Products and operations are naturally a pair of enemies who love and kill each other, but they are also dependent on each other. It is often said in the industry that products set the stage and operations perform the show. This sentence quite reflects that for a product to be successful, it is inseparable from both the product and the operation. 1. The evolution of the perception of the relationship between products and operations. Looking back on my understanding of the collaboration between products and operations, it is divided into three stages: In the early years when I was in charge of Ctrip’s travel and food business, the product and operations teams in the department were relatively far apart, and the core of the product The focus is on how to build a food channel page, how to optimize the information structure, display selling point information, and how to display and display POI from the perspective of user interests; while the focus of operations is to build a food expert system, pull seed UGC, and promote evaluation production. etc. The two teams interacted relatively little, each was focused and busy, and there were not many conflicts that required coordination. During the period of Yihaodian and JD.com, as the person in charge of front-end products, I could strongly feel the frequent collision between products and operations. In addition to the eternal battle of priorities, typical conflicts include: operations want to develop more abundant resource slots for big promotions, while products want to clarify the positioning of each resource slot and do more refinement rather than more; operations want all resources to be maximized during big promotions In order to promote services, the product hopes to properly retain the column entrances that users have fixed habits; the operation hopes to expose as many products as possible (such as clicking on the homepage to kill a single product to enter the list page instead of the single product page), and the product hopes to design based on the psychological appeal of the user. Determine product access paths; operations hope to promote sales through shaping price recognition, and products hope to ensure experience through discount authenticity. In a nutshell, operations pay more attention to short-term sales results, while products focus more on long-term user experience. Of course, I am also behind this The values ????as a product director at that time. When I was responsible for site-wide products and central operations at Amazon China, my own product thinking has been greatly integrated with operational demands, and it has also been clearly reflected in the work guidance of the product and operations teams. Products and operations have truly entered the stage. A state of harmonious cooperation and mutual complementarity has been achieved. Of course, this is also due to 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 what is better. 2. Classification and focus of products and operations 1. Product products are essentially focused on mid- to long-term effects and require an in-depth 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 product? What do our users particularly care about, and what do they not really care about? How to guide users to be less lazy in operation, easier to get started, and simpler to think? How exactly do they use our products? What time, what posture? Are there any sensitivities? How to decide? Should we make money by selling goods or services directly, by building a social relationship chain, or by monetizing traffic through user scale and stickiness? At this stage, is our core pursuit to expand scale, pursue sales, or pursue profitability? How do we build loyalty? Why do users come? Why churn? Where are users’ real pain points? What are they excited about? Who are our competitors? In comparison, where is the memory point we give users? How to differentiate from competitors? Product managers need to combine the business environment and industry characteristics, conduct in-depth analysis of user psychology and core demands, find pain points and excitement points, and design products that meet users' psychological demands and solve user pain points to realize the company's business model and interest demands. In terms of design, while inheriting user habits, the product pursues the innovation of gameplay, emphasizing creativity and "Wow effect". It is particularly important that different targeted KPI systems should be designed for products with different purposes, such as selling products to assess conversions, sticky products to consider frequency of repeat visits and activity, and social products to assess forwarding rate, communication radius and exposure conversion rate. ,etc. Indicators cannot simply be generalized. When it comes to product classification, in addition to vertical field classification and toB and toC, from a working level, products are also divided into front office, middle office and back office. Below is a simple definition I've put together. Front-end products: Everyone is a user of various websites and apps. Front-end products are relatively easy to understand. They are mainly responsible for interacting with the C-side. They need to deeply understand user psychology, guide users' usage paths, manage user behavior, and create usage scenarios and core dynamics. , create a variety of front-end channels and pages to complete consumption guidance (broadly speaking, the purchase of services, content reading, and the purchase of financial products also belong to consumption). Simply put, anything that directly interacts with end users can be considered the front-end scope. Middle platform products: Middle platform itself has different definitions. Common ones include business middle platform, technical middle platform, data middle platform, etc. Taking the large and medium platform defined by Alibaba as an example, it contains core units such as product center, user center, store center, evaluation center, transaction center, and search center. All kinds of core data of the entire platform are sorted out and abstracted, and modeled as Each system model encapsulates the core business logic, shares data resources with various front desks (such as Taobao, Tmall, PC, Mobile), standardizes the core elements of the front desk display content, and supports flexible display at the front desk. configuration. The middle office is also defined as various systems used by business management teams, such as promotion definition systems, event page building systems, advertising release systems, product entry systems, report statistics systems, etc.

Back-end products: Different from the front-end which is more focused on user interaction and the middle-end which is more business logic, the back-end is generally more focused on technical implementation and underlying architecture. For example, authority management system, cluster management system, security encryption system, risk control system, data statistics system, etc. I have a background in front-end products. When talking about products, I will be more biased towards front-end products and user analysis. I also ask my middle-end and back-end product brothers to forgive me for my bias. I agree more with the idea that products set the stage and operations perform, but I don’t agree with the idea that products give birth to children and operations raise them. In my opinion, products and operations should give birth to children together, raise children together, and work hand in hand to carefully brew and implement the "children" to grow up. I feel that the distinction between the middle and back offices in the industry is not absolute, and the boundaries are not absolutely clear. 2. Operations, compared with products, pay more attention to short-term and mid-term effects. It is more about giving full play to the value of existing channels and tools, targeting users with the final blow, and achieving immediate business goals. And as daily work, we conduct continuous inventory of daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly trends, customer demand changes, and actual sales/visit data, and adjust and replace products, content, and copywriting at any time to achieve a continuous Best results. Take selling goods as an example to give a simple analogy: products need to be carefully considered: how to design the shelves, three or five layers, white or red, square or round, and how to lay out user shopping lines to allow customers to quickly discover products. Complete the purchase, or make customers want to shop more and stay longer in the store. The work of operations is similar to the daily placing of goods on the shelves. What logic is used to select which goods to put on the shelves every day? It should be highlighted in yellow. Should the goods be arranged by category, group of people, scene, or price? After yesterday’s sales inventory, it will be decided today which goods will be removed and which goods will be added to the display space, etc. wait. Operation work is more routine, and it is necessary to quickly adjust operation strategies and control the rhythm and intensity based on yesterday's or even real-time sales data to achieve the best sales results. Operations are also divided into many different directions. For example: commodity operation is a very basic and core operational position on e-commerce platforms. This function often exists in the purchasing and sales team. It requires an in-depth understanding of commodity knowledge and is responsible for selecting Products, set up and continuously optimize categories at all levels, establish a product library, replace products according to seasonality and consumption trends, establish basic information about products, collect and organize the characteristics and highlights of products, summarize selling points, and explore effective product sales and promotion models , and provide opinions and suggestions on the display and optimization of the front desk. Event Operations After years of education on platforms such as Taobao and JD.com, Chinese consumers’ purchasing habits have become highly promotion- and event-driven. According to statistics, about 90% of sales on e-commerce platforms come from products that are on promotion. It is also for this reason that e-commerce platforms often host various large and small activities throughout the year. When I first started taking over the big promotion operation, and later when I took over the big promotion operation team, I especially wanted to find this book to learn more about event operations. However, after searching through common operation books, I could not find a particularly good book on event operation. This position created the miracle of Double 11, setting off wave after wave of climaxes in a series of large and small promotional activities. It was exciting and the focus of consumers, which was very attractive to me. Over the years, through actual combat and learning and cooperation with event operators from different platforms, I have gradually understood the operational ideas of this position. Later, I will talk about the relevant links along the e-commerce growth process system I summarized. In the article, I will elaborate further. Activities include major promotions and daily activities, and event operation is to design an event calendar, determine event goals, decide when and what theme to hold the event, what categories to include, what rhythm to hold, and what kind of gimmicks to use . Design specific activities for each activity stage such as the warm-up period, introduction period, peak period, return period, etc., design the layout and content of the main venue and sub-venues, determine the charging rhythm of each category, and decide when and what category to invest in. resources, how to combine marketing resources with resources provided by manufacturers and stores to push the overall effect of the event to a new high, etc. Content operations are based on content-based platforms, such as knowledge websites, news websites, audio and video websites, online education websites, Weibo, and public accounts. Content operation is the soul of the website. On e-commerce websites, content operations have the effect of increasing stickiness and guiding purchases. Of course, short videos and live broadcasts, which have become increasingly popular in recent years, are also critical to e-commerce and shopping guides. The core requirement of content operation is to build a content system, grasp the direction of content, be responsible for content production, recommendation, reading guidance, encourage social interaction and dissemination, and manage the use of content resources. The core problem that content operation needs to solve is to build a virtuous cycle around content production and consumption, and continuously improve various content-related data, such as content quantity, content views, content interaction number, content dissemination number, etc. Among them, the establishment of seed content and the accumulation of seed users in the early stage are particularly critical. User Operation User operation is also a core part of CRM. Its core content is to build a user system and a loyalty system (mainly a membership system), manage user acquisition channels, lay out user growth paths, design and manage user contact methods and communication content throughout the life cycle, and conduct operations based on the multi-dimensional characteristics of users. Differentiate user operations, reduce churn rate, and recall lost customers.

Its essence is to establish a virtuous cycle around the entire life cycle of users and maximize output. Its core indicators are customer acquisition, activation, retention, dissemination, visit frequency, and individual user output. Product Operations To be honest, I have been quite confused about the functions of this operation position along the way. It does not have an authoritative definition, and I have not seen any books or articles that can really explain this position clearly. In actual work, I see that what product operations do is to organize the docking of resources; analyze the products in various dimensions; and propose optimization requirements to the products on behalf of the operations team. I personally think this has been completely covered by the functions of product managers and operations personnel, whether it is data analysis, resource organization, product analysis, or business communication. So my team generally does not have this position. Page Operation Most apps have a large number of front-end pages such as homepage, channels, categories, etc. The functions responsible for operating these pages can be collectively called page operations (also called home page operations, channel operations, category operations, etc. when broken down), and are responsible for conducting various analyzes on the traffic efficiency and sales of the pages, such as analysis The source, destination, bounce situation, conversion ability of traffic, customer classification, corresponding shopping guide preferences, inventory, listing and removal of hot-selling products, promotion settings, daily activity generation, picture design demand communication, picture replacement, and creation of marketing copywriting Doing, optimizing, optimizing, splitting, integrating categories, etc., etc., etc., are mainly based on a lot of daily and meticulous work, and have a real-time impact on consumer experience and final sales. In the setting of KPI, CTR, traffic distribution effect, click value, conversion rate, sales, per capita PV number, churn rate, etc. are often assessed. In addition to the above common operation directions, there are often many subdivision directions, such as channel operations, review operations, app store operations, community operations, WeChat and Weibo operations, new media operations, etc., which basically all belong to one of the above. general direction. There are many idiosyncrasies behind products and operations. For example, they both require an in-depth understanding of user psychology and consumption motivations, and know how to create and capture consumers’ shopping impulses; both require in-depth interpretation of data, and the optimization of practices through data understanding. and make rapid adjustments; they all need to carry core business demands, work in one direction, and complement each other to achieve business goals from different angles. 3. Practical cases of division of labor and cooperation between products and operations. The following is a mobile homepage product as an example to illustrate the focus of products and operations that I understand: 1. Product thinking about the homepage: How should the homepage information architecture be designed to be the smoothest and most effective? How to fully support precise users, semi-precise users, and idle users browsing on the homepage? How does the home page information architecture pave differentiated browsing paths for price-sensitive users, quality-oriented users, and solution-oriented users? How to design the first and second screens to minimize user bounce? How should the entrances of each column be laid out and combined, and how should fists and hook products be placed, so that users can increase the depth of access as much as possible (number of screens per person)? What kind of information should be displayed at the entrance of each column to maximize the channel click-through rate (CTR)? How to effectively increase the number of clicks per user on the homepage (or increase the number of columns visited per person) and increase the value of clicks (amortized to the sales amount per click)? How to combine visual heat maps and mobile thumb click features to allocate core business resource fields? How to make use of the residual value of home page traffic (users who are still unsatisfied after browsing to the bottom)? How to create a personalized homepage? How to design rich marketing resource positions and reasonably control the timing and objects of exposure to balance user experience? How to rationally set up advertising resource slots to increase ad exposure and click-through rates without causing resentment? How to set pop-up window rules to reduce interference to users? 2. Operations’ thoughts on the homepage: What are the resource allocation rules for the business? How many resources are allocated to which business line and based on what principles? How to formulate the portal efficiency algorithm model for each business line to comprehensively feedback portal usage efficiency through multiple dimensions such as visits, sales, customer acquisition, stickiness, etc.? Which entrances are efficient, which entrances are inefficient, and how to reward efficient entrances? What are the rules for applying and using marketing resources on the homepage (for example, if the icon turns red, who will be given it on which day, and what rules should be followed for application)? What marketing materials should be placed in which location and on which day? What standards do materials need to meet? Does the field require a horse? How to design horse racing rules? What products or discount information are exposed on the channel's homepage resources and have the greatest likelihood of being clicked? Is the traffic distribution reasonable? Is a reasonable proportion of traffic effectively directed to the corresponding business sector? What impact do newly launched columns or functions have on the overall traffic efficiency of the homepage? Did the core data on the home page fluctuate last week? What is the reason for the fluctuation? Are the weekly or monthly KPIs for home page operations achieved? If it is insufficient or exceeded, what is the reason? Fourth, let’s conclude with a summary: the product sets the stage and the operation sings the show; the product designs the stage based on the long-term, and the operation focuses on the present to do daily operations; the product creates a stage that users love based on understanding the user’s pain points and excitement, and the operation relies on grasping the user’s decision-making Complete the final blow to achieve sales based on factors; the product creates a good long-term experience through the stage structure, and the operation generates revenue through exciting programs to trigger impulses; the product and operation are the same as the screenwriter, the product is re-conceived, and the operation is re-played, ** *Working together to create a great drama; products and operations working together to continuously optimize the entire theater from stage to performance through data reflection to shape an increasingly exciting future.

The demands for products and operations are also full of conflicts and compromises, which require corporate management to carefully grasp the balance point to achieve the best business results.