It was late at night, and only the lamp in the room was yellowing, and the input cursor in the notebook was blinking.
Work, the project has been completed, but also on the line, this is the second project I was responsible for in the company (product), by their own planning and design of the product, now on the line, although the future operation is also a difficult road, but to go online without a little bit of joy is also false.
In retrospect, there are still a lot of things to think about and improve in the whole process. To sum up, it is just right to sort out the details of knowledge points.
The beginning of everything
At the end of May this year, Boss called partners and I (well, I’m the only one in the product department) had a brief meeting on the company’s new project, an online ToC product. The company is a self media company with its own traffic resources.Product business is clear, resources in hand, the experience is good enough, on-line after a period of time is basically not worried about the number of users. At that time, boss and the partners said that they were very exciting and full of expectations for the realization of the project. But I was a little worried because boss put it in.Vertical segmentation of the market has been developed for a long time, and the development of the market in recent years is not particularly optimistic. When I made my point to you, everyone was quiet, and then Boss said,’My concerns are justified, but the company is currently open with traffic and related collaborative resources.The cost of the project is not high. In general, the project is cost-effective.
From the point of view of business and company leaders, this is reasonable. To survive, an enterprise needs to be profitable in business. This is the first condition. In the short run, it’s profitable to combine the company’s own resource analysis, and I know they’re thinking about it, so they’re not.I have made too many comments.
Later, I seriously think about it, now the pure line of the project has been very difficult to have a market, in these years, the basic needs of users have been excavated, have a mature product to meet the needs of users, and user habits are slowly developed. So the cost of online traffic has been soaring in recent years.For this reason, many companies have begun to slowly turn their product flow entrance to offline, but also began to combine offline business, the formation of online and offline closed-loop. Oxygen dioxide belongs to this category, just because everyone has consumed the industry before, talking about it will subconsciously rememberBurning money, but from the point of view, online and offline want to combine is very consistent with the market development prospects.
In the next few years, the Internet’s focus will shift from product to business, from pure online to online and offline integration, and then AI encoding, there is still some room for imagination.
It’s a bit far away. Come back.
Market research, or do well.
The ToC project is located in a small niche and is not in the mainstream, although it has been developed for a long time. So there are too few relevant information on the Internet. Of course, there is no market research data to study and reference. We just started looking for a relatively authoritative research website from Analysys think tank and airy.Whether there are relevant industry analysis reports, but the results are obvious. Then only from the most convenient Baidu, Google search related industry market information, search results are not many. And the information that is searched is also uneven, the article that searches also has certain age.
One after another collected the relevant information, and then flipped through the Baidu index, found the general trend of related industries, and analyzed the situation of major players in the market, and finally conducted a market questionnaire survey, obtained a slightly more satisfactory analysis results. Although the market is small in capacity and little room for development, it usesHouseholds are interested in the industry, and the company has the relevant traffic and resources, combined with SWOT analysis can still enter the market.
Now it seems that, in fact, when doing market research, did not do too in-depth analysis, of course, there is time for this external factor constraints. Although the conclusion of market research is only to play a supplementary role, but can reduce a lot of trouble for future development, or to do a good job. For the industry, the market is small.There is no authoritative information to investigate, in fact, it is the same as studying a new industry, to investigate a strange industry, in the final analysis, from four aspects.
Firstly, we should trace the origin as far as possible, understand the causes of the industry and the key link of the service chain; secondly, we should study and study the evolution process of the industry giants. The development of the industry giants often includes social, political, economic, scientific and technological, management, strategy and other reasons, their evolution can better reflect the changes of the market.Secondly, it analyzes the main business models and business patterns in the industry; finally, it is necessary to use as many different products as possible, we must have our own summary, so as to achieve a thorough understanding of the upstream and downstream market. Of course, there is not much time for you to study the market, so the product manager is flat.It is particularly important for the industry to accumulate and to exercise sensitivity to the market.
Competition analysis is very necessary.
I remember that I also consciously did a targeted analysis of competitive products, engaged in later look also in line with expectations.
Competitive product analysis report is a direct output of competitive analysis. We usually see on the Internet most of the analysis report is substandard, because a lot of competitive analysis report, in fact, can only be regarded as a product experience report, the basic module is “objective third-party data content + pure display of competitive 5 dimensions”, such a piece.Thousands of words, half an hour, do not know what their purpose is.
Real competitive analysis reports are designed to narrow down the scope of targeted analysis to address the challenges / difficulties faced by products or development needs at a given stage. For example, if a product is at the conceptual stage of the product (in my case at the time), then the competition analysis is mainly aimed at the market (user demand, market)Field capacity, status quo, business model and other dimensions of in-depth analysis, as for the rest of the product architecture, function, process, interaction, operation and other dimensions, temporarily can not be considered. This not only reduces workload, but also purposeful and targeted analysis.
In doing competitive analysis, many product managers have forgotten that it is necessary to combine the company’s own situation to explore their own unique competitiveness, rather than the final “reference” content, otherwise the products produced are showing a homogeneous tendency.
User research! It’s important!
In this product development process, because the time is too tight, there is no time to do this part of the content. This is also a common problem for small teams in pursuit of short and fast.
But if conditions permit, the process should be done. Before that, review the role of user research.
Through the study of user’s task operation characteristics, perceptual characteristics, cognitive psychological characteristics, the actual needs of users become the direction of product design, so that the product more in line with the user’s habits, experience and expectations.
When doing user research, follow these steps.
The first point is to clarify the purpose of doing this. So before conducting user research, we need to clarify the purpose of user research. Only by making clear the purpose of investigation can we effectively indicate the direction of user research.
The second point is to identify the users of research, that is, to find the target users. So how do we find the target users? We need to use the “user portrait” of the product. The complete user portrait process can be divided into four steps. The first step is user information collection, the second step is user information analysis, the third step is user information validation, and the fourth step is user information validation.Step is user portrait optimization.
The third point is to identify research methods, and individuals will choose the most general and efficient user interviews. What needs to be done is to prepare the questions, and at the same time to analyze the user, give the possible answers and the depth of the answers behind the problem mining.
The rest is research work, and it is also the time to test the product manager. Then write the Research Report and guide the next step according to the conclusion of the report.
User research not only helps companies design products, but also benefits users of products. It is mutually beneficial to both. Therefore, user surveys are necessary when conditions are available.
Product planning and design
This part, now recall, due to the lack of timely communication with the technical staff, resulting in later developers did not pay attention to the details of the content, this is still relatively deficient. But this will also make a clear reflection in the future.
Product planning and design, the two core ideas are user experience elements (strategic layer, scope layer, structure layer, framework layer and performance layer).
Product planning (strategic level)
After finishing the analysis of the main competing products, my thinking is clearer. It will be very helpful for the product planning. The core content of product planning is nothing more than these:
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Define product strategy direction
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Determining product positioning and market positioning
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Identifying target users
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Determining the use scenarios of products
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Defining business models
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Version iteration plan
The whole product planning stage is basically centered around these core elements.
At that time, the product planning was also carried out in accordance with the above steps, but these content and direction are determined through a lot of work in front of the completion.
Functional requirements (scope level)
Complete the product planning, enter the product design stage, in this stage, the most difficult step should be how to transform the requirements into functions, as long as the problem is solved, the following work is easy to say. How can we transform user needs into product requirements? At this time, the “28 principles” began to play. onThat is to say, only the needs of the general users can be converted into product requirements, and then develop a functional model to solve the pain points of users’needs. This process needs to be determined by combining the strength of the team and the urgency of the requirements, and the immediate outcome is the functional requirements list.
Before proceeding to the next step, we need to complete the business flow chart, functional logic flow chart, complete these can make the drawing of the prototype more logical.
Archetype diagram (structure layer and frame layer)
Prototype diagram, in fact, is the product manager to their abstract ideas into a concrete output, is the most direct display of product manager ideas. All of this is based on the above work. Now my own approach to this is to combine prototypes and interactions directly on the prototype diagram, and finally generateA high-fidelity prototype allows designers to experience and annotate the necessary pages, with the benefit that they can understand the whole process most intuitively.
In fact, one of the drawbacks of this high-fidelity demo is that it’s hard for developers to have a global view of page jumps in a project. This leads to the development of task logic which takes time and cost to study. Later, after observing various prototypes, I found the page line.The block diagram can solve this problem well. By the time of awareness, however, the project was at the end of its development, and it was time to add the wireframe to the next project.
PRD
For the product requirements document, there are some online use of word written document cases, articles are nearly 20,000 words (the number of words of my graduation thesis)… This paper level PRD is not my style. It must be hard for developers to see it.
In this project, the role of PRD is not so big, just a record role, because developers are basically around the prototype diagram for development, and I do a detailed note on the prototype diagram, can be very good to meet their needs. So later, some products need to be modified, plus P.RD’s content module is not perfect enough to simply update it.
In fact, it will be found later, due to the flow of personnel and handover need to use PRD, if the PRD did not follow up the update, then it will be busy to death product manager, think tired.
So I disguised the use of product thinking, reorganized the structure of their PRD, optimize the PRD experience in use, using Axure RP to write, PRD can meet most of the needs of the forward team. Its structure is as follows:
And I also wrote a previous article about using Axure RP to write PRD – Axure Pro 8 to produce product requirements documentation, you are interested to see.
project management
In fact, before I was a product manager, I was a project manager, so this part of the work is better. In this project, we made some optimization for the previous processing methods, and the results were good.
Before a project really enters the development cycle, it requires the project manager (product manager) to schedule the development of the priority functions, then to set a detailed development schedule and set milestones. It was in the form of a combination of tables and Gantt charts, with one milestone a week, that is, one week a week.The basic content of the morning standing meeting is to report the completion of the previous day’s work and the current task safety. Then the product manager will summarize and supervise the progress. The final progress report is also directly reported to boss by me.
Through this way of management, can bring a sense of control of the project, every morning can clearly grasp the direction of progress, so that progress will not fall. The final project is also scheduled on line, but also to the team, give yourself an encouragement.
In fact, from now on, the way of thinking is correct. However, if the project size is larger, then the project management capability of the product manager is highly demanded. Of course, large projects usually have project managers to manage. In general, the fundamental purpose of project management is to ensure that products are available on a regular basis through various means.Go online.
summary
In the whole process of project planning and follow-up, all kinds of problems were inevitable at that time, but through everyone’s efforts have also been solved. If it is recorded, it must not be solved by the length of an article. As a person in charge of a product, we should have empathy in demand, market ability in market research and analysis.The product must have the product ability and the logical thinking ability, the development stage must have the project management ability and the communication ability, afterwards the product on-line must have the operation ability, the data analysis ability.
Actually finished the project down, only then knew oneself is insufficient, then carries on to oneself, summarizes.