Whether entering a new business area or facing a new project goal, how to quickly understand the background, clarify the direction, and develop an effective promotion strategy is a key skill that every product manager needs to master. This article will provide you with a detailed guide to help you take on a new project more calmly.
Recently, when communicating with the surrounding products, the word change is often mentioned, and I believe that every product manager who has worked for many years has experienced change actively or passively, such as going to a new business or taking on a new project within the company.
As an old product who has worked for ten years, I adjusted the field from C to B in 17 to 18 years, took over 3 business breakthrough projects in 18 years, changed new businesses in 19 years, changed industries in 21 years, came to the startup company in 22 years, and from the 5th year of my career, there will be a big change almost every year, so I want to share the summary of my past experience with product people in need, so that I can be more calm when taking over new projects, improve the probability of success, and truly “embrace” the changes.
Go through the facts
Seeking truth from facts is a phrase that everyone often hears. But the hardest thing to do in the first two weeks of taking on a new project or coming to a new business is gathering information and understanding the context. So which facts you must read, I suggest you can devote 80% of your energy to figuring out three questions:
1. Strategic positioning: Why do you do it?
If it is a new business, it depends on the strategic positioning of the entire company and group at the beginning, whether it is a drainage product or a profitable product; Whether to verify a certain strategic hypothesis or to fight fiercely with competitors. If it is a project, it depends on what the strategic goals of the business behind the project are this year, and what role it plays in this strategic path. To know the answer to this question, you need to have enough channels to understand the information, and you also need to be patient in the process of doing it, thinking while watching, and finding the answer. Once the answer is found, there is the strongest logical fulcrum in product selection and operation strategy.
To achieve these three challenges, product managers will only continue to appreciate
Good product managers are very scarce, and product managers who understand users, business, and data are still in demand when they go out of the Internet. On the contrary, if you only do simple communication, inefficient execution, and shallow thinking, I am afraid that you will not be able to go through the torrent of the next 3-5 years.
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Channels that will help you get answers: strategic planning/project KO materials; project/business number one and organizational form;Your +1/+2 Leader; +1 Leader for business/operation/technical interfaces;Financial BP
2. User targeting: Who am I solving a problem with?
In the process of taking over the project, find out who your users are, this matter is related to the object of your project/product/business to serve, it may be a direct user of the product, it may be an object of a certain link in the industrial chain, it may be a KA customer of the company, or it may be other business line departments of the company. It is important to be clear that you have a problem with everyone within the scope of the project’s influence, who has pain points, who is a supporter, and who is a neutral.
Channels that are conducive to your answers: user research/industry research materials; product/operation/business/technical interface person;Personal research;
3. Result Positioning: How to define success
Generally speaking, taking over a new project will have clear success goals and time periods, which may be GMV, user volume, commercial revenue, or 0 to 1 scenario landing. If it is a vague goal, then how to define success is yoursThe first two weeks of taking over the project were the most important thing.Maintain constant communication with the person directly responsible for this matter.Define his positioning for your scope of work, goals, results, timeline, and resource support.
Channels that help you get answers:Direct project leader.There may be a lot of noise in the process of collecting information, what must be paid attention to?Ignore all gossip and only believe what you see and feel.
Make inferences from facts and make trade-offs from inferences
When you collect the above three types of information from various channels, the next most important thing is to see the role positioning of each link of the entire project based on these facts:Who they are, what they want, what they will give, and what is the window of time they give you.
It is recommended that you dedicate a large chunk of the day or a weekend to find your inferences from these facts, based on the inferences you draw from the facts, that is, what kind of reaction they will do when you do something. Through this process of deduction and game, find the best path in the process of landing your project: that is, solve the _____ problems first, and then get more _____, so that you can _____.
If you don’t know how to start,It is recommended to start with the needs of each role, deduce three steps, and then evaluate the project risk and cost to find the lowest risk and cost-controllable path to advance.From the inference of this path, you can prepare a product plan for implementation, and use the ___ function to solve the ____ problem of the core user in _____ scenario.
If there is no ideal answer, then I recommend doing deterministic needs first to buy time, and gather more information in the process to help you make inferences.
The sooner you get the critical path, the easier it is to make trade-offs and help you focus
Hypothesis-practice-verification, hypothesis-practice-verification,…
The next step is the product landing, this process does not have much time cycle, the important thing is to review in stages, manage expectations up and down, and celebrate every small milestone. Here are some small considerations:
- Hypothesis: You can use Mr. Yu’s user value formula to clarify what the old experience is, what new experience you want to give to users, and what replacement costs users need to pay. If some new values are not high, they can be discarded; If the replacement cost is too high (learning cost), it can extend some value points to the old experience or directly put it into future planning. Doing so can help you eliminate some useless functional points.
- Practice: Manage project resources and expectations of all parties, and fast implementation is more important than perfect design
- Verification: Timely review and assumptions to calibrate cognition.
The above three steps are suitable for taking over new business and new projects, as well as for iterative design of small product solutions. If you are often at a loss, you might as well try the above method,From knowledge to action, from action to habit, from habit to experience。
