Learn Tencent's product management approach

Recently, I read some articles about Tencent's product management system, both false and real. I happen to have a colleague who used to work at Tencent and can provide first-hand information. So this afternoon, we held a one-hour meeting to discuss Tencent's management, and found that there are a few points that were handled well.

1. Set up a quality monitoring team composed of highly experienced and high-level product personnel, giving them great powers to monitor and standardize all product projects. And use KPI to constrain product projects to comply with these specifications. In order not to engage in dogmatism, many specifications are confirmed by the project manager and the team at the beginning of the project. They are not necessarily assigned rigidly. Once confirmed, they are strictly monitored. Make sure that good practices don't become empty slogans.

2. Each product has an open feedback forum, highlighting the external entrance, actively soliciting user opinions, and responding to "every piece" of valuable feedback in an internal shift manner, requiring a "person-to-person, face-to-face" communication attitude. Answer, prohibit mechanical question and answer. The company's top management (including Xiao Ma) regularly inspects each product forum, and once they find that they do not respond to users seriously, they will immediately reprimand them. Ensure that product personnel maintain close contact with users for a long time.

3. Each product has an internal communication platform, which is divided into two parts, one is similar to a message board, where the product supervisor publishes the progress and dynamics of the project; the other is a forum, which is open to everyone in the company and accepts feedback. A very active atmosphere has been formed within Tencent, and it is even proud of the popularity of the platform (at least your supervisor will like this). The effect of brainstorming and internal supervision.

4. Set up the position of product architect. A few technical elites are responsible for the system architecture construction of all projects, and only build the architecture to ensure the underlying rationality of each project.

5. Implement the project summary system. After each version is launched, the corresponding planning-development-tester will hold a meeting, and everyone will summarize the experience and mistakes in this version process, and how to improve it, especially Pay attention to improving the cooperation process of the three parties. Use an institutional approach to force introspection and force cross-functional communication. After several versions, the project efficiency will be significantly improved.

6. The implementation of the grayscale release policy is very thorough. A version will undergo several levels of internal testing, and then gradually upgrade it to external users. After constantly correcting problems, it will finally be released on a large scale. Make sure to catch the problem early and the affected user surface is as small as possible. At the same time, Tencent's extremely active internal communication atmosphere can also allow products to get more professional feedback during internal testing.

7. It has a powerful data mining function backed by the client. It is more complicated to describe in detail. In short, it is very powerful and the data is astonishingly detailed. The status of the data mining sector is also quite high. I have said before that "statistics are too thin to derive reliable results", but in the face of Tencent's data mining capabilities, I am afraid that this sentence must be changed.

8. Set up a risk management mechanism for new people and new projects, such as 3 old programmers with 1 new programmer, completely separate technical management and specific development work, carry out code reading every week, and take extraordinarily strict new products. Testing arrangements, etc., so that the technical damage from inexperience is minimized.

There are other things that are popular, some idealized and unreliable things, so I won't talk about them. What makes me sigh and admire is the above eight points. It's not that I admire Tencent's ability to do these eight things - I can think of all the ideas, and I also have my own set of skills for project management team building. However, Tencent has implemented the professional principles of product management from the company level and from the level of the top leaders. It uses a variety of monitoring methods to avoid its empty guns, and makes product management institutionalized and systematic, and good experience is internal. When it is circulated, it becomes a positive binding force, bringing the joint force of the entire large product team, rather than allowing the project managers to struggle individually. Ma Huateng led a large number of product executives from top to bottom, persistently promoted the standardization of the product-based management system, and continuously innovated and optimized this system, so that the entire company was integrated into the "product gene", and finally achieved "Tencent of Products".