalent to one is the manager of new media operation and the other is the executor of new media operation.
The difference between the requirements of B-end products and C-end products
After the 2 positioning distinctions, you can know which aspect of the function to do, and if you don't grasp the positioning well, it will cause the product to become four different, which makes it difficult for the B-end to get customers, and the C-end users are not easy to use, because they don't need many functions.
The most difficult feature to do: external data and algorithm support function
Recently, there is also a relatively big feeling that for product managers, if they want to do functions, the most difficult thing is the function of external data access and algorithm support.
External data is used as a support, which makes it difficult to have stability and data proofreading of its own functions. For example, we do official account data analysis, compared with other self-developed functions, we spend a lot of time doing data debugging, for this kind of external data, we have to constantly add data and test data to know whether the call is successful.
The function of the algorithm as a support involves the lack of development resources, especially the model algorithm requires more hardware costs and data costs, resulting in high research and development costs.
Therefore, if it is positioned as a data product as much as possible, then the team must have data analysts and data development with high requirements, otherwise the progress will be slowed down.
Now to make software products, the two most friendly forms for entrepreneurs: small programs and web pages
The main reason is that the development and maintenance costs are the lowest, and the threshold for launching is also the lowest. Both can reduce a lot of terminal adaptation time, if you do APP, plug-ins, PC clients, you will spend more time on the test of terminal equipment.
Of course, other forms will get relatively high user activity and stickiness, for example, we do new media operation plug-ins, which can get more than 40% of the daily activity, and there are always users who will fail to install and register because the product is not suitable for the browser, which makes it difficult for us to solve.
This will not be the case for web pages and mini programs.
Excellent product manager entrepreneurs: integrators of development, operation, and design resources.
The entrepreneur himself must be an excellent resource person, and for a product manager, if he wants to start a business, he must be an excellent resource integrator, including designers, development, testing, and operations are his resources.
Lei Jun once said: "Entrepreneurship is to share a few percent or dozens of one's dream with others, and everyone will work together to complete this dream." For product managers, this dream is a product prototype solution or a product that has been launched 1.0, so as to attract other personnel to join, as shown in the figure below, a product is launched like a source of power, continuously attracting all kinds of external resources.
These are my recent entrepreneurial thoughts as a product manager.