The author of this article is Jinkey (public account Jinkey-love, website Jinkey.ai)

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In 2017, most of the time around wechat ecology to make products, from small programs to enterprise wechat, from THE C end to the B end, can not help but trigger some thinking

Wechat is the most successful product in China today. Is it doing everything right? When is the same thing right and when is it wrong? Why are two opposite things both true at different times?

About our product

1. Any product should serve a specific business purpose. Don’t talk about user experience.

User experience can make a business sustainable, but the business needs to survive first, so don’t put user experience above business purpose. Make the user experience as good as possible while meeting specific business needs. Always say how wechat experience good, people behind mutual entertainment and advertising to provide enough financial support, but you do not. Not wechat is a winner, wechat’s approach is good, the idea of winning and losing is not helpful for personal growth, to learn to critically look at a product, wechat is worth learning, there are not worth learning.

• It’s like a QQ pop-up. It’s like psoriasis. Whether you use it or not, it’s there. Shake, drifting bottle can let users choose to hide “for the good user experience”.
• Whether you like it or not, it is “part of your life”.

The reason is simple: Interactive entertainment and advertising are currently Tencent’s biggest sources of blood, while wechat and QQ are just two carriers. On days when the game is not a major source of revenue, perhaps this portal can be turned off for the sake of the user experience.

In order to build the entire enterprise ecosystem, it is ok to force users on individual functions, but do it smartly. For example, the entrance to the game is disgusting, but it doesn’t use digital red dots to give you a hint, and it doesn’t show up on the digital red dots of the desktop icon. User experience is good, only relative. Ux shouldn’t be an excuse not to think about monetization, and business goals shouldn’t be an excuse not to think about UX.

Product functions and priorities are aligned with current corporate strategy

Can not ignore the strategy of product function, there is no best, only appropriate. We used to notice that every detail of wechat was Webpage perfect, but now we don’t, for example, when we search a group chat link, why do we get only the Webpage (technically the same type of message as Webpage), but not the text message with the URL? Why can’t wechat chat records roam in the cloud? The idea of 900 million users is definitely more points that can be improved than the product manager of wechat. However, it may not be right. What is right now may not be right in the future, and what is right may not be done (because there are many things that are right). Take a look at some of wechat’s “inconsistent” decisions:

1. From QQ number to import the first wave of users to some reason closed QQ registration wechat entry
2. The “hormonal function” generated by the strategy of attracting some early adopters in order to survive the internal competition: shake function, nearby people, and shake function and nearby people are plugged-in as “deactivate function”.
3. Instead of making wechat phone calls (although there is a separate app for wechat phone book), VOIP calls are made directly to users’ phones, which is a change from the relationship with operators. Tencent, which relies on SP business to survive, is unwilling to compete too much with operators whose main business is telephone, until the popularity of mobile Internet finds traffic as a new growth point for operators.
4. At the beginning of the small program that does not do centralized distribution to now focus on supporting benchmarking industry cases, search a content explicit priority to a part of the application, to the full flow entrance. .

There are many more examples, but none of these are wrong, and doing A is right, and the opposite of A is right. But the company’s strategy evolution, originally in the C-end pursuit of the ultimate wechat, put more energy and resources on the B-end users, b-end users for the purpose of profit, wechat products to do not disturb users is impossible, more is to seek a balance, wechat is also learning and growth. The original high cold wechat, but also more to listen to the opinions of industry partners, common exploration.

Resources determine how far a product can go, and vision determines how wide a product can go

You have ideas, can promote the company’s decision-making layer, apply for resources; You have an idea, you can write BP to finance; If you have an idea, you can ask your friends to help you. You have an idea, you can learn to code it yourself…

If all you have is ideas, then it’s just like farting. For product managers, we should learn to strive for resources to meet the needs of users to achieve all the required resources of product functions. Lack of resources, the product can not go on. If you can stand on your own and want to be an indie developer, then you need to support yourself first.

There are resources to make the product go on all the time, but it depends on the vision of the product manager or the boss to see whether a good hand will be spoiled.

For example, if you have a unique patented facial recognition technology, you can first provide an API that other developers can pay to use. That’s one point. You can be a great indie developer with a single API, but you’ll never be a unicorn. And by this patent,

We can cooperate with hardware companies to generate intelligent security cameras, which can detect strangers and immediately record videos. Release a photo album APP that automatically classifies and retrieves faces; Provide Internet of Things face recognition module; Reconstruction of 3d model after identifying human body feature points + VR/AR can achieve remote immersive social…

When a variety of cooperation or related products are derived from the core products, a complementary and coordinated matrix can be formed to form a wide field of ecology. If you take the most familiar wechat example, is from

Communication (Voice) -> Social (circle of friends, Shake, people nearby) -> Social Reading: Public number -> Social payment (Wechat red envelope), social entertainment (games) -> C-end expansion to B-end (service number, enterprise wechat) -> LARGE integration of B-end and C-end (small program, investment in the field of government affairs and people’s livelihood strive to become as indispensable as water and electricity)

From communication tools to water and electricity for the Internet, vision determines the breadth of products.

4. Right and wrong product decisions are relative; Too much is too little.

The same technique, in another scenario, he could be wrong. For example, there is a trick in product design, which is to increase the cost of user exit in order to achieve GMV or increased activity. For example, when you uninstall a lot of PC software, ask you whether you uninstall it because of any uncomfortable points, and then provide a “thoughtful” solution, which is a good way to retain users. However, Ctrip goes through several steps from the ticket details page to the ticket purchase completion page, each step asking you if you want other services (such as shuttle pickup), even if you click cancel in the previous step, the next step will still prompt you to buy. These additional services are selected by default throughout the process, increasing the user’s operational cost to bundle. Next thing you know, it’s a public relations disaster.

Policy and law are the bottom line of product design

Some procedures cannot be simplified. For example, money paid by users to merchants cannot be collected on behalf of ordinary individuals and companies. The funds paid by users must be directly transferred to merchant receivables’ accounts through institutions qualified for clearing (such as Wezhong and SPD). Another example is the money that users deposit into the financial platform. For example, interest is paid to users first, and then transaction costs such as commission fees are deducted from users’ accounts. The commission fees cannot be directly deducted from the interest and then returned to users. Listen to a friend of financial products said that they have to learn a lot of financial securities laws in their spare time to design a reasonable and legal product process. Of course, if you do not understand, you can also consult the company’s legal department after the design. Generally, risky business processes need to be approved by the legal department.

Figure out the process, and then do the functional design.

When I got the demand, I started to open Axure paintings and Open Word to write, but this often only resulted in a scolding. Think clearly about the following questions to avoid conflicting needs:

1. What users? (such as white-collar workers)
2. What do users want? (like eating)
3. What are the scenarios that trigger this requirement? (e.g. at work, home, restaurant)
4. What resources are available in this scenario? (For example, the company has a microwave oven, home has a rice cooker and kitchen utensils)
5. What is the solution to the need? (e.g., ordering take-out, bringing your own food, going to a restaurant)
6. What is the core process of problem solving? Vertical thinking (such as opening the takeout app-> Select restaurant -> Select food -> order -> take takeout -> eat)
7. How is each step of the core process optimized? Lateral thinking (e.g. store selection steps, can it be sorted by points away from the user? To do so, there should be a front-loading process that prompts the user to authorize the location; Is it possible to personalize recommendations according to user tastes? If so, users have to click to select preferences or make recommendations based on historical orders; Can we make a hot list to recommend delicious food to users? If so, we need a mechanism to prevent merchants from brushing the list; Is it possible to give priority to the preferential intensity of the merchant recommended to users? …).

Think about these questions before you open your Axure.

About the technology

1 products do not know technology, can only do screws forever

Products should not understand technology, in fact, has been a platitude topic. Here’s what I think:

If you are an intern or a new graduate working as a product manager, it is not very useful to know the code, because you are usually assigned to make a small function point. You can write down the professional terms they say, such as Redis, Mysql, CDN, etc., in your spare time, you can search these terms once. Just get a general idea of what these things do.

As you progress in your career, even as you lead one or more product lines, you will find that your understanding of R&D limits you more and more.

1. Operations, for example, to edit image in the background to the community of operations for beautification, development “not possible, you want to be somebody else’s beautiful picture show so many functions, the somebody else to do, where we have scheduling”, I will try to find on the Internet open source or the third party’s picture editor SDK, finally found a beautiful picture show the advanced version of the API, Privately ask developers “Can I have a try?” The result was out in an afternoon. If I didn’t know what an API was, I wouldn’t even have to write code to find it. We’ll talk about technology stack selection later (this is not a product manager decision, but a product manager decision).
2. Take hardware products as another example. If you do not know what ZIGBEE is, what one-way communication is, what two-way communication is, and how hardware communicates, you will not be able to understand the data flow between hardware and mobile phone or even server, and the software end designed by you is likely to fail to run. At this time, you need to ask hardware engineers to understand the logic of this. In your spare time, you can search for information online, buy a raspberry Pie or An Arduino board to play with. There are a lot of tutorials online, if you can’t even copy and paste code, there is nothing to say. After practicing it yourself, you will have a clearer understanding of the data flow within the entire product. How much concurrency can be saved and how much memory can be saved by the code you don’t need to write to make a product? Just understand the data flow and user data manipulation logic behind the product. What? You don’t have time? Then why do you have time to play King of Glory?

2. Be familiar with multi-terminal API and technical limitations, so as to design full-terminal product architecture

With the development of iOS and Android for many years, many underlying communication and data processing apis have been rich. Basically, you can do everything you can think of in the APP. Therefore, for the product manager, it is only necessary to pay attention to the new capabilities released by each new version of iOS and Android. Examples include Callkit for iOS 10 and CoreNFC for iOS 11.

• If you want to get into the game, try calling the iOS API from Swift or Kotlin writing the Android API yourself.
• If you don’t want to write your own, you can check out other people’s interpretations of these new apis on websites like Jianshu, CDSN, and Bole.

What’s the use of knowing? Callkit can identify the strange call, for example, known as stewards tencent mobile phones housekeeper and 360 have the function of it, but don’t know we can also do your company’s products, such as jingdong APP can use this interface to help users tag jingdong Courier, Meituan delivery can help users mark registered in Meituan Courier number, That way the user won’t be able to reject a cold calling number.

Wechat applets do not encapsulate many system-level apis, only common ones, so we need to know which functions are done on APP and which functions are done on wechat applets. Wechat small programs are used for one-time and temporary functions, while APP is suitable for some heavy users and needs to be opened frequently. It can be opened directly from the desktop and use the API provided by the system to do more functions for heavy users. Specific terminal choice can be seen before I wrote the article “micro channel small program 10,000 words practical operation guide” familiar with the API of each platform, product architecture design on each platform will be more easily.

What procedure should the technology understand? What role does the technology learned from the product play?

It is best to understand a programming language, their spare time can write small scripts instead of some repetitive work. You can go to Github, Medium, Zhihu column and other technical trends, foreword, open source framework. To learn technology is to have a common language with the development, reasonably discuss the research and development cycle so as to discuss the feasibility of fixed schedule with the development, make functional choices, but also can use new technology to break through the product boundary.

When it comes to new technologies, in big companies, there are special pre-research departments or research institutes for cutting-edge research, whose research direction is determined by senior executives. They do some functional research that you think is impossible, which is beyond the current product needs, so as to make technological reserves for the future. This is usually not our place to intervene, but we can learn about their latest research results through internal forums and think about what technologies can be productized to improve the functions of existing products.

For start-up companies, non-technical, open source, cloud services, third-party SDK do not write their own, quickly verify the direction of the product; Technical, also do not invest too much r & D resources in non-main business, such as Iflytek focus on voice recognition technology, there is no need to put r & D resources into cloud storage, you can use seven cattle storage services. Product managers can be involved in technology selection of these third-party services to see if their SDK documentation meets the product’s current needs and future expansion. If you have spare time, you can also try to access their SDK, so that the requirements can be more reasonable.

About career

Learn from a person, don’t listen to what he says, see what he does

What I learned from this example is not the concept of “run out and go”, but the mentality of continuous learning. I fully communicate and learn with b-end users, understand the characteristics of each industry, try not to disturb C-end users on the premise of meeting the needs of B-end users, and seek a balance between business and humanities. Learn to adjust the product strategy according to the reaction of the industry and users. To achieve 900 million users, wechat has strictly restricted recruitment, restricted the expansion of team size, and learned what is to make the best of everything and make the best of everyone.

2. The person who can enter BAT may not be the most awesome person, but must be the most suitable person.

You don’t have to hire the best, just enough. A team needs such leaders, but not all of them can be such leaders. Otherwise, the team will have no centripetal force. Sometimes start-up companies do not hire a person who earns hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to write a preliminary product demo that can be satisfied by a graduate. Writing an architecture that can withstand 10W of concurrency with only a few users is a waste of resources. So companies are looking for people who fit the needs of the current stage, not that you are awesome, all companies will want you. Just because you don’t pass an interview doesn’t mean you’re rubbish. Just say, “We’re not right for each other.”

3 The captain or the screw on the ship?

Society needs division of labor. It is impossible for everyone to be a boss. But don’t just focus on one tool or one skill, because the industry and technology are changing fast, and there’s a growing need for people with multiple skills, people who cross boundaries.

For example, you can focus on being the product manager of C-terminal software, but do not limit yourself to e-commerce products. When you are offered a live broadcast product, you say “I am not familiar with it”. No one is familiar with making products from birth.

For example, you can choose operation as your career, but you can not only write soft articles, the whole operation system, you need to dabble, point by point break.

Based on your knowledge of the industry, you should try anything that shows promise. You’ll find that there are a lot of similarities between different products (such as the r&d process), and you’ll need to quickly learn about the new industry. Don’t set limits for yourself, jump out of your comfort zone, and grow in multiple fields and careers.

Of course, you have to be a professional screw, no one will oppose you, after all, a ship needs the captain, also needs every screw on board.

4. You are your best resource when you can’t mobilize the company’s resources.

Learn more skills in various aspects in order to fill the position when there is a vacancy, but in the case of the company or team resources, do not steal other positions to do things, should free up your time to think.

You can disagree with what your boss wants, but you have to do it

When it comes to decisions, what the boss says is not always right. Unless you can convince him that he is wrong, you have to follow his direction and ideas. Although the product manager is the closest place to the CEO, the difference between the product manager and the boss is like the distance of more than one Pacific Ocean from Google. Product managers provide solutions and suggestions; bosses make strategic decisions. Your boss also needs to balance your team, legal, financial, partnership, and investor interests. He knows more than you do, and has more interests to balance, so don’t always think that your boss can’t make such absurd demands. Keep your opinion to yourself, but think about why your boss is doing what he’s doing, and when he has time, you can read more about his ideas and broaden your own.

6 do and write more, read more books of knowledge framework, look at information roughly, don’t look at micro class

Look at your annual report on every platform every year, read thousands and thousands of words, look back to find that nothing seems to have learned. Ask more of the industry’s top talent, read some systematic books, build their own knowledge network from the overall situation, draw a mind map, and then learn according to the “map”, single point breakthrough, point with surface, “light up” this map. Information can be quickly scanned, but keep an eye on industry trends, technological developments, and broaden your horizons.

conclusion

In 2017, from C-end to B-end, from APP to small program, enterprise wechat multi-terminal integration solution, from software to hardware, from functional design to product architecture design, from traditional machine learning to deep learning, I would like to thank myself for my efforts and those who helped me.