"West Young Master": product thinking to enter the traditional industry

The story of West Young Master's meat loaf has been all over the WeChat circle of friends lately, and we only know the marketing side of the story without knowing the real product side of the story, and my interview with West Young Master made me realize that the team is not just making a meat loaf, but is using a product thinking to re-enter the traditional industry. Rather, they are re-entering the traditional industry with a product-oriented mindset. In the interview, Meng Bing, the founder of "West Young Master", positioned his company as an Internet company rather than a company, so let's see how the meat loaf is realized through the product thinking learned in big companies.

Product development

1. Research and analysis, positioning

In the publicity story "Why I quit my job to sell meat buns" wrote the founder wanted to make meat buns as an idea from the beginning, but in reality it was not. In fact, Meng Bing has spent a long time in the four first-tier cities of Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and he was fascinated by the roadside food stalls, carried out a very careful observation and then came to the conclusion that:

① Some snacks have deep geographic characteristics, but it is difficult to circulate to all the cities, such as donkey meat hot barbecue;

② Some snacks have a great universality, such as rice noodle, cold noodle, egg cake, meat buns and so on. The first time I saw this, I had to go to the hospital to get a prescription for a new medication. This universal product is what the team should consider, and then how to combine their own strengths to make a better product;

③ The founder of the founder through the comparison with their own hometown snacks, to find a most suitable product. There are a lot of snacks in Shaanxi, but many of them are only liked by local people and don't meet the public taste. So after several rounds of screening, the founders finally set their sights on meat buns - both a Shaanxi specialty and universal.

Of course, the choice of meat buns is not only because the founders are familiar with their hometown, but also because there is a desire to bring their hometown products to the general public. And this research process is the first practice of the purest product line.

2. R & D and internal testing

R & D: Determine the product is meat buns after the first positioning is also solved, but the second positioning also came - from Shaanxi learned the production of meat buns just to be able to make the Shaanxi people like it. This is also something that product managers need to think about. The so-called product is to make the majority of people happy, as long as 7 to 9 out of 10 people say they like it, then it is a design success.

Meng Bing spent half a year on the internal testing of the product, so that it can retain the characteristic taste of Shaanxi, but also to make the majority of people satisfied, but also need to redesign the whole process, and personally develop the oven equipment.

In the development of the meat loaf itself, the Meng Corps team created a set of formulas to calculate the amount of salt, the minced meat, the thickness and diameter of the loaf, etc., and adjusted the taste each time through fine fine-tuning, and scored the taste through user feedback. This approach may be related to the background of the founders, two founders have stayed in Baidu, have done senior engineers, the essence of the search engine is a set of formula, and algorithmic engineers are constantly adjusting the variables to control the quality of the ranking of the site, and this fine-tuning needs to be carried out on a daily basis.

Meng Bing told me that the development of a meat sandwich is absolutely no less than a search engine.

The most important thing to avoid in product design is to be self-centered and ignore the real needs of the user, and treat what you want as what the user wants, so you need to test in the R&D process as well.

Test: internal testing Beta1.0, testers for about 10 people, constantly baking and repeatedly taste the flavor, and then constantly changing the composition of the personnel (relatives and friends), and repeatedly test the taste; internal testing Beta2.0, testers for about 20 people; internal testing Beta3.0, testers for about 30 people, and began to randomly pull people to taste in Beijing street schools; internal testing Beta4.0, this is the last version of the test, the location is set in Tsinghua, the testers for 100 people, and finally determined that the vast majority of these 100 people are very satisfied with the taste.

Meng Bing did not say very specific on the test, but I believe that based on the idea of product testing, they will certainly test the sampling range of people to characterize the selection of men, women, age, and other reference dimensions for their products to do considerations.

Official beta 1.0: Wudaokou opened with a fire on the day and maintained a fixed length for the duration of the sale.

3. Continuous iteration

Meng Bing said they are still in the harsh pursuit of optimizing the process, and rapid iteration is still underway. Meng Bing's average working time these days is close to 20 hours, every day at 9 o'clock team meeting, constantly discussing how to optimize the process, such as cutting the meat of the link how to be more rapid, in the collection of the link how to let the user pay faster, how to let the long queue of users to have a better mood, etc. are all in the scope of their considerations.

For a product, the user only needs to get the most optimized result, but in reality, it's the result of a whole bunch of engineers, product managers, designers, interaction designers, and so on working together.

4. Extreme and emotional

From R & D to testing to iteration is the performance of the Meng Bing team in pursuit of the ultimate, but there is a detail in this particularly moved me, Meng Bing said that the ordinary meat sandwich vendors are to take a bad plastic bag to give you a loaded, so the user experience is very poor, so they use paper bag packaging, and are Imported safety materials - and they also want to do a more extreme thing, at present their paper is still able to penetrate the oil, so the user experience is still not satisfied Meng Bing, so they are looking for a water molecules through the molecules but not through the oil molecules through the mesh material, if you can't find it, they are likely to go to find a cooperation to specifically develop Such a paper bag, not only to ensure the safety of consumption, but also to achieve the most optimized results.

In the pricing they will set the price of meat buns cheaper than the local Shaanxi, even if opened in the Wudaokou (Note: called the center of the universe, Wudaokou, students and foreigners, the restaurant industry competition incentives), insisted on selling only 7 yuan a copy, in order to hope that there will be more people come to taste the products they do.

In addition, Meng Bing also told us that the store opened in just eight days encountered a team also doubly touched by the thing, the first is a special two friends in Hunan to skip work and then do high-speed rail from Shandong to Beijing to eat their meat buns, after eating they are very happy, and then take the subway from Beijing back to the mountain Hunan. Meng Bing said with emotion, their meat sandwich absolutely not dare to claim what top food, if the food itself is not so attractive to them, and they are certainly not to eat a meat sandwich to come, but for some kind of **** the same ideal.

Marketing

1. Product is marketing