background

In daily software development, products will receive a lot of requirements, and need to evaluate the value of the requirements, so what should be done? How to evaluate it? Share a useful thinking rule: how to measure the "reliability" of a project/requirement, I hope it will be useful to you.

I learned this rule a long time ago, and it is currently being used a lot in my team. There are many miscellaneous essays on the Internet. This time I will sort out a special case and share it with you.

details

At the end of the year, I always encounter something like this:

- Now small bosses use a small book to keep accounts, which is too inconvenient. We will provide small and medium-sized enterprises with a financial management tool this year, so that they can help them manage their money. - Make an electronic fax for
customers Function, they can save a lot of fax fees and paper
- Let's create an open platform for customers to buy software services online, so that they can buy all the software services they need here
...

When we decide what to do, success or failure, 50% is already doomed.

So what is reliable?

It seems that you only know when you do it. Is there a way to improve the success rate?

Once, when Wei Zhe came to do mobile management, he asked 3+1 questions for each product line, which left a deep impression on me.

At that time, we were working on a management tool for Taobao sellers. One of the functions was to help Taobao sellers research market conditions, and then the problem came:

Wei: "How did you come up with this product?"
Me: "When we were in contact with sellers, we found that many people spent a lot of time learning about competitors and what is selling well in the market."

Wei: "How many sellers are there ? Do this? How often"
Me: "Most sellers do it several times a week"

Wei: "How do they now know about their competitors and what is selling in the market?"
Me: "They do it every day now Go to Taobao to search, find a seller who sells similar products well, and then look at the characteristics of his keyword settings, the price, how many sold, and what activities he has done. It takes several hours a week." Wei:

" How do they use your products?"
Me: "Using our products, on the one hand, they can see a certain baby for him, what are the similar products in the same industry, what is the price, and what is the sales volume. On the other hand, you can see which treasures sell best under a certain keyword under a certain category."

Wei: "That is to say, you are helping them save time? The time of small businesses is worthless, as is the case in China. The same is true in the United States."
Me: "..."

Wei: "Can they see these data on the Internet?"
Me: "Yes, but there are some statistics and analysis, such as the average price, how many people have higher prices than him, etc. He doesn't know."

Wei: "What will he do after he knows this information? What can he do?"
Me: "He can modify some keywords, modify the price, or change the promoted products. When doing a through train It can be more targeted."

Wei: "Then is our function linked to promotion, such as integrating with the through train? Just let him do the optimization of the through train?"
I was taken aback. This may be a direction: "Not yet, but it is indeed a good direction."

Wei: "After customers use your product, how will the website data react?"
Me: "Maybe the seller's search behavior will decrease, and the number of revisions will increase"
...

One month later, the product went live and attracted tens of thousands of paying customers within one month, but the retention rate of these customers was very low. Many people reported a problem: I have told me about these problems, and then what?

At this point, looking back at this conversation, there are a few surprising points:

1. In fact, Wei Zhe has never had any contact with our business, and maybe he has never had contact with Taobao's customers, but through these questions, he quickly extended several valuable questions, revealing the essence of the business. Such as: "Then how do they use your product?"
2. All the information is given by us, but there are many problems that we have not thought about before, and the conclusion is also that we have not thought of before.

So we think:

Whether this set of analysis ideas can be applied to any unfamiliar environment and business, let us learn more valuable information by asking the right questions, and then make a judgment.

Wei Zhe called this method of asking questions: "3+1" thinking rule

3: Where does the demand come from? Who are the target customers? How many people have such needs? Is the need urgent? What is their pain? What is the scene? (before/after using the product)
+1: What will be the performance on the website data after the solution?

The first three questions: can help us cut into the essence of the problem and trigger more thinking.

The last question: Let us think about what kind of results we want and how to measure them.

Question 1: Where does the demand come from and who are the target customers?

This question should be divided into two parts. Let’s talk about "Where does the demand come from" first . I personally feel that this is the most powerful question. It directly kills more than half of the unreliable demands: Is it what we want to do or what the customer wants? ?

We often find that many needs are what we want, or we think customers want . For example, "we make a financial management software, which can help small businesses manage all their money, and now their accounting is too confusing."

But when the product came out and we visited small businesses, most people didn’t think it was a problem: “We are such a small business, just get a notebook to keep notes on it”, “We have already hired a part-time accountant, she can Done."

There is actually a small episode in this project: the development of financial software is actually the strategic plan of the big boss. We often encounter such projects. The "direction of action" becomes the "plan of action".

For example, in this project, the boss wants a financial product, but when we implement it, it directly becomes a financial software, but maybe some kind of "financial service" is what the customer needs?

Let's talk about "who is the target customer ?" This is a cliché, but it is still very important.

The most common mistake we make is to generalize and expand the target customer group : Recently, we are working on a logistics recommendation project, which is to let Alibaba’s Chengxintong customers enjoy Debon/Xinbang logistics when they come online. The VIP price is cheaper than sending it by himself.

Who is the target customer here? "All companies that communicate with integrity" is of course the most correct answer, but it is useless and cannot solve the problem. The next step is to ask: "Who needs such a recommended logistics service the most?" Of course, it is the person who sends a lot of logistics in a year. What kind of characters flow more? Good business people. How to judge the business is good? People with a lot of website transactions/views. BINGO, we found that to do a good job in recommending logistics, it should be linked to transactions and browsing, and give priority to marketing and services to these people.

At this time, you can start to guide the practice, and a lot of related ideas start to pop up: whether to provide additional discounts to customers with a turnover above **? Do you provide targeted guidance to the customer's website after the transaction? Is the logistics route accurately recommended according to the location of the customer after the transaction? ...

You see, good questions lead to good ideas!

Of course, "people with good business" is not the only answer. It may also be "shipping heavy items and relatively large customers". Then the latter may be specific industries for precise marketing and services, such as the hardware industry.

The second question: How many people have such needs? Is the need urgent?

This is also a very good question. How many people have such a demand means the capacity of the market, and the degree of urgency means the value of solving the demand. Capacity + value = whether it makes sense to do it , the two are indispensable.

This is the case with the online store management tools we made before. Indeed, many people have such needs and are willing to use them to save time. But for him, expanding business and finding new customers is the most urgent. Therefore, , although there are many people who pay, we are destined to not be able to charge a high fee on this, because the value we bring is "time saving", and the time of small businesses is not valuable.

Recently, a classmate of an English training school was chatting with me. He said that he found that their students actually need to buy a lot of things before going abroad. He hopes to open a website to tell students what things they need to buy, and at the same time, they can buy them on his website. The information these students prepare for going abroad, although necessary, is by no means the most urgent. How many people are willing to pay for this is hard to say.

How to understand the market capacity and urgency?

Generally speaking, we can get the urgency through in-depth interviews. For example, if we talk to 10 small bosses, we will have an intuitive feeling of how many people feel that financial management is very urgent. (Of course, we must pay attention here not to talk with them inductively with subjective intentions, otherwise what we hear is just the result we want to hear.)

The market capacity is complicated. Online surveys and the like often make it easy for those most in need to fill out the questionnaire, thus giving us wrong conclusions.

It is relatively better to use random sampling interviews. If a person is unwilling to talk to you after hearing your intentions, basically he does not need this matter.

The third question: what is their pain? What is the scene (before/after using the product)

This question is a key link from strategy to implementation. Whether a thing is reliable or not, in fact, you can’t tell just by looking at the direction. My personal feeling is that "there is no reliable direction, only reliable methods."

And where does the practice come from? In fact, there are two issues mentioned here:

1. Have we really found the scene of the customer's problem? (The scene before using the product)
2. Will the usage scene we set for the product really happen? (Scene after using the product)

This reminds me of the B2C business that Alibaba is doing recently: unknown good products. Simply put, Alibaba introduces B2B suppliers to Taobao, opens up an independent market, and provides products directly from factories to consumers.

Our starting point is that B2B suppliers are mostly factories, so they will have better sources of goods than Taobao sellers and can provide consumers with better products. In this matter, the ultimate customer is the consumer. If we ask this question, we have to ask "what is the pain of the consumer?" Now consumers come to Taobao, willing to spend time looking for cheap goods, and those who like to bargain Just go to the market, and if you want to buy goods with guaranteed quality quickly, go to the mall.

Where are the "pain points"? What can be thought of are "they want to buy the first-hand supply from the factory, not the dealer", "they want to buy the last order of foreign trade", "they want higher quality service". Positioning on different pain points will lead to different follow-up approaches.

From the current point of view, Wuming Liangpin is still positioned as "factory goods" and "foreign trade last order".

So can buyers buy "factory goods" and "last orders" on Taobao? Do a search and you will find that there are a lot of them, and it is difficult to distinguish the authenticity from the false.

So can unknown good products be distinguished? Not currently.

Then do we have to distinguish? Maybe, but you have to ask the previous question first: how many people are currently looking for factory goods and foreign trade goods on Taobao but are not satisfied, so that they can decide whether it makes sense to use it as a core strategy. If we can't clearly locate the customer's current pain, it is impossible to talk about the scene after the customer's pain is resolved. So although I don't know the current operating conditions of Wuming Goods, I think that as myself and a consumer, I will always ask a question: When I go to Taobao, under what circumstances should I go to Wuming Goods to buy things?

Another example comes to mind. Recently, I was discussing Taobao’s opening of a supermarket with colleagues from Taobao. Simply put, Taobao opened an online supermarket in Shanghai to sell products from traditional supermarkets. Let’s take these two questions together:

Question: "What is the customer's pain?"
Answer: "Now you can't buy a box of Coke, a large roll of toilet paper, or a box of instant noodles on Taobao."

Question: "Does anyone want to buy these things on Taobao?"
Answer: "I think so too."

Ask: "Why don't you buy it?"
Answer: "The shipping fee is too expensive, and there is no other store that can buy the above three items." OK, the customer's pain came out, then we should provide the customer with What kind of value is also immediately clear (post-use scenario): enable customers to buy the above-mentioned daily necessities in a store with relatively low shipping costs.

+1: What will be the performance on the website data after solving it?
We think that we are providing value to customers, so we have to use something to measure whether the value is recognized and how much value we provide. For example: if the search is optimized, the click-through rate of the list page after the customer searches should increase; if the homepage is optimized, the click-through rate of the homepage should increase. The payment process is optimized, and the number of people who make successful payments will increase.

This question will force us to think about what is our customer value? What is the result we want, so as to formulate meaningful KPIs. This is true for as large as a department or as small as a function.

Look at another case:

Recently, we are working on a webpage call function, so that buyers can call sellers for free on the website without worrying about long-distance charges.

Can such a function be recognized? Of course, the number of paying users is a good indicator, but it is related to too many factors, so is there any standard that can help us clearly see how much value we provide?

We found an indicator: the number of calls connected every day, including the total number and per capita. The logic is: the value of this product is the buyer’s call. If a buyer is willing to make this call, it means that value has been generated. So by focusing on this indicator, we start to pay attention to: “Why the buyer didn’t call” because "The button is not obvious enough", or "there are too few buyers who come to the seller's store", or "there are still many worries in the process of making calls (such as tariffs)", or "buyers don't like to make calls in the first place".

So, we set out to do a few things:

- Place more spots and make the buttons more obvious
- Prioritize activation for sellers with a lot of inquiries, and then promote
- Focus on the problems that customers worry about more during the process

This question forces us to think about how to provide and deliver customer value .

Just imagine, if our focus is on the "number of paying customers", maybe we care more about the payment process, ordering process, packaged sales and other things, and the direction will be different.