Product managers are forced to copy products.
In recent days, I saw a content forwarded by a startup company on wechat, accusing Evernote of copying Flomo. It’s been read more than 100,000 times.
Remember this article from before:
It’s getting harder and harder to make fun of startups, mainly because if you’re not invested in or bought by a big company, then the big company will set up a project team to quickly copy the product and get it on the shelf, and with a strong infusion of traffic, you can win or lose. Let the entrepreneur lose everything.
Should the product manager make a copy?
My answer is: plagiarism is not shameful, but know how to filter and apply
In many companies, product managers copy everything. As a result, business becomes unusable and resources are wasted. Some companies also plagiarized, and the results were different. Several companies all copied and combined into new ones, without considering whether users and the market could accept them.
There are essentially four reasons to copy products.
1. Making the product itself is an extremely expensive business
To be a product manager, students must have a clear understanding: that is, from the first day of doing products, from the perspective of the company, you are a person who is burning money, and the whole product research and development department is burning money every day.
Neither development nor product managers are responsible for the results for the revenue. Sales, channels, and operations are responsible for the operational metrics.
So stand in the company boss or project manager’s point of view li. If you want to burn less money and increase the possibility of survival, it is very critical to naturally re-product design, and demand research, a little error will affect the later work time and cost schedule
If there is a relatively mature product, similar business and good market feedback at this time, naturally, the product design scheme of Rice will become the optimal solution. Than their own needs research, product design plans to save much money.
2. Timing of product development is a matter of life and death
When a product is approved, from team research and development, to product launch. In fact, it is a very long process. There is no Internet product you see on the market, such as APP, small program, or even web site, which does not take more than three months to complete.
It is emphasized that three months includes development, product design, testing and cold start-up operation. In fact, it is very short. Xu Internet companies spend at least six months or even one year to complete the incubation of a product.
While the average life span of an Internet company is three years, one year is quite normal for a project team. If it doesn’t improve in one year, the project will basically be killed or replaced by another project.
Projects that failed to cross the KPI line even though they were growing and generating revenue were also terminated.
If we want to survive, we need to get a 1.0 release out right away. Then copying becomes a priority.
3. No product stays the same
Now you can use the Internet products, they actually have their own research and development plan. In other words, problems with your current product, or even a bad user experience, may have been known for a long time, but have been delayed until the next release due to scheduling or resource issues.
Even though 300 million people teach Zhang Xiaolong, wechat’s product manager, to make products every day, making fun of wechat’s various unusability. But as long as you are willing to wait, there is no doubt that the wechat experience will get better and better in the future, and so will the problems. And the day that you hate the most is fixed, it depends on the time.
So product plagiarism is actually a test of the future of their own products, others do first online is a natural test of users and truth. Even if you don’t know the next version of their product, you can actually reduce the number of potholes as long as the business model is similar and the functionality is the same.
Optimize the functional modules that are not easy to use and do not conform to their own business. If you optimize faster and find it earlier than others, the product will have more opportunities.
After all, no company with 100% identical business can survive entirely by copying.
Product growth takes time and is constantly changing. QQ used to be the only social networking tool in the PC era, but today’s version is probably unknown even to QQ product managers themselves.
Under the era of different technical support, hardware environment allows, user preferences are different.
Copying is just a shortcut to get to a certain point, but not a way to get there. If you copy a product that no one else is iterating on, you will fail.
4. What is the product Manager copying?
It is faster to stand on the shoulders of giants than to start from scratch.
However, the purpose of plagiarism is different. Some will disassemble each other’s functions to select mature functions suitable for their own business. For example, clubhouse, which caught fire in 2021, has been launched by at least 10 companies in China as far as I know.
In version 1.0, it was basically the same as clubhouse, even the UI wasn’t changed. Except for the logo change
There are also countless domestic birth methods. It was almost the same early in the project, but changed over time and through product iterations.
Finally, the product is suitable for domestic users’ preferences, user scenarios and policies.
That’s all for today.