The company's directional demand is generally not decided by the product manager, and the demand at this level generally comes from the decision-making level. Bosses usually decide the strategic direction of products according to their own resource advantages and market analysis.

For example, why does WeChat socialize with acquaintances, Mo Mo socialize with strangers, and 360 antivirus? For this level of demand, there is generally no specific demand. Usually, the demand that the product manager will hear is what kind of users the product should be aimed at and what kind of problems should be helped to solve. This type of demand may be heard more in the initial startup. For example, the birth of Hungry stems from his founder's desire to solve the inconvenience of ordering takeout on campus.

When a relatively mature company is incubating a new project, the demand you hear may become: What are the advantages of the company's resources, which industry we can use this advantage to cut into and what problems we can solve. For example, the birth of the applet must be that the decision-making layer of WeChat Wocai has done more things after thinking about the users with this volume. In this way of thinking, the concept of applet is gradually derived. Using small programs, WeChat realized the conversion of traffic and realized its own platform and systematic thinking.

At this stage, the product manager should do more to understand the direction put forward by the boss. Based on this demand, we can determine the crowd, determine the scope of the demand (that is, what to do), and some resources that we can use. (such as traffic resources, content resources, algorithm resources, etc. ).

To put it simply, if making products is compared to opening a shop, then at this stage, we should choose the cuisine (solving problems) and chefs (resources) and what kind of people to sell them to. However, the location, regional selection, store decoration, detailed dishes and pricing have not yet been determined.

User demand survey

After receiving the strategic demand, the next thing to do is to decompose and improve the demand and refine it. What you have to do at this time includes: finding the target group and understanding the usage habits of the target group.

For example, if you want to make a take-away platform, your user group may include two groups, merchants and users. For these two groups, there will be many demands. You need to consider the business environment. There are probably only one or two people in an ordinary shop, including cashier, delivery and ordering food. They may not be able to pay full attention to the order. In this case, your push mechanism and voice reminder may need to ensure timeliness. Similarly, due to the production environment, order management needs manual confirmation to ensure that it will not be overloaded and affect the user experience. The shelves and shelves of goods should be as simple and clear as possible, and they need to be removed from the shelves in time when the merchants are out of stock. (different from the richness and diversity of customers).

The user end faces the student group, which is different from buying in the canteen, PC or mobile phone. How to show which businesses are there, what characteristics each business has, how to help users choose businesses, how to judge the tastes of businesses and how to show prices. The demand is quite different from that of the merchants.

The take-away software cited in this article is quite common in our daily life. Many needs can be judged by common sense. However, if you meet the needs of the minority, such as the secondary community, sex toys and so on. If the product manager has no experience in these products, you need to find the user base. The common practice is to contact the internal staff of the company, such as operation and customer service. These positions that often need to deal with users can give you some real opinions. You can also maintain the WeChat group of seed users and do research questionnaires.

But small companies generally don't adopt these methods because of high cost and long time. The best way is that the product manager can become a loyal user of the product and really use the product. Instead of thinking of yourself as a product.

In this link, in fact, the product manager can basically transform the directional requirements into more detailed functional scope and corresponding priorities. Let's take the restaurant example away. In fact, here we are based on the restaurant, chef and opening budget given by the boss.

We have basically determined who our food will be sold to, whether these people want to have a working meal or a weekend party, or a couple date, and what their approximate budget will be (target population and core needs). Under the support of these conditions, the content of the menu can be basically determined, and cold dishes, hot dishes, signature dishes and staple foods should be set up (the demand is transformed into the corresponding function list). According to the personality characteristics of these people, we can also determine the decoration of the shop (page style, typesetting)

The needs of collaborative departments

After determining the user's needs, we should continue to confirm the internal workflow. Products are not only used to serve users, but also to serve other departments of their own internal systems. For example:

Maintain the daily content and activities of the operation department, then you need a management background;

Customer service should be able to collect and answer users' questions, then our page needs a customer service display position and a background page to reply to customer service;

For example, if you are hungry, its cooperation department also includes take-away delivery personnel. At this time, you need to give the delivery staff a page that can quickly view and manage orders (the volume is enough to become an app);

Website products may receive demand from seo department. He will ask you to add many internal links on your page and ask some search terms to have landing pages. This may directly affect the structure of your website, and seo will let you make many pages specially for reptiles.

There may be some needs that are invisible on the page: for example, finance may have the need to make accounts, and BI has the need for data statistics.

After determining the departments you may need to cooperate with, sometimes you need to continue to confirm their staffing and workflow, which will affect the design of the front and back ends.

Take our company as an example, the products are vertical content products. When I plan the content display, I first need to make clear the production scope and quantity of our content and the display form of the content (audio, video? ), these things determine how your page is displayed.