Make products, you can't live in your own world

http://content.businessvalue.com.cn/post/14222.html
If you make products, you can't live in your own world.
Business Value Posted on September 12, 2013 | Filed in Value Digest
| Kingsoft CEO Fu Sheng



Why Tesla was born in Silicon Valley instead of Detroit? In fact, this is a clash of two cultures. All the car manufacturers have not done a car like this before, why can Tesla? Because the best carmakers are all concentrated in the traditional auto industry. In fact, this is the same as when Xiaomi made mobile phones. Everyone thinks that Xiaomi does not understand mobile phones, but the essence of the Internet is to pursue a single point of extremes, and Xiaomi has done it. As evidenced by the recent surge in Tesla stock, I feel it will soon outpace many traditional automakers. Because it is using a different way of thinking to make cars, not electric cars.

Making a car is the same as making an Internet product. The popularity of Tesla has indeed brought me a lot of inspiration, and I will briefly talk about it:

the first point is to think over the real needs of users. I used to be fascinated by a concept of my own when I was making products. I felt like I was going to change the world, and I danced every time I talked about a concept. But now I often ask myself or others: Do users really need it? What are the core needs of this concept itself for users?

In this impetuous age, we are easily moved by a concept. Do people really think that Tesla's success is because it's an electric car? Not really. To be precise, it's a super cool, supercar, practical, stylish and cheap, or at least not expensive. Therefore, it is very important to really understand the needs of users, and users must not pay for a so-called "electric" concept.

Tesla believes that demand is divided into three levels: high-end demand, mid-end demand and low-end demand. He believes that the car is to meet the high-end demand at the beginning, find the group of people who like the car the most, and then form the whole user communication. I have expressed this view on many occasions. In my opinion, all products are designed for a niche in the beginning. If you want to build a car that everyone likes, it will be doomed; if you want to build a mobile phone that everyone likes, it will be doomed, and if you want to do a browser that everyone likes, it will also be doomed.

Therefore, in the beginning, it was mainly to create the ultimate reputation for niche high-end users, which has been confirmed in many points. Including our cheetah browser is very cool, why the first one chooses black skin, there is no public software that uses black skin before. Because I think the first stage is called word-of-mouth communication for high-end users, and then it reaches the mid-end, which becomes radiation communication, and then penetrates into traditional industries. When they really start to think about Tesla, It has already started spreading to users of the general public. Therefore, Tesla's initial positioning was very accurate, just to make a super cool car comparable to a Ferrari sports car.

Second, the user experience is more important than the concept. That is to say, you have to rely on technology to bring users experience advantages, not concepts. For example, electric is a concept, but electric cars bring you the trouble of charging everywhere, so the first thing Tesla has to solve is the problem of charging.

I remember that the US voltage is 110 volts, which is lower than ours, how to charge at this low voltage? They had the audacity to make the entire baseplate into a battery, something almost no EV has done before. However, everyone thinks that Tesla's battery is very good, and it brings users a convenient and extreme experience in details.

Therefore, no matter how strong the technology is, it is necessary to know that the application of technology is the core. Just like every time a technical colleague tells me how strong the code is, I will repeatedly ask whether it is useful to users, and your technical code is stronger. , If the user has no experience, it is actually a thing that suffocates in his mind.

Of course, some people say we need to pursue innovation, and yes, that's true. I remember Joe Gang said: Innovation is 1% innovation plus 99% execution. We used to think that innovation is an art work, but later found out that it is actually a work of execution.

Therefore, making a product must have a positioning that meets the needs of users, rather than a certain concept in your mind. Moreover, sometimes what we think of as a requirement may be, in essence, a pseudo-requirement. It is definitely a very complicated process to find out the real needs of users.

In the past, when I trained product managers, one of the important chapters was how to ensure that you can really understand the needs of users. You know, all great ideas don't come to mind suddenly in the bathtub. That kind of inspiration depends on accumulation. If you reach enough users, think deeply enough, keep thinking and exploring, you have a chance to make a good decision one day.

In addition to contacting users, how you use it yourself is also very important. If you don't use it hard, you can hardly say that this thing is really a user requirement. There is a saying in Microsoft development that "eat your own shit", in fact, it is even more so when making products.

Of course, there are also some principles to adhere to, that is, you can't simply become a collector of user opinions, if you just become a user's vote choice, it is too simple. We still need to continue to think deeply about the product, and make some differences in some seemingly ordinary points, but this difference must be achieved by "single-point entry" rather than "multiple". The key is how to go deeper, follow the user's behavior, how to combine the user's real behavior with its scene, turn it into a perceptual software, and establish a real competitive barrier in the market.

In general, we have to constantly challenge ourselves, ask ourselves, and keep thinking about where we are wrong. We can’t be the “fifth monkey” that I often say. Do things that others take for granted and numb to be extraordinary.