The production and research team worked overtime and almost didn’t go home during the Chinese New Year, but it was finally completed.
After 3 months, the product mix strategy, sales strategy, and commission management plan have all changed. At this time, the small iterative function is needed, and the large one needs to be revised and reconstructed, which seriously drags down the efficiency of business development.
Changes in the market and management are unavoidable, and smart product managers need to identify the lowest-level factors that affect changes, and then abstract product design layer by layer to provide flexible architecture design for R&D; flexible configuration can be achieved with business changes, Efficient iteration.
Example 4: Decentralized background country email list tools seriously damage the user experience.
Customer: I want to activate the xx module permission.
Sales: OK, we can support different module configurations at any time.
Sales: Hello, Miss Operation, please help to open the xx module permission.
Demand has arrived inside the company: continue to pass internally (operation department, product group, middle office, user center...)
Each department has its own important and urgent work. This work is only marginal support work, and the response efficiency is bound to be low. Emails and WeChat are only answered after half a day, or even completely missed.
So half a day passed, a day passed...
Customer: Why not open? We use it!
Sales: I just want to open a module permission, why is it so difficult? Didn't you say that you can support opening at any time?
Therefore, from this perspective, the "back-office system" is not only for "supporting business", but the core guarantee for the efficiency of the entire organization.
A well-designed back-office system—makes the organization’s collaboration efficiency 1+1>2, and a back-office system without deep thinking—makes the organization’s efficiency 1+1<2.
How to plan and build a back-end system so as to avoid the above four examples as much as possible? The following is a brief summary of the author. If there are any deficiencies, readers are welcome to advise and discuss.
Awareness of overall view - the awareness that product managers must have in advanced.
Business research - tap into all teams related to the business.
Business abstraction - highly abstract the complex work relationship of the organization: process-based and modular.
Entity-Relational Abstraction—Structured, Object-Oriented Architecture: Implementation-Oriented.
Prototyping - efficiency first, behavioral layer experience > visual layer > emotional layer.
1. Global awareness
The product manager position, the process from primary to advanced, is also an iterative process of "product perspective" in a sense.
1) Functional perspective
Product intern/assistant: Receive a certain task and complete the design of a certain function point.
2) Single product perspective
A product module, or the person in charge of a product: Overall planning of the iteration plan for different modules of the product.
3) Multiple business perspectives
Senior product manager: not only focus on the product itself, but also on product-related operations, marketing, and sales. "Look at the product from the perspective of the whole business"
4) Multi-product multi-business perspective
Product Director/Director: Responsible for multiple products and multiple businesses, weighing corporate strategies, and taking into account multiple departments. Overall planning and management of "Enterprise Product Matrix".
Although the level of attention will vary with experience. But as a product manager, even if you are currently only responsible for a single point of function, if you can, you must think about the problem from a global perspective.
A product just solves a real problem and generates some "value", but to realize this value requires: identifying and defining value (product), realizing value (technology/production department), delivering value (marketing/operation department), exchanging value ( Operations/Sales).
And this process from value definition to completion of value exchange is the productivity of different attributes within the enterprise, which is coordinated through different production relations and using different production tools.
Therefore, when product managers design the "production tools" of the organization, they first need to have a high cognitive level of "global view"; even if the final deliverables are limited by priorities and resource bottlenecks, and have to make trade-offs, it is also from the perspective of "Organizational efficiency" is a trade-off after global consideration.
2. Business research
The so-called business research is to thoroughly understand that the system you have made involves all relevant departments/related persons/related systems of the company, as well as their work content and purpose.
For example, if you are working on a financial system, the systems involved: commodity management system, order management system, and even performance management system for operations/sales personnel, supply chain, human resources, etc.
At the same time, the departments involved may include: Finance Department, Commodity Order Management Department, Operations Department, HR Department, Sales Department, BOSS Group, etc.