How to design a good product background and the level of the designer and the essence of the product background understanding, closely related.

Next, I want to talk about how to design a good backend prototype from the perspective of the thinking process of product managers at different levels on the same prototype and what the essence of the backend is.

1. Product manager level

The thinking and execution of back-end prototypes vary greatly between product managers at different levels.

The primary product will go and talk to the backend user about the requirements, draw a nice prototype in Axure, and write a logical, well-formatted document.

Intermediate products begin to have a deep understanding of the business line, thinking about the product background design from the perspective of being a user, and can design the background according to the uniqueness of their own business line. Greatly improve the user’s work efficiency and reduce the use cost.

Advanced products can be integrated through the business line from a more macro perspective, and even have a deeper understanding of the business than most people in the business department, and design the product background that does not need too much change in the future demand changes, emergencies, and business upgrades.

** For example: ** How to design a financial reconciliation system

Next, LET me use the reconciliation background in the financial payment system as an example. In the face of how to design a set of “account checking background” product requirements, different levels of products will do? (I have written before “How to design a financial reconciliation system — From 0 to 1 to build a reconciliation system” is only the entry level, you can refer to it)

Entry-level Product Manager – Solve surface problems

1. First of all, check the off-the-shelf reconciliation background to see what functions, understand what is the reconciliation system.

2. Investigate the user usage process, go to the financial department and ask the accountant sister to visit them one by one and ask them what functions they need.

3. Summarize the examples and research information found, open the Word document, and say it in your own words. The format must be beautiful and illustrated. Then, using Axure, I turned the document I had just written into a prototype drawing.

An entry-level product design prototype solves only the surface problems and builds the basic workflow. However, they do not understand the deeper problems of the business, which will lead to unlimited problems that users have not thought about in the process of using the system after it is launched, resulting in the final background reconstruction, which wastes a lot of manpower and resources.

Intermediate product Manager – deep understanding, deep problem solving

1. Collected the basic information of the reconciliation background, fully understood the significance and position of the reconciliation background in the whole financial system.

2. Sorted out account checking requirements with the accountant sister of the financial department, understood the meaning behind each step, understood that account checking was the last line of defense of the entire payment system, understood the meaning of account checking between internal orders and external payment channels, possible problems and solutions to all problems. After a clear understanding of the real needs, and then according to the product logic and the uniqueness of their own company in this business to design the entire reconciliation background.

3. Finally, in the design of the prototype, according to the research needs, ensure that the functional structure and business logic of the background is simple and clear, modularized and framed. In the face of future unexpected new features (will definitely add features), more leisurely enough.

Intermediate product managers have a deep understanding of business logic, and have a certain ability to abstract business into modules, forming a clear structure, business logic smooth background framework. The backend prototype has been built to meet the changing needs of the future business, but it has not yet been integrated.

Senior product Manager – understands and anticipates problems ahead of time

1. After receiving the requirements of the account checking background, study the payment link of the financial system first, what is the correlation between payment and account checking, and understand what is account checking from a macro perspective. The relationship between reconciliation and finance, the relationship between payment, the meaning of reconciliation for the company, and the meaning of front-end users. The relationship between the reconciliation background and other systems in the global context, and how information flows in and out of the reconciliation background.

2. Observe how to obtain and flow upstream and downstream information in account checking with the accounting sister in the financial department from the financial perspective.

3. Whether it can be more automated: observe the entire account reconciliation outflow, and whether the part of manual judgment can be abstrused for automatic judgment by the system. For example, the user of “cross-day trading” placed an order in our system at 23:59 on the same day, and paid in the payment channel at 00:01 the next day 2 minutes later. Then, there will be a paid order that is not available through the payment channel on the account of the day. This transaction should be automatically suspended and automatically checked the next day. There is no need to show it and process it manually on the day.

4. Abstract general solution: For example, the company only connects wechat and Alipay at present. If the company needs to connect online banking (traditional banks) and paypal (international payment channels) in the future, what will be the difference?

Senior product managers have a comprehensive business knowledge reserve, strong overall view and abstract ability, and can think of the future form of the product background first, predict the possible problems in the future, and have buried these clues in the product prototype.

twoWhat is the nature of backstage?

And then I want to take a different dimension and talk about how to design a great product back end.

1. The essence of background is a large piece of white paper (information bearer) + a pen (information addition, deletion, modification and check)

Big white paper: We can use a piece of blank paper written user information (user management system), record sales (sales), user (work order systems), check the books (payment reconciliation system) but every change, modify, search are very trouble, paper records online, it is easy to reach data such as user information management 30000 users, This is where the disadvantage of purely paper records comes in.

Excel (pure database) : The big White paper upgrade is Excel. With Excel, the efficiency of information recording and information flow has been greatly improved. We can easily record information in form. Use the user ID as the anchor point for the associated key to expand to an unlimited number of records, which can be sales records or work order records. But then again, even if Excel is simple, it changes once you start building slightly more complex information systems. The advantages of Excel include the cost of learning, the diversity of recorded data (not friendly to long texts and rich media), and the collaboration of multiple employees.

Visual UI+ database (background + database) : The upgraded version of Excel is “visual UI+ database”, which can be ERP, CRM, OA, CMS, HRM, finance or invoicing. Whatever it is called, the underlying layer is made up of a “visual UI+ database”. The difference between them lies in the corresponding product logic optimization of the data flowing into the system, so that people in the operating system can use the data in the most efficient and convenient way.

1941, the FBI’s fingerprint database for criminals, information stored on large white papers, purely manual CMS (content management system) picture source

2. What does the user gain in the process of upgrading from the white paper to the data background?

(1) Operation interface optimized according to workflow — manual operation part

The same set of data, in different background, have different processing.

Name: Carla; Age: 21; Education: Bachelor degree;

This set of data can not only be sales background data, and student management background data, but also can be human resources background data, risk control background data.

The same data, different processing methods, the formation of different business background, so the key to data processing lies in the background product design of the deep understanding of business logic, the more thorough understanding, the more concise and smooth background design.

(2) Automate everything — machine operations

From the big white paper to the data background, can have such a huge change, because of the computer (hardware) and program (software). The advantage of computers and software is automated batch processing.

So in addition to the manual part of background prototype design, there is another important part, automation. How do we abstract the data from the business into the data that the system can handle? Let’s take a look at the case of Meituan

When Meituan was a group buying site in its early days, people manually filled out a series of contents, from the title to the copy, for each order. The company has a team of editors who do just that. With the explosion of the previous volume, it became clear that this pure manual editing was very inefficient and not scalable.

So can we abstract and automate the human part of writing copywriting? Let’s take the headline that needs the most attention. The information contained in the title was already filled out by the seller and the seller when the order was placed. We can combine these fields a little bit to form a heading.

Fill in the form for the above activity

  • Coupon value: 30
  • Group purchase price: 1
  • Get Involved: Super Tuesday
  • Time of use: Tuesday
  • Scope of use: universal
  • Usage limit: 1
  • Inventory: 500
  • Chain brand or not: Yes
  • Wifi: Yes
  • Product description (limited to 35 words) : Wuhan price landing bright stars city, the most grounded gas folk grilled fish and incense pot, very spicy, very addictive!

The above information has been filled out by BD offline when discussing the content of the activity with the store owner. We use the activity information directly to generate the title to complete the full automation of the order.

Picture from “Analysis of Meituan O2O Supply Chain System Architecture Design”

Did you see a light? After the implementation of this automation strategy, a nearly 100-person editorial review team was disbanded, helping Meituan reduce the cost of order by 90% and improve efficiency by eight times. So meituan called the project 908 internally, and then the idea was extended to automate everything. (This is just a little bit, I recommend you to read the original)

A good product prototype should first abstract the business logic and leave what can be automated to a machine. It is necessary to design the workflow so that users can complete the processing of information in a smooth workflow.

To be able to handle these two points well is to make a good product prototype.

Read more

  • User management system – User rights design from entry to mastery
  • How to design the financial account checking system — From 0 to 1 to build the actual operation of account checking system

Jiang Chuan, co-founder of Kalayun, b-side product manager, focuses on the implementation and construction of enterprise internal efficiency tools. Personal wechat: HiJiangChuan, welcome to communicate with me on wechat.