preface

To begin with, why did I write this article? There is an industry saying that testing may know more about the product than the product; Because testing updates validation points to test cases, products often forget to update requirements documents.

Every once in a while, some horrible product manager comes up with weird requirements and features. What’s the basis of this weird requirement?

Why is it that some product managers are happy to work with others, and others want to take a knife?

Some time ago, a net friend said to me, Jb, think you are suitable for making products, do not consider transformation?

The first reaction is, will you survive the transition? Does a test dog who has been working for 5 years make the transition to product manager?

The second reaction is, if I’m going to transform the product, what do I need to know?

Combined with the above reasons, I am curious about the position of product manager.

Since curious, it is to understand what the product manager is, so, bits and pieces to read books to find information, recall the previous contact with the product manager, sorted out such a thing, may write bad or even wrong, welcome to discuss;

Again, this article is just Jb learning to organize the content, not necessarily reasonable, welcome to study together to discuss ~

The problem

Here are the common problems:

1) There is more negative feedback after this function is implemented; 2) Launch a new product that no one uses; 3) The relationship between R&D, test design and product is in hot water; 4) Don't know what a product manager is;Copy the code

This article will focus on the above questions one by one, all kinds of miscellaneous things together, so start ~

Definition of product manager

In popular understanding, the role of product manager is actually a manager who takes fundamental responsibility for a product. Including requirements analysis, requirements, development requirements, requirements online and requirements maintenance so several stages, and these stages, what does the product do?

1) Understand user needs and use various means (market research, user research, etc.) to convert user needs into viable product features

2) Project management In many companies, the product needs to take into account the role of project management, which includes project planning, work coordination, man-machine relationship handling team, and the ability to develop efficient workflow;

3) Long-term vision can strategically make the next step of the product;

At this point, is there any understanding of the product manager’s role? Do you have a general idea of what a product manager does? If not, keep reading

Big/small company product manager difference

Maybe at this time, some students will jump out and say that the above, what research, long-term vision, are false, the boss said to do what he did, where there are these things;

Well, it’s true that as mentioned above, the requirements for product managers in large and small companies don’t make much sense. What are the differences between product managers in large and small companies?

A large company

The characteristics of large companies are: the division of labor is very detailed, you can assign a student to be responsible for a specific function;

• Work to establish an effective and continuous work system, can not take things for granted, do things to be reasonable, after online, timely pay attention to the use of online users to make adjustments;
• Quickly understand the product background knowledge, and quickly start the old connection work;
• In the constantly changing internal environment, find the balance of interests, for example, due to the lack of R&D manpower, the set demand, what to do?

A small company

The point of a small company is to be an all-rounder;

• Don’t understand it doesn’t matter, can quickly learn, learn to use;
• Because it is a small company, there is no way to do all kinds of communication and research like large companies, so it needs the ability of quick trial and error;
• Consciously design ways to improve productivity, such as organizing review meetings;

The introduction may not be very comprehensive, but it can be regarded as the current understanding of product managers of large and small companies, but also because I am not a product manager, so I can not feel more things;

The difference between product manager and project manager

Many students know that product manager and project manager are two different positions, so what is the difference between them?

The product manager’s job performance is to lead a product team to make decisions and develop products that users need; The nature of the project manager’s job is to get the team to complete a project on schedule within a limited amount of time.

Product manager’s job is diversified, at the beginning of the project, the product manager will focus on the place such as data analysis, user surveys, the purpose is to quickly develop products development strategy, once you determine the direction of product development strategy, will transfer manager to fall to the ground and project management to work on, so I have to see, the product manager itself to have the ability to project manager, In this way, the product can be launched on schedule;

Of course, the product manager and project manager are mutually cooperative, the common process is as follows;

• The product is responsible for identifying problems that the product solves and translating them into requirements documents
• Discuss the feasibility of requirements
• Identify product requirements, hand them over to the project manager, and form a task
• The project formulation process will be met to implement the project progress
• R&d, testing, product acceptance
• Prepare for release, product and operations develop release plans and release strategies
• Launch smoothly, analyze online data, improve user experience and set requirements
• Repeat the above process

One sentence impressed me deeply: product manager is to do the right thing, project manager is to do the right thing!

How to write requirements document

A requirements document should contain at least two parts: purpose and function description;

purpose

First introduce the problem to be solved and how to demonstrate whether the problem exists, the realization of the scene, the problem solving standard (successful standard);

Functional description

How to carry out the function, its introduction and flow chart, logical diagram, whether the function affects existing architecture or other functions, various measurement indicators and statistics;

General design idea

1) Why do this feature? Can be combined with product positioning to think; 2) What value will this function bring to users or app? 3) How can the value generated be realized? 4) Which users will use this function in what scenarios, and what are the main routes of users?

How to find user needs

User needs must be based on the user, so be sure to verify that this pain point really exists!

To find user needs, there are several steps: 1) first determine the target users, any demand will exist for/against both sides, it is not to say that there is user feedback, do not do this demand, so we should first determine the target users of the service; 2) Make assumptions about users’ pain points through data analysis and user surveys;

Example: Sales of fast food restaurants have been declining year after year. There are several possibilities:

• 1) Are the products displayed in the store outdated and unable to keep up with the trend?
• 2) Are consumers becoming more and more picky about fast food restaurants?
• 3) Users think fast food is unhealthy, so they switch to other chain stores?

Something like that, let’s make an assumption;

3) Further mining data and user feedback to verify the existence of user pain points;

• Obsolete? Check out other fast food restaurants or chain stores for style dishes.
• Did the percentage of users choose fast food go down? If not, is there a change in how much they spend per visit?

Through step by step analysis, in-depth understanding of a specific pain point, and about the user survey, generally adopt two methods: interview & questionnaire survey

It should be noted that the user sample of interview is selective and has limitations at the same time, so there is a general assumption about the use of interview. We know the field of user pain points, but do not know the specific choice, so we need to systematically understand the specific pain points.

The questionnaire survey is suitable for users who have a mature assumption and need to know their specific ideas.

What is a minimum viable product

The minimum viable product, belongs to the confirmatory study, means the minimalist prototype products first, with minimal cost and effective way to verify whether the product in accordance with user requirements, flexible adjustment, if do not conform to the market demand, fail fast, will loss to a minimum, if the product by the user, user needs are constantly mining, iterative optimization products;

purpose

The purpose of minimization is to reduce the cost of trial and error;

Feasibility, to ensure that the product can basically solve the needs of users, when the product can not even solve the most basic and unique needs, then the user experience should be improved, solve the problem, not continue to add new functions;

There are many examples, such as: 1) Honor of Kings, inherit the warcraft gameplay and reduce the difficulty of the game, add social culture; 2) Pinduoduo, the initial positioning is social + e-commerce, gather enough people can buy fruit at a low price, later developed haggling, lottery, free to get your house, power index distribution;

What is A/B testing

An A/B test, commonly known as an ABtest, is A comparison of two or more randomly assigned samples of A similar number.

If the experimental group’s results are statistically significant on the target indicator compared to the control group’s, it suggests that the experimental group’s function can lead to the desired result, thus helping to test hypotheses or make product decisions.

It is important that you define the metrics before you do the ABtest.

The only way to verify causality is abtest

1) Causality: because there is J, there is B; Because users don’t have content to watch, they lose;

2) Correlation: the change of J will lead to the change of B, but it is not clear that the change of B is caused by the change of J; Users who find there is no content to watch will lose a higher proportion; But can not be sure because there is no content to see, resulting in the loss of users;

Whether abtest is required

Abtest is not a panacea, and there are situations where it is not applicable: 1) No matter what the result of this function is, it is needed, in which case abtest is not necessary; 2) The number of samples is too small to obtain reasonable results through ABtest;

User growth

With the emergence of various apps in the market and the saturation of the population, it is no longer as it was a few years ago. Just releasing an app can have a large number of users, and there are too many similar apps. For existing apps, how to do user growth is particularly critical.

Growth used to rely on money, throwing money to attract users, but now you need to use technology and data to analyze how to grow, find the entry point to affect the growth, precise execution, so as to achieve viral growth;

The user is not something that a team can do, but the product, marketing, data analysis and other teams work together to find the direction of the product by analyzing the data trend, and use marketing skills to achieve product growth.

The formula

There is a formula for user growth: add = add + retain + recover

Formula for

The boss requires that the number of active users of the app be increased; So, getting more users to download the app, that’s new; Keeping people who have downloaded to keep using it is retention; Let the app has been deleted but registered users download and use again, this is the recovery;

Well, what’s in it for you? Feature:

• Find cooperative channels, such as xiaomi store to download APP for advertising recommendation, advertising space recommendation;
• Drainage, wechat, toutiao, small program such products drainage;
• Baidu seo;
• Increase brand exposure through microblog and public relations news;
• Derivatives with other apps;
• Pre-installed;
• Users share with other friends to download;
• Offline activities

Left:

• Various marketing activities;
• Establish a task system to increase user engagement;
• Enrich their own functions, strengthen the core competitiveness;

Save:

• Mainly short message, mail, operation activities to the user back and forth;
• The new routines used there are also applicable and save this inside;

Application, for example,

Mai Mai is a workplace social software that emerged in recent years. This app has a typical way, so it is used to introduce, not to advertise.

New: pulse will send messages to users from time to time, who browse you, who have sent messages to you, or who browse your home page, but it only gives you open part of the function, if you like to use all the functions, you need to open members, at this time, is the new team force;

Retention: after purchasing members, there will be many customized functions, and more information will be obtained, so that users can feel the value-added services they can enjoy as members, and have a sense of superiority. This is the power of retention team;

Redeem: later, the membership fee may be too high, it is cancelled, no longer renew, at this time, it may receive some activity information, such as purchase discount, or have more benefits, this is to redeem the team;

You think this is the end of it? No ~ after the user is redeemed, the new team will continue to make efforts to push the user to a higher level as far as possible. Before it may be a monthly member, it is recommended to upgrade to a yearly member to obtain more member benefits;

This is the normal way. Is there anything else?

Savage growth

Typical apps: Pinduoduo and Millions of Heroes Pinduoduo use the circle of friends to achieve viral growth, such as haggled prices and bangrob; A million hero is to spend money and recommend new users to get a chance to survive;

There are two other ways: 1) Collecting stamps, such as Pokemon GO, which is the same as buying a children’s meal at McDonald’s to collect all the action figures; 2) Lottery, lottery is a magic routine, that is, can attract new, can retain, but also to recover users, and lottery rules can be customized rules;

The core of growth is to reduce customer resistance

The so-called user resistance is that when users enjoy the value, all the behaviors that users need to do but do not want to do are user resistance.

For example, when you open an APP, you are prompted to log in, but you forget whether you have registered or not. You directly input your common account password, but the result indicates that you are not registered. Then you go to the registration page and enter information again for registration.

There are several points that can be optimized: 1) When you can’t find the account entered by the user on the login page, you can pop up the window and ask the user whether he/she needs to register. Click Register to jump to the registration page and synchronize the newly entered account. 2) If there is a user name restriction, the user name can be automatically recommended

The best choice

It’s not going to define beginner, intermediate, or advanced, but it’s going to tell you what’s better when you have a problem;

1) We should first find out whether the user has this pain point and quickly verify the existence of the pain point; 2) We should have small short-term goals and big long-term goals in everything we do, rather than judging data by daily and monthly activities. 3) Pay attention to other products and other data in addition to the products they are responsible for; 4) Dare to question whether the company’s design is correct and whether the original process can be optimized rather than adapted;

Product are

The word product sense is very empty, simple understanding is to convert the demand into users like, use the product experience;

Product sense includes four aspects:

• Ability to turn vague and abstract ideas into practical product solutions
• Whether to design a product solution that conforms to user habits and smooth experience
• When developing a product strategy, be specific and know what the next feature is going to be
• Can define product focus and success criteria

Improve product sense

How do you improve the product feel? 1) The most direct way is to find similar products and compare the target group, product functions, user experience, release records and other intuitive content; 2) Find fault with the products you like to use; 3) Think about the success and failure indicators of other products and why they are defined in this way; 4) Seek inspiration from non-Internet industries. For example, banks will divide platinum, gold and silver cards into different groups of users. The purpose is to target different user groups, and different groups use different strategies.

summary

The purpose of this article is to make you more familiar with the work of product manager.

There are a lot of content, well, first write here, after the situation to update the content of the product side, for the knowledge of the product, still will keep learning, mutual encouraging ~

Thank you.