An overview of the
As the number on Hong Kong’s 100 skyline counted down to zero, the sky over Victoria Harbour was in full bloom with brilliant fireworks, putting 2017 behind us with a flash of fireworks.
2017 is my first year as a product manager, this year’s work can be described as “ups and downs” ups and downs, by my hand there are 4 or 5 products, all types of dead, aborted, there are online and accumulated a certain number of users, for the team to bring profit products. I feel that this is not like the experience of a first-year product maker, but because of this experience, I have gained a lot in this year, although there are still many deficiencies.
And at the end of 2017, take a summary of the pits and gains I’ve made. Here’s what I learned from my experience:
- Experience matters
- Product planning and project tracking
- Solve problems in user usage processes and data
- Speech ability
- User survey
- The perspective-taking
I will summarize this year’s learning harvest from the above 6 aspects.
Experience matters
1, user-friendly design, you need to learn before turning to become a product manager in the absence of is more care about in our daily life experience, he is probably a more emphasis on efficiency, so in the use of some products, can meet my needs, can improve efficiency, and how can let I don’t think can complete the whole process of product, Can let me focus on my own things, such a product can be considered as a good experience. Although I know I need to make a good experience, when I actually do it myself, it’s a different story.
At the end of last year, I was responsible for the development of a Web background management system, and the first version was completed before the Spring Festival of 2017. The result was predictable, and the product was delayed. In the first version, the process was not smooth, the experience was poor, and there was no aesthetic feeling (the team didn’t have a design at that time, they just did it according to the prototype). As expected, the boss attacked me wildly, which was really a big blow at that time.
Taking this as an excuse, I really only have a superficial understanding of web design interaction, so my first task back in the New Year is to do a good iteration of the optimized version.
In order to fill the hole, I began to learn the interaction design of Web products through various channels. I remember I read an article before, saying that the fastest way to learn a new knowledge is to ask experienced people, then read relevant articles on the Internet, and read books further. I first asked people. I found some product predecessors in the wechat product group and QQ product group. They provided me with some articles of relevant forums, such as “netease User Experience Center”, “Tencent ISUX” and “Design Expert”, and also recommended relevant books to me. Read experience-related articles and blogs based on information provided by your predecessors and summarize them. Then read Don’t Make Me Think and Design Psychology.
Maybe it was because I focused on learning knowledge in this field during that period of time that I mastered it quickly. The book Don’t Make Me Think and Nelson’s Ten Principles of Interaction that had the greatest influence on me. Although the “Ten Principles of Interaction by Nelson” were simple, But almost every scenario is a much friendlier experience when packaged with these ten principles.
Then the new learning interaction experience knowledge, rules into the web site background management system version optimization thinking, redesigned the navigation system, and each operation priority from the user’s point of view, truly take the user as a “fool”, thus successfully completed a new version of the iterative optimization work experience. Next came UI design, and since there were no designers on the team… Thanks to the background management system, the design requirements are not so high, their previous contact with the UI design, so on the top of the design.
After the second version was completed, the home page had the following comparison:
The first edition
iteration
Iterations of the new version received unanimous praise from customers and the experience was much better. Maybe it’s because the previous version was so bad… Anyway, this experience made me really understand that in product design, every function and operation should reduce users’ thinking as much as possible, and every operation should make users feel and feel respected. After this project experience, I also had an in-depth understanding of emotional design and design psychology. Later, I gradually formed a habit, which can be regarded as a thinking mode of “experience thinking”.
Product planning and progress tracking
In the middle of this year, the company’s top management based on their own resources, to create an information product. Started as a platform for drainage, so in product design and there is no much difference in information products on the market, the biggest difference lies in the model, add a user task system, users can read information, also be rewarded, in turn, converted into RMB, accumulated to a certain after the withdraw operation can be done, to attract users by this model. There were already several similar products on the market. As the product model is relatively mature, the initial design is not difficult, the key is how to plan these requirements and functions, and determine the priority. Since the boss gave an urgent launch time, product planning and progress tracking became particularly critical.
In terms of product planning, I read the Book of Revelation and remember that there is a good metaphor for agile iteration, which is that if you want to build a car, you build a bike, then a motorcycle, and then a car, not the car. This ensures that the core functions are done first and then the rest of the functions are prioritized, which is a good example of how important feature priorities are. Therefore, in this product planning, the online version was divided into 4 iteration plans according to the 4 quadrants of priority, as shown in the figure below.
Priority quadrants
Then, in terms of progress tracking, corresponding goals and tasks will be assigned to developers at each stage, and the quality of the project will be controlled through daily morning meeting and stage summary meeting. Although this was done, there were delays at each stage, and the quality was not guaranteed, although the delay was not much work. What’s the problem? The problem was not immediately identified. A few days later the company hired a technical bull to manage the technical team, which came at a good time. Meat after induction first and when I know the situation, for my project management methods, logic and direction are correct, but there is one point was not well done, is not the task granularity and refinement, now the task granularity is basically function module, and a cycle for 3 days. Brother Meat said something to me that impressed me: “Team, the developer’s self-consciousness is have high low, in order to ensure that each of us can keep up with the progress of work, you need to do the worst plan, that is to say, assume that the developer is the premise of low conscientiousness, we need to put the task of fine to half a day, even in two hours for the unit, and then through the early meeting on a daily basis to report progress, It puts a little bit of pressure on them so they’re motivated to do it, but of course, if they’re self-motivated, they’ll do fine if we don’t.”
Indeed, sometimes it is necessary to fine-tune tasks according to the team’s situation in order to better control the schedule and product quality.
Solve problems in user usage processes and data
September is the beginning of school season, but it has nothing to do with me. Due to the development of business, the team needs to open a new product line, which is a web novel reading WebApp bound to the official account. In the product design and development of this project, agile development was still adopted and a version was iterated quickly.
Shortly after the launch of the first version, a certain amount of revenue was obtained through user recharge. In the following month, we continued to optimize the page experience of H5, but there were several problems in the process that could not be solved. No matter we promoted and attracted new users or old users read, recharge conversion rate, attention rate and other data were always in a low state. At that time, the first version was by absorbing the essence of some mature cases, and then combined with the experience of a good navigation system, the experience is still ok, but why did this happen? At the time, we made various assumptions about these questions, but found that there was no data to analyze to test our assumptions. Therefore, the most important work at this time is to conduct statistical analysis of the data first. So, the problem is that we only carried out simple statistics on simple user data and recharge data, and did not carry out statistics on other aspects of data, which is really a pit.
So what kind of data do we need to collect?
First of all, it is necessary to make clear the data concerned, such as recharge conversion rate and focus on conversion rate, and then determine the related parameters, take the recharge conversion rate, the formula is recharge conversion rate = number of people (△t)/total number of users (△t), where (△t) is a certain time interval, If you need to query the recharge conversion rate of a certain day, you need to count the number of recharge users and the total number of users on a certain day. The same goes for conversion rates. In order to have a more comprehensive understanding of the product, it is necessary to obtain more data for a more comprehensive analysis, such as the number of visitors and the statistics of daily novel reading. So which data are we going to get first? No one has a clear answer. And I also not enough understanding of operational data, so I can’t make accurate judgment, so this time is the best combination of users using flow chart, to determine which parts of the world is what we need to pay attention to, and then determining the buried somewhere, and explain what is the meaning of data, and then there is a more important is, the causes of the changes in these data, This is of great help to the subsequent data analysis. So what’s a product manager to do? A product needs to acquire user data, the most important thing is to have a clear user usage flow chart, and then determine the final data to be acquired through the user usage flow chart. Through sorting out and summarizing the user process, the current user process of using the product and several core data indicators are determined, as shown in the figure below
User process burying point
After determining the indicators, it is necessary to analyze the possible situation when the indicators change, and then make a specific analysis based on the specific situation.
Data parsing
After this case, I better understand that data analysis is a very important means to analyze product conditions and improve product competitiveness. At that time, I did not have too much experience in data analysis, so there would be no data in the early stage. However, after discussing the data analysis plan with everyone, I was unanimously approved by everyone, which increased my confidence and benefited a lot. In the future, I will also consider the situation of data burying point in product design.
Speech ability
In the second half of this year, the team continued to expand, but I was still the only product manager. Therefore, I was the host of requirements review and version iteration of the product, and I was the coordinator of the morning meeting every day, so my speech ability in front of the audience was also unconsciously improved. Of course, I also unconsciously treat each meeting as a speech. Because I have watched many TED talks in the past, SO I have studied them a little bit. If I think from another Angle, as an audience, I like to listen to those talks, or I hate those talks, so it is easy to understand. Therefore, I usually put a title on a PPT, and if there is data, the user chart will show the data. If it is necessary to show a copy, the copy will be no more than three lines, and I will quote a relaxed tone from time to time to ease the atmosphere.
Preparation for a speech is very important, can achieve what we want to make sure that the speech as a result, is the information we need to pass really passed to the audience, you need to put your speech control in a certain period of time, can’t only speak concept, is the best way to the form of a story telling, and clarity. That is to say, you should start your speech by telling everyone what the main content of the speech is, and then break it into several parts, and then explain each part. If the speech is longer, you should make sure that your tone of speech is primary and focused, and it is better to interact with the audience and arouse the enthusiasm of the audience. Finally, it is necessary to make a summary of the speech and let the audience follow the speaker’s ideas.
Public speaking is a skill that needs practice and summarization. It doesn’t have to be compelling, but it does need to get your message across. If the presentation is a product and the audience is your audience, why not make the presentation better and make the audience experience better?
Although my speech ability has improved in this year, it is still not enough to give a “good experience” of speech, and there is still a long way to go.
User survey
After several iterations, the reading WebApp has become stable, and it’s December. The next plan is to build our own platform and prepare for the planning of our own reading App.
However, it will not start with “competitive product analysis” as before, but will first investigate the current market conditions of the industry and important user research.
Because WebApp has accumulated a certain amount of users, and the customer service side has active seed users on hand. So this is the best time to do user research.
How to do user research? Before conducting the research, I have reviewed the theoretical knowledge of user research several times.
Do user research, first of all, ask yourself, what is the purpose of this user research?
The purpose is to more accurately capture our current users’ user portraits, usage scenarios and suggestions for our platform.
Next is the question of setting the questionnaire, the question setting of the questionnaire is also skilled, the most core is the following points:
- The number of questions should not be too large, about 12
- Questions unrelated to the purpose of the study
- Can ask don’t ask resolutely
- Problems should be easy before they are difficult
- Open and closed problem reasonable collocation
- The question should not be conductive to avoid the reaction of the heart
After identifying the problem, you need to make predictions about the results of the survey, such as how the user’s portrait will look. After these are determined, we need to start the research, so how to attract users to fill in the questionnaire? Due to the nature of the business, we can reward a certain amount of book coins by filling in a questionnaire, and users can read paid books by using book coins. The activity is displayed in the activity banner on the home page, and in order to prevent users from brushing, we turned on the default setting of unselected options.
Thanks to the incentive mechanism, users were very motivated to participate. In less than a week, we received more than 3,000 questionnaires.
The next step was to analyze the results of the questionnaire and show the proportion of the following options in each question in the form of charts, such as:
The male to female ratio
Age distribution
Then summarize a final portrait and user research results.
In addition to the user questionnaire survey, I also conducted one-to-one user interview with active users through wechat customer service. Although face-to-face interview is more direct and efficient, I gave it up considering the cost. One-on-one interviews can directly understand users’ feelings on the platform, understand users’ deeper needs, and face users’ ridicule, which is really “refreshing”… The difficulty of user interview is much more difficult than questionnaire survey, and it also needs the patience of customer service staff, and praises the user as god… I went too far. Due to time, I only interviewed several seed users, and the effect was not ideal. In the follow-up, I continued to exercise my ability in this aspect, which is also the core ability of product managers.
When it comes to users, Jobs once said: users don’t know what they want. We need to guide them. So we have to be able to understand the user better than the user.
Analogical thinking
After completing the user survey and determining the user portrait, the next step is to analyze the needs of reading products. After experiencing the precipitation of the previous project, NOW I will not immediately determine the function, but will spend more time on thinking about the requirements, allocate the work of the product to 80/20, and spend 80% of the time on thinking and 20% of the time on execution.
As for the online novel reading App, since I am not the target user, it is difficult for me to understand the needs of users by thinking. Although I have learned a lot of users’ feedbacks from previous user surveys, it is difficult to design products that can resonate with users without real feelings. To this end, we can change the perspective, although I am not the target user of the novel, but I usually like reading books, can you connect the two scenes? In this case, I was the target user myself.
So let’s look at the process of reading traditional books and see if we can find out what motivates users.
I divide traditional book reading into two categories.
- Reading books with a purpose
- Reading books without purpose
Purposefully choose books to read 1, can’t find a book Assuming that Sunday afternoon, I watched the movie “star trek”, is very interested in the time travel inside, want to know the knowledge about time and space, the relativity, the Internet is not so developed, so the first time I will choose to go to shenzhen book city related books. (I came to shenzhen book city, I came into the door, can see the wide variety of books, some of the best sellers on the books in a prominent place in the entrance, such as “melancholy grocery store”, “a person’s pilgrimage”, “the world pass by from you like the best seller, the content of the book can arouse people’s resonance, a lot of people like to buy, like to watch, So it’s only natural that book city would put them in the most visible place. But I’m not very interested in these, I’m here to find books on space-time and relativity to satisfy my thirst for knowledge (a little too much…). “, then I would pass the sign in the bookstore, relativity belongs to physics, physics belongs to science, science is on the second floor, so I went to the second floor, find science, then physics books, and then in the physics area, find books related to space and time, relativity. When I find a book, through browsing the contents, introduction, introduction and so on, feel the content of the book is very good, I will buy it home, first put on the shelf.
2, I used to read before going to bed, hungry after half of the book, sleepy, to go to bed, they put the bookmark in their own place to see the folder, and then put the book back on the shelf, and then go to sleep. Because the second day is a little busy, such as working overtime, home already more than 10 o ‘clock, wash gargle already 11 o ‘clock, taking advantage of the silence of the night, their own or charge for a while, from the bookshelf took out the theory of relativity bought yesterday, and then continue to see the content behind.
On the first day of summer vacation, Xiao Xue went to the civic Center to play and watch movies with her friends. After they saw the movie, they found a place to drink and hang out. Then went to shenzhen book City, snow feel summer vacation, there will be time to read. So into the book city to see what good books. The first thing I saw was a prominent bestseller at the door, among which there was a novel called “To Our Simple Little Beauties”. The cover was pretty good, so I went to read the introduction and the plot of the first few chapters, and found it very attractive, so I decided to buy this book. There are light snow has always been very interested in literature, so go to the literature area, see what good books. To the literature area, before the snow has bought some books here. In the recommended exhibition area, found a book called “Night flight west”, she had heard before, but did not read, are the type of snow like to see the book, snow picked up and looked at the front of some chapters, feel very good, also bought it down. It’s almost 7 o ‘clock, and it’s time for snow to go home.
The reading process is the same as the purposeful book reading process described above.
Through the above analysis, the following flow chart is obtained:
The reading process
While reading books shows the needs of life are:
Realistic scene reading hand overture
The whole process is not too different from the online reading application. The scene requirements are reflected in the App, such as book city module, search, book recommendation, book classification, book introduction, book purchase, book reading, bookmark, reading environment and so on. Finally, it is determined to meet the online reading needs of users and corresponding functions.
Looking forward to
In 2017 in science and technology development is undoubtedly the most popular technology in the artificial intelligence, associated with driving and intelligent wireless voice assistant, computer vision, and natural language recognition are into people’s lives, and will become a new generation of computing platform AR, VR and MR, have brought a new revolution to our current era, industrial upgrading, so in the New Year, As a product manager, in addition to accumulating basic product capabilities and practicing business sensitivity, I also need to understand new technologies, think and explore the application scenarios of new technologies, and welcome the advent of the new revolution!
Well, let’s be practical. As far as I’m concerned, the product journey is still a long one, so I need to set four directions for the New Year:
- Ability of precipitation products in various aspects (core competitiveness)
- Mastering psychology (exploring the deep motivations behind people’s needs)
- Cultivate investor’s vision and business sensitivity
- Understanding of ARTIFICIAL intelligence technology (not abandoned by The Times)
Charge up and welcome the New Year!