Products and operations are born enemies who love and kill each other, but they are as close as lips and teeth. It is often said in the industry that products set the stage and operate singing opera. This sentence can well reflect that a product can't succeed without products and operations. First, the cognitive evolution of the relationship between products and operations. Looking back on my understanding of product and operation synergy, it can be divided into three stages: when I was in charge of Ctrip's tourism and food business in the early years, the products of the department were far away from the operation team, and the core concern of the products was how to build a food channel page, how to optimize the information structure, how to display selling point information, how to display and display POI operation from the perspective of user interest, and the key points were to build a food talent system, pull seeds UGC, promote evaluation and production, and so on. There is relatively little interaction between the two teams, each team has its own emphasis and is busy with its own work, and there are not many conflicts to be coordinated. During my stay in 1 store and JD.COM, as the person in charge of the front desk products, I can strongly feel the frequent collision between products and operations. In addition to the eternal priority dispute, the typical conflicts are: the operation wants to develop more abundant resources, while the product wants to define the positioning of each resource, and do fine instead of doing more; The operation hopes to promote all resources for promotion services, while the products hope to appropriately keep the column entrance of users' fixed habits; The operator wants to expose as many products as possible (for example, clicking on the home page to kill the single product to enter the list page instead of the single product page), and the product side wants to set the product access path according to the user's psychological demands; Operations hope to promote sales through the shaping of price perception, and products hope to ensure the experience through discount authenticity. In short, operations pay more attention to short-term sales performance, and products pay more attention to long-term user experience. Of course, this is also behind my values as a product director at that time. When Amazon China was in charge of the product and center operation of the whole station, my own product thinking has been greatly integrated with the operation demands, and it has also been clearly reflected in the work guidance of the product and operation team, and the product and operation have truly entered a state of harmonious cooperation and complementarity. Of course, this also benefits from Amazon's powerful underlying data system, so that all actions are supported by clear multi-dimensional data, and there are no longer too many subjective disputes about how to be better. Ii. classification and focus of products and operations 1. Products and products, in essence, focus on medium and long-term effects, and need a deep understanding of the company's business model and business essence. The core of product managers' thinking is often the following questions: Who are our users? What are their characteristics? Why do they need our products? What are our users particularly concerned about, but not really concerned about? How to guide users to be lazier, easier to use and simpler in thinking? How on earth did they use our products? What time, what posture? What are the sensitive factors? How to make a decision? Do we make money by selling goods or services directly, or build a social relationship chain, or realize traffic through the size and stickiness of users? Our core appeal at this stage is to expand the scale, or to pursue sales or profit? How do we build loyalty? Why do users come? Why is it lost? Where is the real pain point of users? What are they excited about? Who are our competitors? In comparison, where are the memory points we give users? How to distinguish it from competitors? Product managers need to combine business environment and industry characteristics, deeply analyze users' psychology and core demands, find pain points and excitement points, design products that meet users' psychological demands and solve users' pain points, and realize the company's business model and interest demands. In design, the product inherits the user's habits, pursues the innovation of gameplay, and attaches importance to creativity and "Woweffect". It is particularly important to design different KPI systems for products with different uses, such as the examination and transformation of sold products, the frequency and activity of revisiting sticky products, the examination and forwarding rate of social products, the spread radius and exposure conversion rate, etc. Indicators cannot be generalized simply. When it comes to product classification, in addition to vertical domain classification and toB and toC, from the working level, products are also divided into front desk, middle desk and background. The following is my simple definition. Front desk products: everyone is a user of various websites and apps, and it is easy to understand front desk products. They are mainly responsible for the interaction with the C terminal, and need to deeply understand the user's psychology, guide the user to use the path, manage the user's behavior, create usage scenarios and core lines, create various foreground channels and pages, and complete the consumer guide (broadly speaking, purchasing services, content reading and financial products also belong to consumption). Simply put, content that interacts directly with end users can be considered as foreground scope. Mid-platform products: Mid-platform itself has different definitions, such as business mid-platform, technology mid-platform and data mid-platform. Take the large and medium-sized platform defined by Alibaba as an example. The platform includes core units such as commodity center, user center, store center, evaluation center, trading center and search center. It combs and abstracts all kinds of core data of the whole platform, models it as a system model, encapsulates the core business logic, shares the data resources of various foregrounds (such as Taobao, Tmall, PC and Mobile), and standardizes the core elements of the content displayed at the foregrounds. There are also various systems defined as business management teams, such as promotion definition system, activity page building system, advertisement publishing system, commodity entry system, report statistics system and so on. Backstage products: Different from the user interaction in the front stage and the business logic in the middle stage, the background is generally more about technical implementation and underlying architecture. For example, authority management system, cluster management system, security encryption system, risk control system, data statistics system and so on. I am the backstage of the foreground products, and I will be more inclined to analyze the foreground products and users when talking about products. Please forgive my prejudice. I agree with the view that products set the stage and operate operas, but I don't agree with the view that products have children and raise children. In my opinion, products and operations should have children together, raise children together, and carefully brew and implement "children" together. I think the distinction between the middle and back offices in the industry is not absolute, and the boundary is not absolutely clear. 2. Operation, compared with products, pays more attention to short-term and medium-term effects, and gives full play to the value of existing channels and tools to make a final blow to users and achieve immediate commercial purposes. And as our daily work, we will make a continuous inventory of daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly trends, customer demand changes and actual sales/visits, and adjust and replace goods, content and copywriting at any time to achieve the best results. Take commodity sales as an example to make a simple analogy: products need careful consideration: how to design a good shelf, three or five floors, white or red, square or round, how to lay a shopping line for customers to find goods quickly and pay the bill, or how to make customers want to stay in the store for a longer time. The operation is similar to the distribution of goods on shelves every day. According to what logic, what goods are selected on shelves every day, on what floor, dense or sparse, how to display the price tag, what kind of promotion, whether the promotional items should be highlighted in yellow, whether the distribution of goods is by category, by crowd, by scene or by price, after yesterday's sales inventory, it is decided today which goods are removed from the shelves and which goods are added to the display pit. The operation is more routine, so it is necessary to quickly adjust the operation strategy and control the pace and intensity according to the sales data of yesterday or even real time to achieve the best sales effect. Operations are also divided into many different directions. For example, commodity operation is a very basic and core operation position on the e-commerce platform. This function often exists in the purchasing and marketing team, which needs to have a deep understanding of commodity knowledge, be responsible for selecting commodities, setting and constantly optimizing categories at all levels, establishing commodity warehouses, replacing commodities according to seasonality and consumption trends, establishing basic information of commodities, collecting and sorting out the characteristics and highlights of commodities, summarizing selling points, and exploring effective commodity sales and promotion models. After years of education on Taobao, JD.COM and other platforms, the purchasing habits of China consumers have been highly improved, which is activity-driven. According to statistics, about 90% of the sales of e-commerce platforms come from products in promotional activities. It is also for this reason that e-commerce platforms are often various activities all year round. At first, when I started docking and promoting operations, and later took over the operation team, I especially wanted to find a book to study the knowledge of activity operation carefully. But I looked through the common operation books and found no particularly good books about the operation of activities. This position created the double miracle of 1 1, and set off a wave after wave of climax in a series of large and small promotional activities. It is colorful, is the focus of consumers' attention, and attracts me very much. Over the years, through actual combat again and again, as well as learning and cooperating with activities from different platforms, I gradually understand the operation idea of this position. I will talk about relevant links in the following article along the e-commerce growth process system I summarized. Activities include promotional activities and daily activities, and the operation of activities is to design an activity calendar, determine the objectives of activities, and decide when to engage in activities with what theme, including what category, what rhythm to engage in and what gimmicks to use. Design specific activities in each activity stage, such as warm-up period, lead-in period, peak period and return period, design the layout and content of the main venue and sub-venue, determine the charging rhythm of each category, decide when and why to invest in what resources, and how to combine marketing resources with those provided by manufacturers and shops to push the overall effect of the activity to a new high, and so on. Content operates on content-based platforms, such as knowledge websites, news websites, audio and video websites, online education websites, official accounts of Weibo and WeChat, and content operation is the soul of websites. On the e-commerce website, content operation has the function of improving stickiness and guiding purchase. Of course, small videos and live broadcasts that have become more and more popular in recent years are also very important for e-commerce to guide shopping. The core appeal of content operation is to build a content system, grasp the direction of content, be responsible for content production, recommendation and reading guidance, encourage socialization and dissemination, and manage the use of content resources. The core problem of content operation is to establish a virtuous circle around the production and consumption of content, and constantly improve all kinds of content-related data, such as content quantity, content browsing quantity, content interaction quantity, content dissemination quantity and so on. Among them, the establishment of early seed content and the precipitation of seed users are particularly critical. User operation User operation is also a core part of CRM. Its core content is to build a user system, a loyalty system (mainly a membership system), manage users' access channels, lay a path for users' growth, design and manage the contact information and communication content of users' whole life cycle, conduct differentiated user operations according to users' multi-dimensional characteristics, reduce the churn rate and recall lost customers. Its essence is to establish a virtuous circle around the whole life cycle of users and maximize output. Its core indicators are customer acquisition, activation, retention, dissemination, access frequency and individual user output. Product operation To be honest, I have been in a state of confusion about the function of this operation post along the way. It doesn't have an authoritative definition, and I haven't seen any books or articles that can really clarify this position. In practical work, I see that product operation is the docking of organizational resources; Multi-dimensional analysis of products; Put forward optimization requirements for products on behalf of the operation team. Personally, I think this has been completely covered by the functions of product managers and operators, whether it is data analysis, resource organization, product analysis or business communication. So when my team usually doesn't set this position. Page operation Most apps have a large number of front pages such as home pages, channels and categories. The functions responsible for these page operations can be collectively called page operations (also called home page operations, channel operations, category operations, etc.). ), responsible for analyzing the traffic efficiency and sales situation of the page, such as analyzing the source, destination, jump loss, conversion ability, customer classification, corresponding shopping guide preferences, inventory of hot-selling goods, shelves, promotion settings, generation of daily activities, communication of picture design requirements, and pictures. Creation and optimization of marketing copy, optimization, splitting and integration of categories, etc. , mainly focusing on a lot of daily and meticulous work, which has a real-time impact on consumer experience and final sales. In the setting of KPI, we often check CTR, traffic distribution effect, click value, conversion rate, sales, PV number per capita, loss rate and so on. In addition to the above-mentioned common operation directions, there are often many sub-directions, such as channel operation, comment operation, application store operation, community operation, WeChat Weibo operation and new media operation. , basically subordinate to one of the above general directions. There are many * * * features behind products and operations. For example, it is necessary to have a deep understanding of users' psychology and consumption motives and know how to create and capture consumers' shopping impulses; It is necessary to have an in-depth interpretation of the data, understand the advantages and disadvantages of the practice through the data and adjust it quickly; All need to carry the core business demands, work hard in one direction, and complement each other from different angles to achieve business goals. Third, the actual case of division of labor and cooperation between products and operations The following is an example to illustrate the key points of my understanding of products and operations: 1. Reflections on the homepage: How should the homepage information architecture be designed to support accurate users, semi-accurate users and wandering users to browse the homepage most smoothly and effectively? How does the homepage information architecture provide differentiated browsing paths for price-sensitive users, quality-oriented users and solution-oriented users? How to design a above the fold and a second screen to minimize user jumps? How should the entrance of each column be laid and combined, and how to place the fist and hook the product, so that users can increase the depth of access as much as possible (the number of screens visited per capita)? What information should be displayed at the entrance of each column to maximize CTR? How to effectively increase the number of hits per user on the homepage (or increase the number of columns visited by each user) and enhance the click value (the sales amount is allocated to each click)? How to combine the visual heat map and thumb click characteristics of the mobile terminal to allocate core business resource areas? How to use the surplus value of homepage traffic (users who are still wanting more at the bottom)? How to create a personalized homepage? How to design rich marketing resources, reasonably control exposure opportunities and objects, and balance user experience? How to reasonably set up advertising resources, improve advertising exposure and click-through rate without causing resentment? How to set pop-up rules to reduce interference to users? 2. Think about the operation on the homepage: What are the rules for allocating resources to the business? Which business line allocates how many resources according to what principle? How to establish the entrance efficiency algorithm model of each business line, and comprehensively feed back the entrance efficiency through multiple dimensions such as access, sales, customer acquisition and stickiness? Which portals are efficient and which are inefficient, and how to reward efficient portals? What are the rules for the application and use of home marketing resources (such as the red icon, who to give it to and what rules to apply for)? When and where to place what marketing materials? What standards do materials need to meet? Do you need horse racing in the stadium? How to design the rules of horse racing? Which products or discount information are exposed by the channel homepage resources, and which products are most likely to be clicked? Is the flow distribution reasonable? Is there a reasonable proportion of traffic effectively directed to the corresponding business segments? What impact does the newly launched column or function have on the overall traffic efficiency of the home page? Did the core data on the home page fluctuate last week? What is the reason for the fluctuation? Is the weekly KPI or monthly KPI of home page operation achieved? If not, what are the reasons? Fourth, summarize and finally make a summary: products set up a stage, operating singing; The product is based on the long-term design stage, and the operation focuses on the current daily operation; On the basis of understanding the pain points and excitement of users, products create a stage that users like, and on the basis of grasping the decision-making factors of users, operations complete the final blow to achieve sales; Products create a good long-term experience through the stage structure, and operations generate revenue through wonderful programs; Product and operation * * * is a screenwriter, the product is re-conceived, the operation is re-played, and * * * works together to create a drama; Products and operations * * * Through data presentation, we constantly optimize the whole theater from stage to performance, and shape an increasingly wonderful future. The demands of products and operations are also full of conflicts and compromises, which require the management of enterprises to carefully grasp the balance point in order to achieve the best commercial results.