I still remember many years ago, I took part in the product manager interview of Tencent for the first time as a product rookie after graduation. I remember the interviewer asked me a question
What do you think are the most important competencies for a product manager?
My answer is:
Focus on solving user needs with interaction design. Providing a product with a good user experience is an important ability for a product manager.
The interviewer replied:
User experience and interaction design are important, but a product can’t just be interaction design.
After the interview, I didn’t wait for a few days, so it was a failure.
At the same time, I had a lot of questions, such as shouldn’t product managers care about interaction design?
With the increase of time and professional age, I also accumulated a number of cases and later joined the work of Tencent Medical And Tencent Cloud again. Only then did I know the answer to this question is:
Product design with insight into the needs of the business as the infrastructure is an important ability for product managers
This story actually reflects the problems that many product managers will encounter when they just make products and when they are making traditional transformation.
I am not familiar with the background, the business framework, and the business closed loop. Meanwhile, I pay too much attention to the interaction of the front product manager and the user experience.
Why don’t many people want to be back office product managers?
1. First of all, the importance of background in the product is not clear
In a small project team, the boss will copy the APP products of a certain head, but behind the APP there are a lot of business systems besides good user experience. How to manage the business inside and support the operation of the system is actually the need to disassemble and think about certification.
You can’t do it with chaoxi alone.
A good user experience is not only responsive to users’ clicks, beautiful UI design and cool animation effects, but also needs to satisfy users’ operation experience under business processes such as payment, refund, customer service, etc., which is also the most complex and time-consuming place to consume resources.
2. The user base of background products is small
Many people become product managers because they were influenced by the so-called “front desk” product managers in the early stage. For example, after making an app and accumulating a large number of users, they have a strong sense of achievement and value.
Back office products are either used within the company or by employees in a few departments. Even with To B’s saas offerings, that’s not comparable To the massive To C user base.
3. Background products are not beautiful enough and do not pay too much attention to user experience
Many places still refer to product managers as product designers, or even have no product managers. Hi is mainly because the work of the front desk product manager, such as APP and small program, itself needs to do a lot of UI design restoration work, UI design review, UED interaction design, etc.
The output should be aesthetically pleasing while also making the user experience as smooth as possible.
Background products focus on efficiency, functional capability, system security three latitude. Therefore, the background product manager only needs to pay attention to smooth iteration and provide more complete and stable service ability after the product is launched. Therefore, you can see that the interface of many background systems in the market is actually very unattractive and even not updated for a long time. But as long as the function can be guaranteed to use, there is still no problem.
4. The threshold for starting back-end products is relatively high
Compared to a front desk product that everyone can see and touch. Backstage products often find competing products will be the product manager. It mainly involves the private data and private business of each company in the background, which cannot be made public casually.
Do backstage products often take a lot of time to do business research, or even the need for product managers to personally go their own business. For example, as a product manager of customer service system, many people will restore customer service. Even the first customer service operation was spearheaded by the product manager himself.
Background production should at least first be familiar with the company’s business, and then correspond to the background product function design, so if there is no certain product manager experience, it is difficult to do the background.
Because the background cannot be made public, many product managers’ results cannot be shown to others.
The most typical awkward situations are:
For example, at a friend party, the front desk product manager can proudly open the APP and let others download and experience, while the back office product manager can only watch and envy.
Is there a future as a backend product manager?
My answer is: very promising
Number one: hard to replace
The substitution of back-end product managers is very low. For example, I have personally seen that after the operation support system of a certain company goes online, the back-end product manager is almost impossible to change after being in charge of product design from 0 to 1. But the product manager at the front desk had no idea how many people had changed
The boss is afraid that if the backend product manager is fired, there will be no one to continue to maintain and extend the design.
Second: background product managers are highly paid
Back-office product managers tend to be paid more on average than front-office product managers. Mostly because companies really do have the same generic business.
For example, the ordering and return business process of the e-commerce system, the customer service session and customer service quality inspection of the customer service system. These businesses are very generic. It can be used in any company. If you have product design experience in a general business, the job is very easy to find, and you can also be able to improve the management and efficiency of the business, and improve the business of the new company, and naturally the salary will be higher.
Third: Back-end product managers have higher ceilings
Compared with the front desk product manager, the back office product manager needs to constantly do business expansion. Because the terminal is a mobile phone, the content that the front desk product manager can learn is very limited.
And the background product manager design to the framework, operation and maintenance, development, etc. Provide effective operation support and security protection for front desk products such as APP, small program and PC official website.
So the back office product manager always thinks more.
Therefore, do not underestimate the background product manager, all product managers in their career will gradually start to step into the threshold from the front desk, and finally to the backend to evaluate the profound skills.
The more closely they study the product managers in the background, the more they will find that the product managers are more inclined to the natural attributes of r&d.
That’s all for today’s share.