In today’s increasingly competitive workplace, people with independent thinking, self-motivation and empathy are often more likely to stand out. This article analyzes the experience of WeChat’s “face-to-face” mock interview and delves into the importance of these three traits for personal career development.
On the evening of April 28, the WeChat “face-to-face” mock interview was launched, and I also looked at the interview experience analysis of the product position after a long time. After reading it, I have a feeling that the light of the right path of the product has never been extinguished!I think the most worthwhile thing about this interview is that the product people valued by WeChat need to have three characteristics: independent thinking, self-motivation, and empathy.
Indeed, I agree with it, take a closer look, people with these three characteristics, let alone products, will succeed in whatever they do.
01 Think independently and distinguish between true and false needs
The whole interview is divided into three parts, namely 1v1 interviews with interviewers and candidates for two product positions and one front-end technical position. The interview process is also the same as the offline real process, the candidate introduces himself, the interviewer asks questions, the candidate answers, and the final QA link, and there is also a summary of the interviewer after the interview. I think several candidates are very courageous and deserve applause for participating in this open interview. I would like to talk about the interviewer’s summary, which I think is the most worth thinking about.
After the first interview, interviewer Regis summarized two key points for the ability that product managers need to have——Independent thinking and self-motivation. These two characteristics mean that product managers need to develop their own understanding of the problem they are facing and the goal of the problem, and then spontaneously find the answer and complete independent verification.
After 10 years of interaction design, why did I transfer to product manager?
After the real job transfer, I found that many jobs were still beyond my imagination. The work of a product manager is indeed more complicated. Theoretically, the work of a product manager includes all aspects of the product, from market research, user research, data analysis…
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Taking the question of the first interview as an example, the candidate introduced the sports drink project she was responsible for, and the pain point she discovered was that “sports drinks are not easy to carry”, so she suggested changing the drink to gummies, which is not only easy to carry, but also can play a role in quickly replenishing sugar after exercise. Regis’ question at the time was, what is the core difference between this gummy and a sports drink, and why should others choose your gummy instead of the drink?I think behind this question is to confirm with the candidate whether “sports drinks are not easy to carry” is a real pain point and a real problem, not a need imagined or created by the product manager.
So let’s break it down little by little. There are two keywords in this pain point description – “sports drink” and “portable”. Sports drinks are generally drunk after high-intensity, prolonged exercise to help quickly replenish water, electrolytes and sugar. If it is only medium and low intensity exercise, there is generally no need to drink sports drinks, drinking water is enough, after all, sports drinks are relatively high in sugar, and drinking them is equivalent to the ineffectiveness of this exercise, and sweating in vain. From this definition, the target group of sports drinks has been narrowed down by a large circle, and it is not universal.
Let’s take a look at “portability”, portable means that you may need to carry it on your body for a long time, generally portable things are light in weight and small in size, so do sports drinks need to be portable? From the perspective of common sports scenes, gyms, sports team classes, ball games, dance, hiking, running, except for walking and running, it seems that there is no need to carry sports drinks on your back, as long as you put them aside, it is enough to drink them during rest. Looking at it this way, it has narrowed down from the perspective of applicable scenarios, and it also does not have universalization. Hiking and running are generally long and long-distance, and it is true that you have to carry some supplements on your body to facilitate timely replenishment of water, salt and sugar in the middle to ensure physical function. There is no shortage of small and portable sports supplements such as salt pills, protein bars, and energy gels on the market, so why are there no gummies made of sports drinks? Is this blue ocean not discovered yet?
Obviously not. Business opportunities are never short of an eye for discovery. Then we have to look back and think about whether the absence of such a product means that there is no such demand in the first place.
We have just disassembled two keywords, and we can see that the target group and applicable scenarios are very narrow, proving that the demand itself is very niche. You may wonder, niche demand does not mean there is none, then there is still this demand, right?
Okay, then let’s assume that there is still demand, let’s dismantle another layer. According to the national standard GB 10789-2015 “General Principles for Beverages”, the standard definition of beverages is: products that have been quantitatively packaged, are for direct drinking or mixed with water, and the ethanol content (mass fraction) does not exceed 0.5%. Translated, it is something that people can drink directly, the main ingredient is water, which can replenish water after drinking. In other words, everyone buys drinks to drink, in order to replenish water, this is people’s actual needs. Then let’s take a look, let’s say that sports drinks are made into gummies, do the gummies still have moisture? Can it still meet people’s need to hydrate? Obviously not, maybe you will be thirstier after eating sugar, and you have to buy water to drink, so why not just buy sports drinks? There is both water and sugar.
Disassembled to the second layer, it can basically be judged that “sports drinks are inconvenient to carry” is a pseudo-pain point, people don’t need sports drinks to be portable, it is enough to buy a bottle before exercise and drink it at any time. The solution designed based on this pseudo-pain point, sports drink gummies, is naturally not a blue ocean waiting to be tapped, but a “beautiful idea” that does not exist in the first place. If there is no demand, it means that there is no differentiation, and such products are naturally not competitive, and people will not pay for them.
I think that if the pain points are scrutinized in the early stage of this project, whether this is a real requirement or a false requirement, and verify your own hypothesis through analysis, you will probably be able to complete the project and spend time solving other real pain points and real problems.
Regis also summed up the role of a product manager in a nutshell – a product manager is someone who can find real problems and solve them with clever solutions.
It is true that such a person can shine in any position, not just limited to product positions.
02 Self-drive and break the inertia of thinking
Regis also mentions “self-drive”, emphasizing spontaneity to find solutions to problems.Spontaneity means to “resist inertia”, and the word inertia has probably been with us for a long time.
When we were young, school taught us to be diligent, not to be lazy and procrastinating in learning, especially in winter and summer, homework should not be delayed until the last moment before starting to “write hard”. When we grow up, we must always maintain our learning ability in order to create greater value for society. It seems like every moment we are being asked to “step out of our comfort zone”. But this kind of request, I don’t think it’s spontaneous, it’s likely that you don’t agree with this kind of “being asked” from the bottom of your heart, it’s someone else asking me to do it, not wanting to do it yourself.
The inertia I understand is not just the appearance of procrastination, this is simply laziness, behavioral laziness. I think what is more difficult to change is the laziness of thinking – the inertia of thinking.Thinking inertia will make you unwilling to even think hard when facing problems, unwilling to find solutions to problems, let the problem be there, or maintain the status quo, anyway, if you don’t change, you won’t make mistakes. Or divide the boundaries of responsibilities extremely clearly, anyway, this is not my problem, that is not my problem, it is about the same as not having a problem I want to solve, purely be an “information transfer station”, and the information will be over as soon as it is forwarded.
For example, what is the difference between behavioral laziness and thinking laziness? An ideal way of cooperation should be that the full-time employees sort out the business needs and solutions, and reach a consensus with all relevant parties, and then hand them over to the supplier to assist in refining the details of the documents. But the daily work I have seen in many full-time positions is that when I receive a task from the leader, I will send it to the supplier, let the supplier come up with a plan, and then take the plan and talk about it according to the gourd, and I don’t care about the rest.
This kind of behavioral laziness.
The result of this kind of laziness is usually that the supplier “strangles the back of fate”, and the problem to be solved and the corresponding plan, ask the main position is to ask three questions, or just throw the work everywhere, not only the business is not solved, but also a large number of colleagues are dragged “into the water” to deal with him.
Thinking laziness is deeper and not necessarily as easy to identify on the surface. For another example, the product management optimization project mentioned in the article “Product 315 Rule” encountered some tricky situations during the current research stage. The company’s business is indeed relatively complex, sometimes the time to market for goods is urgent, and many processes have not been standardized, often through manual methods of stacking and piecing together, stunned to get the goods on the shelves and sell them first, supporting the business first. Over time, people in this chain will feel that there is a manual operation here, and another system configuration is needed there, anyway, the last time the goods can be put on the shelves, this time they can only maintain the same way to operate, otherwise they don’t know what unknown risks they will encounter that will cause the goods to be unable to be put on the shelves.
When I asked, “Why do you need to do this?” The reply I got was basically “I don’t know, that’s what I did before.”
When I asked again, “This field is not used in several systems, and the service service has been stopped, can I no longer enter it?” The reply received was basically “uncertain, but it is recommended to keep it”.
I found that no one will take the initiative to see whether there is room for optimization in this process design, whether the current process is reasonable, and what kind of process is efficient. Everyone adheres to the mentality of “the enemy does not move, I don’t move”, unchanged is the most stable, even if you keep investing manpower, it doesn’t matter if you work overtime, anyway, no matter how long the chain is, there will always be a time, and it will always end, so there is no need to change, and there is no need to find better solutions and processes.
This kind of laziness in thinking.
The result of this laziness is that the process becomes more and more lengthy, more and more manpower is invested, and the efficiency is getting lower and lower, and the ability to respond flexibly to changes is gradually lost, because once variables appear, the link is likely to collapse.
The so-called self-drive is nothing more than when you face a problem, you will take the initiative to think and find a suitable solution.It is not “asked”, nor “listening to others”, nor “others do this, so I do it too”, it is the inner desire to solve the problem, rather than putting the problem there to rot.
As a product person, we will face countless problems from users, if we do not spontaneously find suitable solutions, then we will only bring endless disappointment to users, and users will naturally not stay and continue to use the products we designed.
03 Empathy allows us to better understand what the other person wants
Finally, I would like to talk about empathy. As mentioned in the previous article “Transformation from Nutritionist to Product Manager”, empathy is to be able to empathize with each other, understand the other person’s feelings, and look at the problem from the other person’s perspective.
To give a simple example, the main user group of the e-commerce platform I am responsible for is the elderly, so I can’t design the shopping link from the perspective of my daily shopping, and add a lot of bells and whistles or click jumps, resulting in elderly users not even knowing where to click next, and it is difficult to place an order.Empathy helps us better judge what solutions are appropriate for current problems.This should be easy for students who have done front-end products to resonate with.
However, what I want to share more this time is that empathy can help us reach consensus with external departments faster and more happily, and help the program continue to move forward.A very impressive communication was to discuss the issue of automatic product information capture with finance.
The core of the solution I designed is that when the business extends to different sales channels, the corresponding extended SKU information is automatically copied to ensure the consistency of product data, including financial pricing information. This treatment solution can effectively solve the problem that each SKU must be manually entered once for each extended SKU, and can also avoid manual entry errors and repeated modifications. However, after several meetings, no consensus could be reached with the finances of one of the entry parties. In the general direction, they recognize it, including that they also have an ongoing digitalization project in finance, and they also want to solve the problem of duplicate entry. I was very puzzled at the time, since everyone is optimizing in the same direction, why do they always talk inappropriately?
I began to speculate if there were still some ideas I didn’t understand from a financial point of view, and I was only immersed in introducing myself. Sure enough, when I chatted with the financial bill again, I found that the financial system digitization project they mentioned had actually entered the final link – the user acceptance test stage, which was about to be launched, and my project was only launched in the future. Later, I explained the details, including the scope of products to be solved and the timeline for progress, to ensure that their project could be launched as scheduled, and to adjust the system data flow when the subsequent product project was optimized. After understanding the financial concerns, we quickly reached a consensus to synchronize the system IT.
I often use this vignette to remind myself not to get caught up in thinking from my own perspective.If you don’t substitute the other person’s perspective to see what the bottom card point is and what your worries are, you are likely to be immersed in the emotion of “why does he not agree with my plan”, and then spend more effort trying to persuade the other party.
I often see situations where the two sides are at odds, you don’t agree with me, and I don’t accept you, and they start to quarrel emotionally, even personal attacks, and finally the cooperation breaks up, which is not only difficult but also fruitless. These senseless quarrels often result in a lack of empathy. If we can understand the other person and think about why he said this from the other person’s point of view, we can generally guess what he wants, and we can naturally give a suitable plan and reach a consensus with the other party.
After thinking about it so much, I found that there is no essential difference between polishing products and polishing myself.When we can really think independently and solve problems by ourselves, we can also communicate with various partners through empathy, or design more suitable product solutions based on empathy for end users, not only our products will be polished better and better, but we will also be polished better.
Diverging our thoughts a little more, isn’t it the same when it comes to our relationship with anyone?Whether it is a parent-child relationship, a partnership relationship, or a friendship with parents, if you can maintain the discovery of real problems and communicate frankly to find solutions to problems, many conflicts will be easily resolved, and even there will be fewer contradictions.
I hope these sharing can bring you a little bit of thinking, and I also hope that we and our products can be polished better and better~
