Birth, old age, sickness and death of needs
source of demand
According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, it can be divided into five levels, from low to high, namely: physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs. The reason why people have needs is because there is a "gap between ideals and reality" in life, and naturally, human beings will have the desire to "reduce or even eliminate this gap". Therefore, what a product manager needs to do is to make a product that meets the needs of users.
In this process, product managers should be user-centric when making product meetings, choose their own user groups, and meet their needs. But people's needs are endless, and different users have different desires. Therefore, in the face of demand, don’t be greedy. Product managers only need to choose to meet a part of the user group. If they want to meet the needs of all users, it will be a disaster, and the final product will be different. not satisfied.
Otherwise, you will be consumed by trivial things all day, and you will definitely feel frustrated after a long time. To solve these problems, you must grasp the source of the problems. This version can’t be controlled, so the next version should be done in advance. Prepare, strictly control requirements, and maximize filtering of requirements that are not related to core functions.
whose needs are addressed
It can be seen from the above analysis that users are the source of demand. By researching needs, you can enhance your understanding of users. Understanding users is one of the important qualities of a product manager. Just like the two movies we are familiar with, the box office of "The Grandmaster" is only 280 million, while the box office of "Thailand" is 1.27 billion. The difference between them reflects the scene of Jingdong's 10,000 white-collar workers and 110,000 blue-collar workers. Maybe we still reminisce about the beautiful scene of two martial arts masters punching under the shady scene on the snowflake platform and the whistle of the train in "The Grand Master", but others may want to see "Thai Embarrassment" The funny picture of cotton wool flying all over the sky, chickens flying and dogs jumping, just for laughing. This is the difference in user needs. Therefore, when making products, we must understand whether we want 280 million intellectuals or 1.28 billion ordinary people.
demand collection
Needs are not spoken, nor seen, nor are they thought of. The real user needs require the four-dimensional combination of "seeing", "listening", "speaking" and "doing".
- "View": observe how users do, how to choose products, and how to use products;
- "Listening": listen to the user's thinking process when they choose or use the product, what they think;
- "Said": user interviews and questionnaires, user interviews are a qualitative understanding of users' needs, focusing on why, not how. In the process of user interviews, to avoid users being too strong or us being too strong and biased, we only need to listen to what users say, but do not need to follow them. Often what users say is not necessarily a direct demand, or even a self-contradictory explanation. What we need is to explore the why. After all, the sample of user interviews is limited and the results are relatively open, so we need a lot of questionnaire survey data to quantitatively demonstrate the needs of users.
- "Do": conduct data analysis, discover data characteristics, make directional assumptions about the product, and then use the data to explain, and finally, through telephone surveys or door-to-door visits, users can revise their interpretations to guide the development of the product direction.
Demand realization [size=small] Demand can be first-hand demand obtained directly from users, or second-hand demand obtained from sales, operations, and bosses. In order to meet the needs of users, there are usually three ways:
- Change the status quo: The most common and stupid way to develop a product;
- Reduce ideals: "Ugly talk in the front", compare and analyze inferior products, and improve the balance of users.
- Shifting needs: Find stronger needs to show to users, so that they don’t have to be entangled in their original needs.
After you have obtained the needs of users, this is the first step of the Great Wall. You need to transform the needs. Usually, you will use demand cards to brainstorm and organize user needs into a product demand list. Usually, there is a many-to-many relationship between user needs and product needs. In the process of conversion, unreliable user needs need to be filtered out. After that, you need to determine the basic attributes, analyze the business value, first evaluate the difficulty of implementation, and calculate the cost-effectiveness and a series of evaluations, that is, the detection of demand DNA.
In the actual project, it is possible that you only need to participate in so many steps of the requirement. You may need to go to the development evaluation and start the development when you get the requirement. Therefore, in actual work, the requirements are mainly circulated and realized through the following steps. For a back-end product manager, your needs may be external needs put forward by front-end product managers or operations, or internal needs, including the needs of the product itself for development; what data the product thinks needs to be displayed on the front-end, and A requirement raised; a requirement raised by R&D that there is a better processing logic. But no matter what kind of demand, it is mainly divided into the following states:
- To be discussed: the initial state of the list entered by the submitter;
- In demand: After the business value is determined, enter the demand, continue to "initially evaluate the workload", "calculate cost performance", and even package the demand into BRD;
- Rejection: The demand has no value to the commercial purpose of the product for a long time, and it is best to explain the reason for rejection in the remarks;
- Suspend: If it is valuable but not done now, it is usually necessary to indicate the conditions for restarting, such as "discuss it after 3 months";
- Under Development: For the requirements passed at the product meeting, the loading will become "under development";
- Published: When the project is published, the status of the requirement changes.
demand process
In actual work, the general product requirements are submitted to the product after the BRD has been done in operation. After the product receives the requirements, what needs to be done is to conduct demand analysis, data demonstration, internal demand review, and development testing for public review, etc. . If it really cannot be done, it may be postponed, and the demand will be restarted when the time is ripe.
Requirements realization process
最后，作为产品经理，永远需要明白的一件事就是：不要奢望所有人都能理解你的想法，包括老板。因为不管一个产品公司战略规划和布局是什么，它依赖的一个核心价值还是在于用户的需求动机，所以当我们没办法说服领导或者其他部门人员去同意我们的方案时，最好早一点把用户研究和用户测试的机制加入到产品开发当中来。期间需要有很多方法来尽可能的获取到用户数据。但是做出来的产品才是接地气的满足用户需求的产品。