Product Manager and Technical Manager

  It has been more than 3 months since the last diary. Today, I feel that I have reached a stage and I want to write something. During this period, I completed 2 product projects. What I want to talk about most is some understanding of the roles of product managers and technical managers.
  I am a technical manager as well as a product manager. After several years of polishing, the products made are much more reliable than before. The main cash cow business currently operated by the company is the one that I lead the design and development of with these two roles. The two projects I just completed are basically realized. the expected target effect. A situation like mine is very common in many small-scale companies. Technology is often the lead, and the product manager's work is done together. However, without the concept of these two roles, it is often difficult to make products. successful. I will give an example of myself. Before I succeeded in the current product, I also did several product projects with a long cycle, but all failed without exception. A big reason is that there is no product manager to help you do it. Product positioning and judgment, I do not have some of the most basic abilities of a product manager.
  As a product manager, first of all, you must research the market in an all-round way and grasp the market direction. I have previously made a B2B marketing product based on PC-side SEO. The development cycle was very long. It took nearly 4 months before and after. Although the effect of the product was not very good, it was not bad, but it was very good after its launch. It failed, and after a period of upgrade and optimization, there was no improvement. If I had a little product thinking at the time, I would not have made this product at all. At that time, smartphones were already very popular, and the mobile Internet gradually began to replace the PC Internet. APPs were flying all over the sky, and it was also in the early stage of the outbreak of micro-businesses. As a result, we were still making PC products, and the big market direction was wrong. No matter how good it is, it will definitely be in vain. Therefore, no matter how busy I am now, I will try my best to take time every day to watch some technology news, learn about some outlet projects, and grasp the market trend. The products I make in the future must be in line with the current market. Definitely not going back to do it.
  A product manager should also have a clear positioning of the product, do a good job in the core functions and requirements, and do not blindly add. Although the company's current product is very successful, it has also taken a lot of detours. Technical people like to build products with added functions, because we often think that the more functions a product has, the more powerful it will be, and the more successful the product will naturally be. But in fact, it is not a direct relationship, it is often an inverse relationship. The more functions you do, the more energy you will naturally disperse. In the end, it is likely to be the main core functions and needs, and we have not achieved the ultimate. Our product is a social media platform. At the beginning, my positioning was to use a variety of social APPs, such as WeChat, QQ, Momo and other diversified functions to PK with the products on the market. The idea is very good, but it is not successful in practice. I often support one We need to spend a lot of time to support the new socialization software, so in the end we support it, but the core WeChat effect is not very good.
  A very important point for a product manager is that the product must have a little innovation, even a little micro-innovation. When you make a product, if there is already a very successful product on the market, it is difficult to achieve success if you blindly imitate and plagiarize. For example, Weibo was already very successful in the market at that time. Tencent did Tencent Weibo, but it couldn’t do Sina, so it achieved great success in WeChat. But it doesn't mean that with WeChat, social networking is completely impossible. Momo avoided WeChat's acquaintance social circle and did social networking with strangers, and later achieved great success. Speaking of our current product, when we first started to make it, we also blindly imitated the products on the market. At that time, the micro-business market was very popular, so the stand-alone products that entered the market in the early days were almost sold for denitrification. At that time, there was a stand-alone WeChat product on the market called Qianmaitong, which is now Yunchuangtong. So I went to watch the product video and did a complete imitation. After doing it for about half a year, no matter how to optimize and improve, even in the end, with the improvement of development technology, the products made are far better than them, such as switching accounts in many WeChat products, queuing scheduled tasks, and delaying tasks. We first developed other functions at the time, but the product just couldn't do it. At that time, I simply stopped to think about the reason. One of the reasons is very intuitive. The WeChat-based stand-alone product market is very saturated. No matter what I do, it will be so tepid. All kinds of WeChat products, and finally found a product that is very interesting, which is the prototype of cloud control. At that time, there were almost no such products on the WeChat market. So it was immediately designed and implemented, and the final product was finally successful. To make a successful product, you must either find a blank market or be able to make some innovative products.
  In addition, the product must be able to solve the pain points of users. For example, a product project that has just been completed, although it has not been launched yet, and it is not sure that it will be successful, it has really solved the problem of high user costs and capital investment risks. According to our current product, Once the control of WeChat is strengthened, the cost of input will be difficult to produce output, but now the cost of users has been reduced by more than 10 times, and a product that is currently being made is even lower, but the effect has not been greatly discounted. , even if this happens in the future, users can step by step within a certain cost range, and expand the volume one by one after returning to the original batch. Although our existing products are very successful, we have found that many users who don’t know much about this market are worried about the cost. They are often reluctant to talk about the cost of hardware. If the cost can be greatly reduced Lower, I believe there will be more and more intentional users willing to try.
  Let's talk about the role of technical manager. I myself started out as a technical manager, and then gradually acquired some product manager capabilities during the development process, and now I have become a product director. In fact, I still don’t have the ability of some product managers, such as product design ability, how to make the experience better, the page will look better, and I still have a lot of deficiencies in these skills.
  For a technical manager, the most basic thing is to be able to do structural design and disassembly of requirements. For example, for a very complex product, you need to be able to understand its requirements, do data structure, do design architecture and disassemble functional modules, so that Development members have a clear and detailed list of development tasks. When I was in charge of the project at the beginning, I almost didn’t do these things. After I understood the requirements, I explained it to the members, and then said the division of labor, and I started to do it directly. As a result, when they are doing it, they find that what some members have been doing for a long time is not what they expected at all, and there are also cases where half of it is done and the method is wrong, so they change the past and do it again. Now, when I make products, I will spend at least a week to do these things. If there are similar products on the market, I will also experience and summarize some functional requirements and designs. In this way, the later changes are small, and the development cycle will actually be faster.
  In addition, it is the feasibility and feasibility study of the scheme you designed. Feasibility requires you to have a certain understanding and judgment of various development technologies of product development. For example, the product we are currently making is divided into 3 aspects: APP client, XP client and management backend. Then you need to understand the technical principles of each end, and you need to have a clear judgment on what can be done and what cannot be done. , such as these 3 pieces, except for the low-level XP client, I don’t have deep development capabilities. I am very familiar with the APP and the backend, and have development experience in actual project coding, so that when you design functional requirements, your You can make judgments clearly in your mind, and you can also design some functions reasonably. These abilities are especially important when communicating with product managers. Product managers often need to make compromises and modifications based on the feasibility of feedback from technical managers. . Implementability means that, for example, if you have designed a bunch of popular technical solutions, but most of the development members do not understand and master them, then this technical solution cannot be used no matter how good it is.
  There is also a very important point, technical managers need to have the ability to solve bottleneck problems. Although technical managers generally do not do specific coding development work, as I am now, but encounter bottlenecks and incurable problems, you still need to solve them. It is a problem of automatic shutdown. The developers have been working on it for a long time and can't solve it. They can only spend time debugging and optimizing themselves. When encountering other similar thorny problems, they can only stay up all night to solve them.
  It is actually very difficult to do well in two roles at the same time, but it is not easy to do well in one of the roles. Up to now, it is sometimes difficult for me to be fully competent in the current two roles at the same time, but in a small-scale company , is unavoidable. If you have two roles at the same time, after-sales and testing work are also two important aspects. Often these tasks will be assigned to development employees part-time. However, if the product and company achieve a certain scale, development work When the load is relatively large, this approach is very undesirable. These tasks are often simple and trivial. If these things are arranged on the developers, it will undoubtedly greatly reduce their work efficiency. However, as a technical or product manager, you must be fully involved in the test during the test, and you must also do it yourself in the initial stage of the product after the sale. For a product that has just been completed, after the product is basically developed, I stare at the test every day to make the data effect. Analysis seems to be a very basic thing, but you must do it yourself at this stage. A good result is often achieved by many factors. After testing it yourself, it is easier to know where the problem is and how to solve it. In addition, during the initial sales of our existing product, I will take the trouble to answer every question from users. I often chat with many users throughout the day to solve problems, but when the product reaches a certain stage, don't spend any more energy on doing this. Things have happened, and more should be placed on the data of the product and the future development direction. Large companies have many divisions, all of which have their reasons and reasons. Although we cannot compare, we must have this way of thinking about making products, and gradually make product development scientific and reasonable. If there is only one way, technology-led products must not be made in accordance with technical thinking. Such products are often built behind closed doors and do not meet the needs of users, and it is often difficult to achieve success when they are made. The simplest The method is to communicate with users more and find more similar products on the market to do research. If the product category is the leading product, it must communicate more with the development technology, and make modifications or even compromise according to the feasibility of the feedback from the developers.
  In short, whether it is a product or a business, whether it is a success or a failure, you need to make more summaries. You must not think that the success of a product is a matter of luck, and the failure of a product is due to your uneven luck and the ability of people in all aspects. All have gone up, and failure must be temporary. Although the competition in the market is about products, the final competition is still the ability of people.