This article was edited by the founder of drawon.cn (desk case) .
Around 18 years ago, the concept of Zhongtai began to be widely discussed.
But at the same time, there are different opinions about what Zhongtai is.
In the eyes of some people: the middle platform is a technology platform, such as microservice development framework, Devops platform, PaaS platform, container cloud, etc., people call it "technology middle platform".
In the eyes of some people: the middle platform is a microservice business platform, such as the most common user center, order center, and various microservice distribution centers, people call it "business middle platform".
In the eyes of some people: the middle office should be a matter of the organization, and it is releasing the potential: similar to the enterprise's internal resource scheduling center and internal innovation incubation organization, people call it "organization middle office".
These understandings are all correct, but there are also inaccurate or incomplete parts. Zhongtai, as a concept that is still being defined, is in a state that everyone feels but is difficult to define. And it is foreseeable that this relatively vague state may remain for quite a long time.
At the same time, after reviewing a large amount of information and communicating with the relevant persons in charge of China-Taiwan of JD.com and other major manufacturers, we found that the current perspective of discussions on China-Taiwan in the industry is still mostly at the level of strategy or organizational structure, while China- Taiwan It is more because when the company's business develops to a certain stage, it encounters bottlenecks and obstacles, and proposes solutions to solve practical problems.
Although looking at it from a strategic point of view, it can indeed broaden everyone's horizons and understand Zhongtai from a higher dimension. But the strategy is formulated based on the actual business. If you put aside the business and talk about it, it is like a castle in the sky, and you still can't understand what Zhongtai is.
Next, from the perspective of actual business, we will discuss the "past life and present life" of Zhongtai, and what abilities you should have if you want to become a product manager in Zhongtai.
Why do you need a middle office?
When it comes to China-Taiwan in the market, two examples will definitely be mentioned. One is that Jack Ma visited supercell in 2013, and then determined Ali’s China-Taiwan strategy in 2015; the other is Huawei’s transformation of China-Taiwan strategy, which is the famous phrase "Let those who can hear the gunfire command the battle."
This seems to give everyone an illusion that Zhongtai is a top-down strategic choice. The boss thinks that the middle platform is good, so he wants to build a middle platform.
However, the reality may be different from most people’s imagination. The emergence of Zhongtai is not entirely a top-down strategic design, nor is it to follow a certain industry trend, but to follow the rapid development of the company’s business. 1. Various problems exposed during the continuous expansion of the organization need to be resolved. At this time, the concept of Zhongtai just corresponds to this problem, so everyone accepts Zhongtai.
In the past few years, with the dividends of the mobile Internet, many companies have developed at a high speed and carried out large-scale business expansion. The speed of business expansion is fast enough, which is naturally a good thing for the company, but the problem that comes with it is that there is a problem within the company. A lot of duplication of construction and waste of resources.
This is the case for the development of Ali's shared service department.
At the beginning, the company only had Taobao, but later realized that the B2C business model would also be an important part of the e-commerce field, so Tmall appeared. With the continuous development of Tmall, it gradually became an independent department, but both sets include Basic business systems such as orders, commodities, inventory, prices, warehousing, and logistics. These two systems are independent of each other and operate independently.
After about 10 years, when Ali started to launch 1688, Juhuasuan and other businesses, he found that although these businesses targeted different fields, the system functions he needed were also highly similar, mainly including orders, commodities, inventory, prices, Warehousing, logistics and other systems. If all these new business systems have to be redeveloped, this will undoubtedly be a great waste of resources. Obviously, the existing system can be adjusted to meet the needs of the new business, so why continue to develop a new system?
Against this background, Ali will continue to improve the powers of the shared service department internally, and unify the reuse of various business departments, and the functions and systems that have been repeatedly built are planned and managed in a unified manner.
In fact, many companies have similar backgrounds and situations for the emergence of middle-office departments or platform business departments.
For example, Didi started its own middle-Taiwan strategy at the end of 2015, which was also related to Didi’s business development stage at that time.
At the end of 2015, Didi formed a vertical structure in a short period of time including express trains, taxis, private cars, ride-hailing, and driver services.
Although there are some differences between these businesses, the core systems and processes are similar. If they are developed independently, various problems will also arise.
For example, the development cost is too high. Each business under Didi can actually support a company independently. If each business is independent to the extreme, then the development cost and labor cost will be very huge. If In order to control costs, slowing down the construction of the system means that neither the quality of the core system itself nor the external user experience is very good.
Against this background, Didi also began to consider the unified planning and construction of many businesses and systems in various cities to improve the ability to serve the front desk.
In fact, what we mentioned just now, and many companies that are practicing China-Taiwan business, have similar problems. These problems can be roughly divided into two categories——
One is that many business requirements or functional requirements are highly similar and highly generalized, but because there is no dedicated team responsible for planning and development, a large number of systems are repeatedly developed and constructed, resulting in low reusability, low efficiency, and production and research problems. Waste of resources, inconsistent user experience.
The other type is that in the early business development process, in order to solve some current business problems, the vertical and personalized business logic is too deeply coupled with the basic system. Due to the lack of platform-based planning, horizontal systems, upstream and downstream systems There are also a lot of cross logic between them, which makes it impossible for the system to be directly reused or even quickly iterated during the expansion of new businesses and new markets.
These two types of problems have special names in the field of software development, called "reinventing the wheel" and "chimney architecture". These two types of problems are essentially that during the development process, in order to solve the current business problems, many functions have been launched quickly, and a lot of technical debt has been owed. When the company enters the mature stage, it is found that these problems exist, which seriously affects Enterprise operating efficiency and operating costs.
How to solve these problems in a mechanized and productized way can better plan and develop the data, functions, products and even experience with strong versatility within the enterprise through unified planning and development in the form of products, so as to better help the front office The business department pays more attention to the business, improves the efficiency of business operation, and then enhances the competitiveness of the enterprise, which is the basic starting point for the development of the enterprise.
At this stage, most of the companies that propose a China-Taiwan strategy or build a large and medium-sized Taiwan have similar dilemmas. The business has been developing rapidly for many years, and many problems are entrenched or a large number of "reinventing the wheel" problems are being solved. The concept of Zhongtai is widely recognized by everyone because it fits the business development of large companies in many cases.
What problems can China and Taiwan solve?
As a product design idea or system architecture idea, Zhongtai is not limited to the size of the company. In theory, any company that is about to or is facing a state of rapid business growth is worth using and learning from Zhongtai. , sort out a large number of reusable functions and scenarios in the current business, and prepare for the rapid growth of the business.
This is of practical significance in small and medium-sized companies.
For many small and medium-sized companies, when they get out of the survival predicament and enter the stage of rapid development, they will encounter many problems, but one problem that they will encounter with a high probability is that the previous business model and product capabilities may not be able to fully undertake To cope with the pressure brought by large-scale user growth.
And when you get to each user in detail, you can find that you have encountered the problems they have encountered before, but because there are too many problems, you cannot provide the expected or even exceed the expectations as in the past. When the expected service is provided, the other party will be dissatisfied.
This is also one of the reasons why many companies are born from new acquisitions and die from retention.
The choice of many companies at this stage is to temporarily solve a problem and quickly launch a function. It is not impossible, but it is very likely that your solution will continue to bring new problems, and finally fall into the function too complicated , to the point where it is hard to return.
Therefore, where possible, the company modularizes, develops and optimizes some long-term valuable functions with high probability, so as to ensure that even if the business scale is further expanded, it can meet business needs. Even, with the continuous optimization of capabilities or methodology, it may even become the methodology of the entire industry one day.
This process is much like repairing an airplane during high-speed flight. On the one hand, the wings are shattered and crumbling, on the other hand, the engines are still running, you can still fly forward, but you know, if you go to the next battle, you may not be able to ensure that the aircraft will not fly. It will fall, so the plane must be repaired before the next battle.
With the development of business, your requirements for aircraft are not only to be repaired, but you may hope that some problems can be prevented in advance. Or, know where your aircraft is most effective, and do it best there. Maybe, you can avoid some problems later.
This may be the concept of Zhongtai, an inspiration for the internal product planning of small and medium-sized companies.
Of course, one thing that needs to be reminded is that for small and medium-sized companies, the concept of China-Taiwan is not necessarily to pull dozens of people alone to build a China-Taiwan production and research team. It can standardize some key processes first, and integrate some recurring scenarios. Precipitation of solutions, and some functions that need to be commercialized first, may be very important for a company whose business has just started.
Challenges faced by China and Taiwan
On the one hand, the limitations of thinking and cognition
Many company bosses, or product managers, or R&D teams are obsessed with solving immediate problems. Under the pressure of KPI indicators, they have no time to think about how to adopt a comprehensive and in-depth global production concept to solve various problems and needs in the enterprise. question. lead to the above vicious circle.
On the other hand, the technical capacity is not enough
The development of the middle platform requires very strong architecture design capabilities, full-scenario business thinking capabilities, and actual development and coding capabilities. It is equivalent to developing infrastructure and basic platforms. Often small and medium-sized enterprises do not have the design and development capabilities of the middle office, or think that the long-term investment of the middle office will burn money and will not see returns in the short term. Business owners in non-professional fields often find it difficult to understand the meaning of the middle office.
Second, the cost of multi-sectoral collaboration.
Responding to business is relatively easy when you're in the business sector. However, in the middle office department, it is not so easy to respond to multiple businesses.
You will find that for the same requirement, the process of department A is completely different from that of department B, or the process is similar, but when it comes to specific details, there are big differences.
What's even more frightening is that for the same problem, due to the different development stages of the business, the attitude towards the problem is completely different: some departments have very mature businesses and their own processes are very clear, so they don't want you to adjust their existing processes ;However, some departments are still in the exploratory period and have not encountered the problem you raised, so they may ignore you at all. At this time, the challenge for the middle and Taiwan product managers is very great.
They may spend a lot of energy on communication and coordination between different departments, repeatedly confirming the same requirement, and there is no obvious breakthrough for a long time. At this time, the middle and Taiwan product managers are required to have strong communication, coordination and collaboration skills.
And, because the solutions they're going to do next, they're going to serve multiple businesses. At this time, the product manager in the middle office needs to have a strong logical thinking ability, see the common needs among different needs, and extract a productized solution. .
Moreover, for some business units that have not yet encountered this problem. They generally like to set up another business, or do it themselves. Always use the current business as a shield, and are unwilling to use what the platform department does, which leads to the low status of many companies in the platform department, or the development process is very difficult, unless the company's strategic layer forces it forward.
Both the soft skills of communication and collaboration are required, and the hard thinking of logical abstraction is required. This may be the most challenging place for product managers in the middle office.
Although there are challenges, it is not necessarily impossible. For middle-end product managers, the content we mentioned just now is only to help middle-end product managers to have some preliminary framework understanding of the challenges and work that the middle-end product position will face.
However, there are many complex problems to be solved in actual business scenarios.
For middle and Taiwan products, their capability requirements are actually very large. On the one hand, strong logical thinking and strategic analysis capabilities are required to be able to see the key processes in the business, understand the next development direction of the business, and transform them into product functions, which can be realized together with R&D. On the other hand, it requires strong communication and communication skills, and can promote the realization of related functions with multiple business lines, related parties with different needs, backgrounds, and ideas.
Behind this is technology and art.
Yunjing's solution for middle office
If technically
The technology used in the Alibaba Cloud middle platform system belongs to the first generation technology.
Tencent Cloud belongs to the second generation technology
Then Yunjing belongs to the third generation technology, front-end micro-service, using WebComponent technology, and micro-front-end technology. The backend adopts micro-service technology and responsive programming technology. At the operation and maintenance level, K8S is used as the operation and maintenance tool. Meet the needs of various scenarios. It can be said that we have summarized the pain points of the industry over the years, and it is a best practice after forging.
Yunjing is both a product and an art. Yunjing can help enterprises solve the pain points described above.