1. is an understanding of the product manager's personal professional ability. 2. Look at the similarities and differences of product manager's work from the perspective of system analyst. 2. Greater requirements and challenges faced by wireless Internet product managers. Part I: Understand the professional core competence of product managers. Personal views and cognition of product managers in SP industry in 2004: 1) Simple product logic; At that time, I felt that the logic of those WAP products was very simple; Some are simple pages, and you can get Monternet online charges by putting a few bells; The main work of the product here is still in content operation; 2) "Operator product planning"; At that stage, SP's business model was clear and profiteering. Mobile absolutely dominates the industrial chain, formulates the rules of the game, and restricts the product model and even the product performance layer. For example, what links should be added anywhere on the page; 3) "channel-oriented product operation"; Operators master marketing channels and billing channels through Monternet, and product managers are more focused on revenue-oriented channel management; Very little analysis of user behavior; Looking back at this stage, I think the whole industry development stage is like this, there is no right or wrong; 4) The entry threshold for product managers is not high; To do development, you must at least be able to write programs, but I feel that the threshold for product managers is too low; BD, content maintenance, art design, many roles can be transferred to product manager; It is understood that at that time, many SP companies would recruit some junior college students and even high school students to be product managers, and they also worked intensively to make money. The work of the product manager is trivial and complicated, but it doesn't feel systematic and rigorous. Every day, I spend a few pages in WORD and throw them in for development.
I have been thinking about what is the core competence and value of this position under this working condition. But objectively speaking, this is not all our problem. At that time, the atmosphere of the entire SP industry was so impetuous. Thanks to the hematopoietic function of wireless business in this period, it supported games, internet and other businesses; But where is the value of talents? With the bursting of the SP industry bubble, SP product managers in many companies were laid off, and job hunting hit a wall everywhere. The reason is that they have not established their own core competitiveness, and even do not have the ability to become product managers in the Internet industry. Understanding of professional core competence of product managers. Here, we only talk about the ability in the professional field, and temporarily put aside business negotiation, communication ability and document ability; Personally, I think the professional ability of a product manager in a field is shown in the following three aspects: 1. Industry understanding ability; The quality of industry analysts; 2. The ability to systematically analyze users' needs; The quality of system analyst; 3. Ability to grasp the details of user experience; The quality of interaction designers; First of all: the ability to understand the industry is the premise of being a product manager in this industry. Macroscopically, industry vision is of great significance to product strategic positioning, product planning and business model. Microscopically, it is the understanding of the needs, behaviors, habits and interactive behaviors of users in this industry. All need to accumulate gradually in this industry; Promotion mode: obtain industry information, think about processing and refine opinions; Personally, I think this is essentially a knowledge level, which is gradually transformed into a capability factor and externalized into an intuitive level through years of accumulation. Understand this industry like an industry analyst. Secondly, the system's ability to analyze users' needs. As the spokesman of users, the product manager is the user group in his left hand and the technician in his right hand; On the premise of deeply understanding the needs of users, product managers should systematically sort out and analyze them and turn them into expressions that developers can understand; The work of user demand analysis is systematic and rigorous, not scattered, trivial and piled up; If we regard the product as a system, we can understand the relationship between functions, rather than simply adding functions. Need use case analysis method for business modeling; And the priority of demand can be evaluated by comprehensively weighing the needs, feasibility and scheme cost of users; Promotion mode: master the tools of system analysis, such as business modeling and use case analysis; Accustomed to the object-oriented thinking mode; Personally, this ability needs more rigorous logical thinking; Our common problem is that product managers draw UI interaction diagrams and user interfaces as soon as they come up. In fact, these are the last thinking links in a product process; It will lead us to fail to recognize the product positioning and the overall picture of the product; In the process of product function expansion, there is no sense of direction and it is easy to add; Personally, this is actually very suitable for the working characteristics and thinking mode of system analysts. Next, we will discuss the similarities and differences between system analysts and product managers.
Furthermore, the ability to grasp the details of user experience; User experience, this term can be understood as users' subjective feelings about products; This feeling may be caused by functional design, interactive details or visual design. Especially in the environment where the competitive market functions tend to be consistent, it is often the details that determine the experience; The person who knows users best is the product manager, who is not only the spokesman of users, but also someone who sometimes has a deep understanding of the industry; Therefore, he needs to have a strong "user-enabled scene restoration ability"; This "usage scene" is a comprehensive consideration of people, time and space; It is to be able to imitate the user's mentality and use environment to test whether the workflow of the product is smooth and whether the experience is ok; If this is a system analyst who is used to use case analysis, it will still have advantages; In some product structures, there is the position of "interaction designer", such as WEB or software interaction designer; This is a group of professionals who have mastered the basic principles of Internet UI interaction and have a theoretical precipitation on user psychology and behavior analysis. Because the product manager should be responsible for the product, because he should have the theoretical literacy of interaction design; Although in the specific work, the product manager may not personally do the interaction design, but he must have the ability to judge and know why it is good or not; There are also some areas, such as WAP interactive product design, because this position has not been differentiated in the early stage of industry development, and can only be taken care of by product managers. The product manager's "125" model is just another way to put it: I packaged and refined the above three abilities within the team: "1": a kind of ability. Ability of system requirement analysis and business modeling; "2": two perspectives. First, the macro industry perspective; A deep understanding of the Internet and wireless industry is of great significance to product strategic positioning, user behavior needs, interaction habits and the derivation of business models. The second is the micro-user perspective; As the person who knows users best, he must be responsible for the product experience and have strong user scenario analysis ability (use case analysis). "5": it is a general product design methodology; Before: strategy layer, scope layer, structure layer, framework layer, UI layer; This book comes from the elements of user experience, which is specifically explained here: 1) product positioning; According to the external market and internal resources, this paper expounds the feasibility of developing this product from the perspectives of user demand and company strategy, and defines the product development strategy from the perspective of 1. User perspective; What needs of what users are met (including locking the target user group); 2. Enterprise perspective; What is the value to the company's interests; 2) business modeling; Through use case analysis, describe users' functional demands for products; Determine the general scope of services; And determine the organizational classification and priority of requirements; Through this work, the business model description and user demand analysis instructions are output; This does not involve detailed interaction and implementation. Personally, although the entry threshold for product managers is not high, it is still a big challenge to become an excellent senior product manager. Judging from the company's professional ability model, the comprehensiveness of quality is on the one hand; The key is to have in-depth development in professional ability; Personally, people who want to make a breakthrough in the above three ability points can be called majors; Personal thoughts and suggestions: 1. Systematic training mechanism of product manager's professional ability. Other comprehensive qualities of product manager, such as project, leadership and communication. . . Everyone can gain ability and quality in different post practice; The company also has a series of training courses in this field, such as communication skills, negotiation skills and project management. . . Wait a minute. However, in terms of the professional ability of product managers, such as the ability of demand analysis, this training is still relatively small; For example, use general object-oriented thinking to do requirements analysis and use cases to do business modeling, such as understanding UML tools; This is less. The requirement specification written by our own product manager either directly draws interactive design; Either adopt the functional specification in the traditional process-oriented system design, which includes input, output and processing; I hope that companies or teams that do better can carry out systematic training in this area; For the principle of interactive design, it is not bad, and the design center has relevant training; For industry understanding, this training may not solve the problem, and it may depend on the product manager's own daily information accumulation and thinking. As for the suggestion of the product manager, I still want to say that it is not difficult to become an ordinary product manager. Be experienced in the business field, and personal opinions vary from person to person. One suggestion is to recruit product managers from system analysts; Or from developers who can analyze the system; Because the thinking mode and comprehensive quality of system analysts are similar to those of product managers, it is believed that it should not be difficult to enter the role with the understanding of the industry; The other is to start training from newcomers. Personally, I think it is necessary to make a breakthrough at the professional level. First, my logical thinking ability is stronger, which is conducive to mastering the method of system analysis. Secondly, he has a certain introverted temperament, is good at observing and summarizing, and can hold his breath in the details of user experience; Also have strong learning comprehension ability, good at thinking about the direction of the industry; As for creativity and divergent thinking, I think it is better, but it is not critical. This can be achieved by discovering and collecting the ideas of others or users. On the contrary, thinking that is too divergent and jumping will affect the thinking of the whole system. The second part: the similarities and differences between the work of system analysts and Internet product managers: from my previous work manager of system analysts, talk about my personal views; In recent years, I worked as a project in graduate school and played some roles in system analysis, including process-oriented system analysis. Later, I tried to learn object-oriented system analysis. First, similarity; 1) The thinking mode of system analysis is similar to the product construction process. We can regard a product as a system, and its internal functional architecture is not simply piled up, but dependent and subordinate, which conforms to the perspective of a system; In the analysis of object-oriented system, it is nothing more than analyzing the people, things, things and rules of the system clearly; This person is the actor of the system, equivalent to the target user group of the product; Things refer to things that users hope to accomplish through the system; Equivalent to the functional characteristics of the product; Things, things produced when users finish things in the system, such as data entity objects; These are also in the product, such as the journal. General system analysis is the definition of system objectives, which is equivalent to product positioning; Then business modeling, use case analysis and system modeling; The front is equivalent to the scene analysis in product design and function construction; The job of system modeling is to describe the system model in technical language. At present, this job is not available in product work, because most products are non-technical background, so these are not considered; But technicians should output complete system modeling; But many teams may have omitted this step. 2) User perspective: System analysts and product managers should strengthen the user perspective very much; System analysis, especially object-oriented system analysis, is people-centered. The first is to find the user of the system and then study his needs and what he wants to accomplish. When doing use case analysis, it is bound to be described with the participation of actors as the core; This is consistent with the scenario analysis of the product manager. 3) Use case analysis and user's scenario analysis ability are interlinked. Our description of users' needs can't simply stay on the cognition of social attributes (age, occupation and income) of target users. . . ), a scene contains a comprehensive consideration of people, time and space. And this kind of scene restoration is necessary to analyze the user's needs. 4) Their professional quality patterns are similar, and their comprehensive quality requirements are relatively high, such as communication ability, leadership ability and negotiation ability. . Wait a minute. Secondly, differentiation: 1) Complexity of business model Generally, the logic of business system design faced by system analysts is more complicated, especially involving workflow links; Internet products are relatively lightweight, and their functions are relatively simple. For example, a WPS product, OA system is simpler than a QZONE product. 2) The general information management system plays a very good role in determining the target user groups and their needs. Finding and doing in-depth CE and research one by one is the first step to dig out all the requirements; Internet products generally face tens of millions of users, and it is difficult to define the demand. Only through the agile development process can we keep exploring and giving feedback. 3) In terms of business model, Internet products contain more creative cultural systems. The business information system faced by analysts generally solves the problems in practical work and objectively and faithfully reflects the traditional working rules; Internet products are more about tapping the potential needs of users, and even stimulating new needs through creativity. Furthermore, the additional advantages of system analysts are: the ability to analyze system requirements and the ability to build business models; When deducing product planning and version rhythm from business model, system analysts generally have technical background and can comprehensively consider technical feasibility and technical realization cost. Part III: The special challenges faced by wireless Internet product manager 1. The product manager's system analysis ability and demand are consistent, and so is his business model building ability. As for other leadership, project ability, business negotiation and communication ability. . . The product models are consistent; Even because wireless product managers will be better at some abilities, such as business negotiation and communication skills. 2. In terms of the details of user interaction experience, due to the characteristics of mobile terminals, there is no industry precipitation in this piece, which needs to be explored and precipitated by itself. 3. In terms of industry understanding, wireless product managers face greater challenges. On the one hand, they need to understand the current business form, competition and business model of the wired Internet industry; Because the wired Internet extends and penetrates to the mobile terminal, business convergence is the trend.
On the other hand, because the wireless Internet also has its own industry characteristics, such as the long industrial chain based on operation; It is necessary to comprehensively weigh the influence of policies of mobile terminals, wireless networks and operators on upper application products; I drew a picture to briefly explain the various elements of the wireless Internet industry.