The golden rule of good G-end products: how to define it?

How to define the G-end good product standard? The authors summarize four key dimensions: a sense of security, a sense of value, a sense of convenience, and a sense of achievement. How to understand and apply it? Let's take a look at the author's interpretation and analysis.

Although many product managers have been working on the G-side for many years, launching one product after another, and have a lot of project experience, if you ask him, "What kind of product is a good product on the G-side?" "He's probably scratching the back of his head and can't say a word for a long time.

We have to admit that when we make products, we rarely think: "What kind of product is a good product?" ”。

When it comes to product managers in the To G industry, some people laugh at themselves as "tool people who draw prototypes". They know that the product meets the needs of users, so they basically listen to what the customer says, and then do the functional design according to it. As soon as the customer nods, they think, "Hey, this product is great!" ”

But this definition of "good product" is too vague. You said that in a team, everyone has different methods and ideas for making products, but in the end, the products can be sold, and the customers say yes. Is it true that everyone is making a good product?

Someone might say, "Oh, look at the sales!" The one that sells more and sells well is a good product. ”

There will definitely be problems with such a division.

After all, there are many factors that affect product sales, among which policy is a big head, and products supported by policies will obviously sell better than products that cannot be relied on by any policy.

In addition, sales and customer relationship will also be the key factors that determine product sales, sometimes, customers choose your product because they have a good relationship with you and want to spend money with you.

Therefore, judging whether a product is good or not just by looking at sales is a bit untenable, and it will not help your product design substantially.

In the final analysis, we have to go back to the user, think about what they want, dig deeper, and find the bottom, the core, and the most painful needs, so as to figure out what kind of product is a good product, which can be regarded as a clear standard, which is conducive to your greater probability of continuing to make a good product.

I can summarize it in four key dimensions: a sense of security, a sense of value, a sense of convenience, and a sense of achievement.

To put it simply, a sense of security makes customers not flinch, a sense of value makes customers willing to pay, a sense of convenience makes customers fall in love with using products, and a sense of accomplishment makes customers become your word-of-mouth communicators.

Just talking about the concept, it is confusing to hear. From implementation to execution, how can we work on the design of the product?

Now, I will talk about it in detail.

1. A sense of security

When we look at a product, we always habitually look for its highlights first, and see what are the wonderful things that can attract customers to pay for it.

But in fact, we should think the other way around, and the first thing we should look at is not the bright spots that attract customers, but the "thunder points" that may directly dissuade customers.

When it comes to G-end products, the deadliest "lightning point" is probably data security.

Due to the sensitivity of the G-end product, a lot of business data has confidentiality requirements, and the security of the system itself must be relatively strict to avoid being attacked by external attacks, otherwise the data will be leaked, but it will be lost "black yarn hat".

Therefore, for customers, the safety of the product is definitely their first consideration.

The sense of security is simply the lifeline of the G-end product, the shortest board of the barrel, which determines whether the customer in the technical department will reject your product with one vote.

For example, we have a product that is actually quite mature and has been used in some places. However, when I confidently promoted it to a customer, I was discouraged.

This customer just "lives or dies" and refuses to use it. Although our system meets expectations in terms of product features, interactive experience, product price, etc., customers just don't buy it.

There was only one reason for refusal: the system was deployed on the Internet, and they were afraid of the risk of data breaches.

Of course, customers will also ask for graded protection for G-end products themselves. Under the requirements of classified protection assessment, complex login passwords must be designed, sensitive data must be desensitized and displayed, encryption must be carried out during transmission, log audit and other functions must be designed.

These functions designed according to the requirements of graded protection are like putting on a "stealth armor" for our products, but unfortunately customers often do not perceive it, and the sense of security of the product is equivalent to "no feeling".

Therefore, in product design, it is necessary to make some "safe" functions that people can perceive.

For example, we can:

1. Log in with your U-Key. It's like a small USB flash drive that was plugged into the computer for online bank transfers in the early days. Inserting a U-key to log in to the system is like putting a lock on the system and you have to have a key to open it.

2. Early warning of abnormal situations. For example, if you log in to your account in an unconventional location, the system will send you a text message or an internal message to tell you: "Hey, your account password may have been leaked, change your password immediately!" ”

3. Add watermark to the page. Prevent those who are interested in leaking information by taking screenshots or taking photos. Even if it is leaked, we can find the "real culprit" through the watermark!

4. Add a safety description page. The functions and measures of the system regarding safety are directly listed. The more detailed and transparent the writing, the more reassuring the customer will be.

Second, the sense of value

Having satisfied the most basic security needs, let's look at the sense of value.

How to stand out in the competition of similar products and let customers choose you with the highest probability depends on the sense of value.

What is the sense of value when making a product?

The sense of value is to face your customers, they spend the same amount of money, and the features and experiences they buy are not the "best" they perceive.

For example, a system that assists customers in data supervision, customers import the same data into it, and the products you make can be automatically extracted from key fields, and competitors need to enter them manually. Hundreds of supervision rules have been added to your product, and you can also customize them, and the rules of competing products are not as many as yours, and the flexibility is not as good as yours. Naturally, the output of the supervised leads results the more your product is also more effective and effective.

Customers will choose you for 98% of the reasons (excluding 2% of non-routine operations).

What is an unconventional operation?

For example, some customers actually have no concept of the function of the system, and will simply compare products by doing "math problems", that is, counting to see which product has more function points.

We've been in this situation before. There is a product that loses out of competition with competitors because it has more testing items than us. Although our product testing items are more practical and the test results are more accurate, customers selectively ignore them and insist on "quantity, not quality".

Sometimes, we also encounter situations that make people laugh and cry. Obviously, our sales team communicated with customers smoothly in the early stage, and we fully cooperated with us to provide the project declaration plan.

However, when the bidding documents were finally issued, we were surprised to find that although the functional parameters of the project were mainly our products, they were also mixed with the functions of other competing products, which was simply a hodgepodge!

Once you've won the bid, you'll have to add these additional customization features to the standard product. Although in your eyes, some functions may be useless, and may even be "feigned" function points set by competing products in order to control bids.

But the result? A good end product, just like that, is forced with some useless features.

Because what the customer thinks is: something is better than nothing, as long as they see it, they feel necessary. Moreover, spending one amount of money is equivalent to buying several products, which is the psychology of taking advantage.

Of course, from the perspective of making products, there is no shortcut to enhancing the value of products. The key is to focus on the customer, understand their needs, and develop features that will really work for them, so as to "reduce costs and increase efficiency".

This is the most important point, and as for other tricks, such as piecing together more features than the competition, or splitting a feature into two menus to display, these are the "icing on the cake" things that need to be considered after the core functionality has been recognized by the customer.

3. Sense of convenience

Is it true that if the product is useful to the customer, the customer will definitely use it?

Of course not, G-end customers have a characteristic, that is, they rely on "administrative" orders for everything, that is, they will do what their superiors ask them to do.

If a product is more cumbersome to use, it will add a lot of work to him, and he is likely to drag it out. When the leader came to ask him about the effect of use, he said with a look of grievance or anger: "This product is not easy to use at all, and it is not as fast as what I did before." ”

Hearing the people who do things in the department say this, if it is not a strong leader, there is a high probability that you will have to comfort a few words, and then think that there is indeed something wrong with this product. Since then, the product has been completely "beaten into the cold palace", and there is no future for it.

Therefore, even if the product is really effective for the customer after using it, the customer may hesitate or even refuse to use it because they are afraid of trouble or do not want to increase the workload.

For example, we have made a "casual shooting" mini program before, which is convenient for the masses to find clues and report through the mini program, so as to help customers broaden the source of clues.

However, the sales of the products were not ideal. When I asked the reason for the sale, I got an unexpected answer: customers were reluctant to buy because they thought that using the app would significantly increase their workload.

I then asked, what exactly will be the added workload?

The sales told me that there are many clues reported, and customers need to check and screen them one by one, which is very laborious. Secondly, I have to regularly release various news trends and case information, so I am even more reluctant to use it.

This reflects the psychology of most customers – even if the product is useful, they are reluctant to accept a solution based on a significant increase in workload.

To this end, our products have made some optimizations, such as identifying whether the clues are effective through technical means, and giving suggestions for the processing of clues, saving customers from making their own screening judgments. For another example, the company arranges the operation of a personnel assistance system to push relevant content on a regular basis, instead of customers looking for content and publishing.

The core of making customers feel the sense of convenience is actually intelligence. Our goal is to reduce our customers' workload, not increase it. Whether it is to replace labor with machines, or to replace customers' labor with our labor, it is a kind of "convenience".

Fourth, a sense of achievement

After talking about the sense of value and convenience, that is, to solve the problem of whether customers will buy and whether they will use it.

Next, let's talk about the sense of achievement.

G-end customers have a very obvious feature, that is, no matter what they do, they have to send news and publicize it. Even if there is no concrete result in this work, but only a preliminary discussion or research on a certain matter, someone has to take pictures, someone writes, someone publishes, and even the media shoots and reports on TV.

To put it bluntly, it's the "vanity" of the customer that is at work. To put it bluntly, customers have a need to showcase the results of their work.

Why do leaders like to watch the big screen and watch a bunch of data flying around on the screen, I feel that this system is very good. It's not just the visualization of data that helps it to control the overall situation and command decisions. There is also a hidden buff, which is convenient for punching in and taking pictures.

This data screen is a system's "Wall of Honor" and "Honor List", the more magnificent it looks, the cooler it is, it can give the "audience" a hint: this system is full of science and technology, very advanced, very avant-garde, very bull X.

Therefore, when I have been working on products and projects over the years, I have a feeling that if a system does not have a large visual screen, it will make people feel that the system does not seem to be important.

Where does the customer's sense of accomplishment come from? It's not how much work has been done internally, but how much attention has been paid to external publicity.

Internal work results can be achieved in many ways, so to speak, using a system, or it can be said to be done manually.

However, the matter of external propaganda (bragging) must be: "I have no one, and I am superior to others."

From the perspective of customer fulfillment, when making products, you have to consider from the perspective of being able to publicize them, what functions you have that others do not have, what are better than others, and you can hype them up across the country.

For example, one day we received a call from a customer from a certain province who came to us in a hurry and said that he wanted to purchase our business system. What's going on? It turned out that a big leader wanted to visit their territory for a work inspection, and they had to quickly find a good thing to show the leader.

However, the customer is also quite entangled. Because our system is already well-known all over the country, if you introduce those old-fashioned functions, it doesn't seem to be anything new, and the leader will probably yawn when he hears it.

What's the point? Haha, don't worry, customers are smart! They had an idea and came up with a new gadget that would allow us to statistically analyze the whole province of their internal systems, and also look at the data situation of the whole province.

As soon as we heard it, we immediately took action, and according to the customer's requirements, we added some new statistical analysis fields, and also made a large series of data, so that the data can be like wearing a sugar gourd, from top to bottom, from left to right, whatever you look at and how to analyze!

The customer saw our results, and was also a happy person, and directly spoke: "The three-level units of the province have listened to me, hurry up and enter your historical data into this system for me, and you will have to use this system for business handling in the future, and no one will want to be lazy!" ”

After this operation, there are many highlights on the data visualization screen of the system.

Therefore, the customer's sense of achievement in the product largely comes from: what the system can show to the outside world. We have to let our customers and superiors see at a glance that the sense of science and technology of our system, as well as the application effect, are simply leveraged!

Final words

Okay, finally, let's summarize, how to define a good product standard on the G side?

It is to meet the following four dimensions:

1. A sense of security is the cornerstone of the product, just like the "bodyguard" of the product, protecting customer data from leakage, so that customers can use it with peace of mind without worrying about "backyard fire".
2. The sense of value is the core competitiveness of the product, it has to make the customer feel, hey, this money is well spent! Powerful, first-class experience, but also to help customers "reduce costs and increase efficiency", this is the king.
3. Convenience is the key to the user experience of the product, and if the product feels like a maze, the customer will definitely leave with it. Therefore, intelligence is indispensable to make it easy for customers to get started.
4. The sense of achievement is the "icing on the cake" of the product, it has to make customers feel that with this product, not only work more efficiently, but also show off in front of peers, this big screen, this data, look at the high-end atmosphere and grade!

This article was originally published by @武林 in Everyone is a product manager, and it is forbidden to reprint without the permission of the author.

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.