Shu Xun is currently assistant to baidu’s vice president of sales and director of integrated business management Department. From 2009 to 2011, he served as general manager of Baidu Tieba Business Division. In two years, he led the team to achieve a 10-fold increase in the number of registered users and a more than three-fold increase in the number of page views of Tieba.
I have been practicing and revising for a long time in a PV product of 1 billion level. In a twinkling of an eye, it has been arrested for 16 years. I have been fortunate to work with many top-notch PMS in China for many years. The “Nine Steps” was written for pan-Internet products, for large products as well as new features in products.
This document is for those who dream of changing the world
Years later, when I look at those young product managers, I will remember that I had a high-paying job. IT was 2000. I was working as a search engine PM for an IT website in Beijing after graduating from college. At that time, my monthly salary could buy one square meter of house in the Asian Games Village.
Ten years later, my friend hired a PM and offered me the same monthly salary as I did ten years ago. The difference was that at this time, the young PM could only buy a house of one square meter in the Asian Games Village with one year’s salary. I was confused about this, so I consulted my HR colleague, who told me that product manager was a rare job ten years ago, but now it is not.
Housing prices in Beijing have risen tenfold in a decade, but the salaries of the best PMS have increased at least 50-fold. So clicking a “V” on Sina Weibo is a common way to meet someone certified as a product manager.
Many PMS have a dream: to change the world with a product they design, while earning a fat entry-level salary that hasn’t changed in 10 years, but feels like a bone in the body.
If you are a PM who is following a master, then you are not only lucky, but also talented in product design, this article is for your reference.
If you have a dream of changing the world with your product, this article is for you.
I share it here in the hope that it can be of value to more dream PMS and make the world a better place through your hands.
This article describes the “nine steps” product design, the main framework is derived from a few from the design level users products shiny people, I have been in a level 1 billion PV product done long time practice and constantly revised, while, has been arrested in connection with 16 years, had the opportunity to work with multiple China recognized the best PM for many years, now under their own understanding.
The “Nine Steps” was written for pan-Internet products, for large products as well as new features in products. In product design, PM will answer the following nine questions one by one, and analyze and discuss with the team one by one.
Step 1: Which core user needs does the product meet?
The key of product design lies in making clear which core value of the product is and what core needs of the users are satisfied.
In practice, 70% of PMS often forget this, because “meeting customer needs” has become the mantra of almost every PM, so it is often forgotten.
We often hear that “Weibo should strengthen the SNS attribute”, “wechat should open O2O”, “community information should flow faster”, are the most typical examples of forgetting user needs.
All these proposals are taken for granted, without standing in the perspective of the user thinking, not clear user needs, will be doomed to failure.
In fact, even when PMS use this, it often doesn’t help. Because a careful analysis of “meet user needs” will find that there is no word in fact.
First, “user” is a virtual group concept, and PM cannot find a specific person to represent the user.
Second, “users” don’t actually know what they want.
So in practice, users are always represented by three types of people: the PM herself, the hypothetical typical user, and the PM’s executive leader. Today’s iPhone, Weibo and wechat users never knew they needed them a few years ago.
User needs are always captured and created by genius.
Just like what will be popular in the fashion industry next year, those luxury consumers and fashion critics do not know, only talented designers can lead the future. Big Things in THE history of IT were either created by genius or hit by super-lucky boys.
Online game “giant” once very hard to practice “to meet the needs of users” this truth, very serious research users, users want to give what, the results to the last found that “users” do not exist, those labeled as “users”, in fact, do not know what they need, so the product completely failed.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, most of us didn’t have to invent an iPhone like Steve Jobs, nor did we have the opportunity to create and lead the way Kim Jong UN did. So, if you’re just building a new feature of an existing product, or you want to design a new gadget, there are two more practical things you can do than think about “user needs” :
1. Be crazy about your product
2. Try to solve your biggest pain point
The most basic quality of a PM is to love their product.
If you don’t love your product, the advice here is to immediately switch to something you do, even if you get paid half as much. What fun life can be when you’re burning for something you love.
Ten years ago, my best friend, in order to get such a job, did not care about the location (no matter how far, no matter how high or low), did not care about the salary (the bottom line is that he can support his local food, clothing, housing and transportation), and ended up creating the world’s greatest Chinese product.
Three years ago, I had a subordinate, an ordinary boy, who was rated as the lowest PM in a large company. However, with the same passion and a young heart, he made products that almost matched wechat and had temporary influence.
According to the first step of this “nine-step method”, if you are a deep user of Weibo, please think about the three-column structure revision of Sina Weibo. What core needs does it satisfy users?
As a heavy user of Sina Weibo, I often use my mobile phone to log on weibo in front of my computer, because THE PC doesn’t give me a better browsing experience. Unfortunately, the core need of “poor browsing experience for PC users” has not been addressed, but has been made worse by the three-column redesign.
If you do not start from the needs of users, it will lead to the opposite direction. Please consider what core needs you solve for a user first when you modify the version. You may change the world, or you may kill the time of tens of millions of users.
The bullet point of the first step is “one core requirement”, especially “one”.
For such products as Weibo, making browsing experience better is the core requirement. How to load the system faster, how to produce high-quality information, how to eliminate spam, how to improve the visual experience are all urgent problems to be solved. PM should never try to invent, subvert existing products, or add some fashionable new functions. Only by grasping the “core needs” to improve bit by bit, one percentage point by one percentage point, can quantitative change lead to qualitative change.
Step 2: What makes you unique compared to similar products?
If the first step is to solve the problem of “what is the use of the product”, the second step is to solve the problem of “what is the use of others”. This seems like a simple question, but as many as 90% of PMS in large companies don’t consider “why should anyone use me?” compared to 70% of PMS who often forget “customer needs.”
Why don’t so many PMS think “Why should anyone use me?” The biggest advantage of being a big company is that it has the money, the people, the technology, the users, and the ability to bring a proven product to users quickly, while still delivering a decent experience.
Because the products of large companies are born with such advantages, which become the magic weapon used by PMS to win, they do not need to consider product positioning, so the biggest advantage often turns out to be a disadvantage.
One evening at the end of 2011, I was in Foshan, Guangdong province, pinching my feet after dinner. As usual, I asked the technician what websites she used to visit, what hobbies she had in life and what she was planning to do. The young girl answered me that her latest dream is to buy a mi mobile phone.
I was so surprised that I almost dropped my teacup. At the end of 2011, I only saw news about Xiaomi on the Internet, and there was not even a real phone on the market. But thousands of miles away in Guangdong, a small town on the side of the road where foot washing girls have made a Xiaomi phone their life’s dream.
I quickly asked her why, she said, “Xiaomi mobile phone more than 1,000 yuan, but with the same as apple, how cost-effective ah.” That’s the positioning, that’s the uniqueness of the product.
China’s Internet is a common example: from news, portals, e-commerce, video websites to today’s group buying, security software, browsers, micro-blogs, mobile phones, 99% of them are undifferentiated competition. Few people consider “what is your uniqueness compared with similar products”. It is clear that those who come from behind have a deep understanding of the problem and extraordinary control skills.
According to the second step of this “nine-step method”, if you are a deep user of wechat, please consider what is the “uniqueness” of the product “Moments of friends”.
When designing the function of “moments of friends”, wechat must have considered its uniqueness compared with Weibo, Qzone and Campus. In the case of such serious homogenization of SNS products, how a secondary function of wechat wins and what is its uniqueness is the primary problem that the PM team needs to solve.
Personally, I think this uniqueness is “private”. In fact, the essence of social communication is “private sharing”.
People get to know each other, friends, close friends, even couples, and finally couples, the process of deepening the relationship, which is the process of gradually sharing privacy with each other. Why weibo can’t do SNS, because the broadcast platform like Weibo does not have the characteristics of privacy by nature.
However, wechat circle of friends solves the problem of Facebook’s complex privacy Settings with a simple means in the positioning of privacy. Whether wechat PM genius insight into this point, or luck, have to be admired.
If wechat moments can do a better job of “private sharing”, the future of the product is very promising and it could have a chance to compete with Facebook in the future.
Step 3: Break down users. Divide users into different roles based on the core values of the product.
The first step is to solve “what use”, the second step is to solve “why others use”, the third to the seventh step is to solve “how to better use”. How to better use the key is to become a user, stand in the perspective of the user to think.
Perhaps genius has insight into the needs of users, but genius also has a growth process in understanding the needs of users. We see That Joe also climbs out from one failure after another. Understanding the user’s needs is like the Buddha’s realization: peel an apple, peel it to the end, find it empty, and realize. User demand is originally a book without words, to understand, there needs to be a peeling apple process.
Decomposition of users, become users of the process is a peeling apple process, a PM must be refined. Different products, different dimensions, there are different decomposition methods. Initial need not be too complicated, but also must not have only one kind of user in mind, that is not to peel apples, but to peel stones. At the very least, PMS should categorize users by the thickest possible line of product core value.
For example: UGC products: see users, write users;
Forum: browsing users, Posting users, moderators;
B2C: browsing users, trading users;
E-commerce: seller, buyer;
New products: seed users, growth users;
Old products: early users, growing users, declining users, lost users;
The core of this process is to capture the most important characters.
It should be pointed out in particular that the division of roles is related to the operation degree of the product. When the product with mature operation enters the refined stage, it needs to break down the roles in a more detailed way.
Take weibo for example: Such as the use way, the life cycle of the role is divided into two dimensional X Y, the use of the microblogging way can be a browse information users, information users, can also share more fine, such as release information users can also be divided into personal, certification big V of individuals, businesses, media, etc., weibo life cycle can be listed seed users, users, the early growth of users, recession of users, Loss of users, etc.
When we cross the X and Y axes, we get a lot of characters. The weibo characters listed above, we get 30 kinds of characters. Of course, some of them are meaningless. Very few products and PMS need to break down dozens of roles. For the most part, we can just pick the most important ones.
Step 4: Become a user. Each character answers the following two questions:
Question 1: Why does the character use this product?
Question 2: How does the character know and get to the product?
After breaking down the character, PM needs to put himself in the character, cosplay, imaginative role-playing game.
When answering the question “Why is this character using this product?” we find that the core needs of the user begin to break down.
As I mentioned in wechat’s Business Model and Entrepreneurial Opportunities, the core needs of users are the first-level needs, and a product only has one first-level demand. In addition, all other requirements are second-level needs, and there are three and four levels below the second level. For example, when microblog users read microblog, it is the first-level demand (browsing), when they send microblog, it is the second-level demand (expression), and when they send microblog to insert various functions, it is the third-level demand.
When we analyze the core demand of microblog users “browsing the information they care about”, the first role to be decomposed is “browsing user”. When answering the question “why do browsing users use this product”, we find that this is because there are “Posting information users”. Then why do users post information?
After layer by layer decomposition of microblog role and why the role uses the product, we will find that microblog users have multi-layer needs:
1. The need for information
2. The need to express
3. The need to socialize
4. Self-actualization needs
These needs are in a pyramid shape, with the number of users decreasing step by step. The top of the pyramid is the “self-fulfilling needs”, which are the big V users of Weibo.
Their purpose on this platform is to realize their own value, so they produce the best quality information, which determines the whole ecological environment of Weibo. This is the uniqueness that distinguishes Sina Weibo from other products. At the bottom is the “need for information”. These roles are all the users of Weibo, who truly represent the whole of Weibo, including the dream and future of commercialization.
The second question to be answered, “How does the character know and reach the product” is a product operation question.
Good products are inseparable from operation, and many products even win by operation. In the early days of Sina Weibo, in order to hire a potential big V, one could send someone to Hong Kong for two weeks, just to give the celebrity an iPhone and teach him how to use the phone to log on weibo. The key to the success of Sina Weibo is to have an accurate insight into how its core users know and reach the product, and to implement high-execution operations.
The example of Sina Weibo tells us that in differentiated competition, you can succeed in the market as long as you have a distinctive feature in product or operation and can exert this feature to the extreme so that your competitors can’t catch up with you.
Step 5: Identify character achievements. Determine how the product satisfies the sense of accomplishment of different roles.
How each type of character grows and is satisfied through the use of the product is the key to the continuous growth of the product. About 90% of PMS fall into a myth about this.
In 1996, when I was addicted to BBS, an adapted lyric “You on the Same Network” was very popular on the Internet. I remember a lyric like this: “At that time, the day was always very short, and it was half past ten in a flash, and you only thought about when you could upgrade, even if your eyesight was reduced by 0.1”. I once wasted four years of college time in order to hang the experience value of the first station on a BBS, so virtual achievements harm people.
In the past 16 years, simple and direct incentive points have been mastered by domestic PMS, which is a method that has been successfully tried and carried forward. There are so many innovations that you can write a history of Internet innovation in China.
Classic such as QQ upgrade system, lighting a variety of ICONS, Discuz’s various titles, points system, online game titles, badges, props, micro blog fans, tool products points, expansion, world ranking and so on.
At present, there is no incentive for users to score products, but become alternative, such as wechat.
It is this kind of quick and easy method especially suitable for Oriental psychological characteristics that makes many PMS ignore the core of the product. The mistake 90% of PMS fall into is over-gamification.
The most important achievement of a product is the sense of accomplishment a user gets when his core needs are met. When irrelevant incentives interfere with his core needs, his real sense of accomplishment is reduced.
Free online games, Taobao, search engines, because the achievements of core users are directly related to the most sensitive indicators of strong income, so they are the best products in the world to do the achievements of core users.
Baidu recently introduced a feature in its search hint suggestion that turns the word blue the second time you search for the same keyword. That’s what searchers have achieved: it’s easier to search for information and the search engine knows you better.
On the other hand, if a search engine introduces a feature that pops up when a user searches: Congratulations, your experience score has increased by 10 points, the immediate result is a drop in revenue because it disrupts the user’s core needs.
Products with unclear business models do not have sensitive quantitative indicators, and PM ignores the core needs of users. In the case of excessive gamification, the achievements of secondary roles immediately become irrelevant, such as some disturbing incentives of Sina Weibo for browsing users. So, the key to this step is to focus on the core needs of your core users, and get your core users to achieve their core achievements on their core needs.
In terms of role decomposition, Sina Weibo’s secondary demand role, that is, the role of “information release user”, has achieved some excellent achievements, especially the innovation of comment mode and concept of fans, which is far better than Twitter, laying the foundation for its late development to win from the product. For weibo, a product that can be decomposed into dozens of roles, it is a great challenge for PM to grasp the relationship between the whole and the part when sorting out the achievements of various roles.
Step 6: Identify key points in meeting user needs.
Break down the entire process of each character from “get the product, use the product, get the needs met, leave, and come back” to describe the key steps and key pages.
This step is the key step to test PM’s execution skills. Whether PM can do this step well has nothing to do with talent, but with hard work and heart.
E-commerce enterprises have the best control over the whole process of meeting user needs.
The reason is simple, because every step is money. Excellent e-commerce enterprises, such as Tmall, Taobao, JINGdong, PM will have a clear understanding of where users come from, how to use, how to leave, how to come back, clear quantitative indicators.
Because PM is very clear, if a key point is well done, the income will rise, and if a key point is not well done, the income will fall, which is directly related to the bonus, but can not be messed with.
This is the advantage of a product with a clear business model, the commercial value is proportional to the user needs.
Search and e-commerce have the best business model, is to meet the user’s first-level needs, the business value is realized. Revenue is a sensitive metric to be found in both business value and user demand.
If you have a good USER experience, revenue goes up, if you have a bad user experience, revenue goes down. There is no better way in the world to improve the user experience.
This step is painful cosplay. Let’s assume a simplest new B2C product with at least four simplest personas:
1. Browse users
2. Transaction users
3. Seed users
4. Early users
There are probably 20 key points, and a dozen key pages, to describe the process of “get the product, use the product, get the needs met, leave, come back” for the four simplest roles. Therefore, if you play too much, you become a user. In accordance with Buddha’s philosophy, product managers peel apples and finally find that the apples are gone.
Step 7: Increase the conversion rate of key points.
When PM finds about 20 key points, how to improve the conversion rate of each key point and key page is the phased target.
When I was the general manager of Tieba, IN order to understand how new users come in, I registered more than 80 accounts online to see what can be improved in the registration process.
So, an average PM should try at least a dozen times on each key point to get a feel for it and find effective ways to increase conversion rates.
Many people have heard of the principle of “one click more users lose half”, although the actual loss rate of different products is different, but the basic is a considerable number.
At the heart of all forms of products under the “generic personas using products” banner, portals, search, and IM have used at least two pages over the years: the portal’s home page and content page, the search home page and results page, and the IM friend list page and dialog box.
E-commerce user demand chain is longer, with more pages. Facebook and Twitter, however, use only one page to satisfy their core user needs and maximize conversion rates. Hao123, invented by Li Xingping, has practiced this interactive revolution seven or eight years earlier than Facebook and Twitter.
It should be mentioned that, after Facebook and Twitter, the most influential innovation in the history of interaction is the open search platform (Aladdin), which can meet the needs of users on the current page of search results, saving the time for users to jump to a new website and search again. This is the invention of the most successful and richest PM in China.
So don’t ever assume that conversion rates are at their peak. Maybe you can revolutionize things the other way around.
Baidu’s Aladdin and Twitter’s left and right column revision are all innovations that accumulate in response to users’ core needs. In this mobile era, more fields that have not been covered by predecessors are waiting for PM to explore.
Step 8: Form a closed loop. Let the product grow by itself.
The phased goal of PM in the previous step has been completed. The eighth step is to settle down and consider the closed-loop problem. The closed loop is the self-growth cycle of the product.
Taobao’s credit evaluation system, it is a closed loop.
Buyers buy products, merchants provide good service to get praise, praise will get more new buyers, new buyers buy products, merchants have the opportunity to get more praise, forming a cycle. The PM’s job is to discover, design, and ensure that the loop runs smoothly. Bad critics, for example, are the killers of this closed loop.
UGC products are also often a closed loop.
Users post good information, good information attracts new users, new users post good information, and more new users are attracted to form a closed loop. Spammers, Spam, low-quality messages, etc., are all killers of this closed loop.
For many UGC products, PMS work hard to make them work, but the degradation of the quality of the information spreads through the cycle like a virus, making the product wither and die.
More products are not closed loop, such as Alipay, dictionary APP, IE browser, Flash games, Microsoft Office and so on. The increase in users did not lead to self-growth of the product.
The difference is that now many tool products have found their own ring, such as cloud input method, the more users, the more user-friendly input method, the more users, the formation of a cycle.
In the era of mobile, cloud and big data, it will be possible for more products to form closed-loop.
Only by forming a closed loop can the product grow on its own and evolve into an organism. Many small closed loops will eventually form a large closed loop, and many large closed loops may eventually evolve into an ecosystem. For example, Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent are all an ecosystem.
Multiple ecosystems can evolve into one super-ecosystem, as ali is doing. Of course, the term ecosystem is a favorite of strategists and commentators, and product managers only care about those little closed loops, pulling and conditioning the ones that hit your pain points.
In 2012, even if the end of mankind comes, from the concept of physics, there is no essential difference with a piece of ice melting into water, they are just a ring of one form, and another form of the ring. All a PM has to do is to be the singer who pulls the strings, the vibrations of countless closed loops, and the whole universe will make music for you.
Step 9: Work fast and iterate quickly.
Google, Baidu interview PM, all happen to coincide out of the same test:
When you get to the scheduled release date and find that your product is still not functional enough, do you choose to put it on line, or do you continue to polish it until it is satisfactory?
Once there was a big BOSS answer wrong this question, but in hundreds of questions, only wrong this one, so or do Google, Baidu’s biggest technical BOSS. What’s your answer? PM always thinks of too many things in his mind, but users think little or even don’t think. Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, the most outstanding PM in the world, simply calls users “idiots”. A genius PM in China describes becoming a user as becoming an idiot, and he hopes that the distance between PM and idiot is only 0.01cm.
If you listen to the teachings of two of the most successful and richest PMS on the Chinese Internet, you will notice that both of them, thousands of miles away, emphasize the same two principles, one of which is: work fast and iterate quickly.
Perhaps, this is the secret of becoming the richest person, because they know that once the opportunity is missed, there is no more. If you’re under 30 and aware of both, there’s a good chance you can change the world and make a lot of money at the same time.
But there’s a big mistake about rapid iteration in the mobile space. A lot of APP updates that don’t matter are constantly prompting users to install new versions, which is definitely not rapid iteration.
Rapid iteration is only a means, the purpose is to better meet the user experience, so product upgrade to give users an experience beyond expectations, to make users look forward to and wait for your upgrade.
PMS should pay for their mobile phone bills by releasing a small change that forces users to upgrade, wasting the company’s bandwidth and users’ traffic. Please learn from Wechat and Sina Weibo, who were born in the mobile era.
Nothing is constant, and the world is changing so fast that how many Apples does it take to figure out what users want? So WHAT I say is always wrong.