One
The first is of course that the product must have user needs, and what the user’s real needs are. One of the most representative examples of user needs is “Segway”, this product has excellent engineering design and beautiful design, but the product’s business plan is based on a series of uncertain assumptions and overestimated the size of the target market.
Therefore, before starting expensive product development, the most important thing we need to do is to confirm user needs and check your assumptions about the market and products to reduce risk. As a product manager, we must first question the basic point of view of a new product, and implement the demand work through a series of tools, carefully assess whether the user has enough motivation to actually use the product.
Demand is often hidden, with its own ambiguity, which we often do not realize. How to deeply understand the problems people really want to solve and know why is the most important thing in this part. The reference book in this part is “Exploring Demand-Quality before Design” published by Tsinghua University Press. Its core content is to discuss how to reduce the ambiguity of demand. In addition, you can ask yourself some questions.
- Is it universal? Specifically, who has this problem and will affect many people?
- Is it urgently needed? People want to solve this problem right away, or can they wait and see?
- Is there an alternative solution?
- Is it valuable? How difficult is this problem for people, are they willing to spend money to solve it?
- Is it profitable? Does the cost of solving this problem be more or less valuable than the problem itself?
Failure Case: I made a typical mistake when I took over a product in 2015. At that time, when the company planned to launch a new hardware product, we took it for granted assuming how much market share we could obtain, and we were confident in our technology and invested After human property, the product was made, but there has been no sales. There are several reasons for this: first, the limited market capacity; second, the use of low-frequency products; third, customer acceptance is biased towards imported products, and reversing this perception requires excessive resources; fourth, customers can choose other methods to indirectly replace products; These reasons add up, the company’s marketing department has no intention and motivation to promote, and the product becomes a tasteless.
two
After initially determining the positioning and demand of the product in the market, my next experience is to quickly make a product prototype.
The current popular approach is to create a minimum viable product (Minimum Viable Product, referred to as MVP) for early market launch, to test whether the product effectively solves a market problem. But in actual implementation, I found that this method is often misused.
For example, because the schedule control or technology has not been broken, the minimum viable product is defective, or the requirements are ambiguous, the minimum viable product has not been verified as a real problem, but has become a product that has to be regularly upgraded within the company.
Eric Rice mentioned in “Lean Entrepreneurship”:
Despite the simplest design, a truly minimally viable product must also be commercially viable, not a waste of half a pendant.
People should be very satisfied with the product and willing to pay for it. If our minimized viable product becomes a sales product and does not meet the customer’s needs, causing the customer to complain or return or exchange, this will bring endless trouble to the follow-up.
Once many products involve costs, if they fail once, they will face many difficulties in the second iteration. Therefore, it is a good idea to test all aspects of the product with a simpler prototype before the smallest viable product.
The prototype design of Google Glass is an excellent example.
Tom Qi from Google X created the original prototype in just a few minutes using modeled wires and a few balls of plasticine to increase weight. Through this quick usability test, he learned that this device will not hurt the ear’s maximum weight. He also learned that the bridge of the nose can comfortably bear more weight than the ears. This is why Google Glass is slightly heavier at the bridge of the nose.
In addition, the details of Google Glass ’s gesture interaction are also tested through rapid prototypes to verify that if you want to feel comfortable, gesture interaction needs to appear in the field of vision, and your hands cannot be higher than the heart, because if you persist for a few minutes, lactic acid will start to increase. Your arm will quickly become tired and sore.
three
What needs to be done next is to combine product exploration, prototype design and verification to iterate the product quickly. In this part, we are currently using the IPD development process. At present, the company that has done a good job in China is Huawei. At this stage, the core is “system thinking”, Qian Xuesen’s definition of “system” is:
The extremely complex research object is called a system, that is, an organic whole with specific functions combined by several components of interaction and interdependence, and this system is also a component of a larger system to which it belongs.
In the system, it is necessary to take all links into consideration, requirements, specifications, project planning and execution, etc. In addition, system components, system decomposition structure, and system architecture need to be considered. Use a picture to reflect this, probably like this.
Case: Based on my own experience, at this stage, the main things I consider are input and output. Who will provide the input, what is the input standard, what the team will output, what kind of indicators will the output achieve, our “relevant stakeholders”, what are their expectations, etc.
Typical problems:
1. Comprehensive design and cost control refer to the need for an overall system design plan before designing.
Taking a piece of hardware as an example, we need to consider the situation of the entire supply chain. Our previous design feels very good, but the supplier has a lot of problems after processing. It may be that the process level is not reached, or the accuracy control may not Meet the standard.
Therefore, in the early stage, it is necessary to comprehensively consider the positioning of the product and the processing level of the supplier, and measure it based on the overall cost. Maybe we have reduced the procurement cost, but if the manufacturing cost and maintenance cost in the later period are greatly increased, this is not a good system design .
2. Requirements change management. During the product design process, the requirements may need to be changed due to omissions in the early stage or insufficient demonstration. This is also a problem often encountered in the development process.
At this time, one is to verify the deep-seated reasons behind the change in demand, and then move forward, you can use the “5 questions” to investigate the root cause and find the real motivation behind the user; the second is to embrace the change once the change is determined, Use the fastest speed to achieve and verify.
3. Creating scenes and user images means that you need to understand your users in depth, have empathy with them, and know in which situations they use the product.
The answer to this question comes from the outside. We need to experience the real usage scenarios of customers, talk and talk with them, and continue to understand their daily lives, habits, and environment: when and where they often encounter this problem. These can provide a reference framework for the interaction and usage scenarios of our products.
The requirements at this stage are actually similar to the demand stage, allowing enough time for thinking and discussion in the early design, and not rushing to conclusions in ambiguity. You can reduce the risks in the later stage by means of sufficient argumentation and unit testing within the group, that is, It means: more upfront effort is needed, not just hard work, because the later the project, the cost of change will increase exponentially.
four
In the product design process, another common mistake is the stacking function. The later the product development, the leader’s “I think …”, the developer’s whimsy, or new features from competitors come online. These internal or external information always impact product managers’ fragile nerves. So he unconsciously added functional modules and thought he represented the customer.
For product managers, the strategy of being responsible for a product means that you have to make a choice. Trying to cover everything will lead to no focus, trying to please every user will eventually lead to mediocrity.
The way to solve this problem is also “system thinking”, the product provides value rather than function. What we need to consider is how to make the existing functions of the product the most comfortable for the customer to use, even if it is complicated but still easy to use.
Fives
In the actual product development process, there are some typical problems. such as:
The product is not completely ready, do you want to release it?
I think the problem is that benevolence sees benevolence and wisdom sees wisdom. When Apple released iOS 6 in September 2012, Apple removed Google Maps from the App Store and used Apple ’s own maps, but it turned out to be a disaster-level release, and Apple Maps was not fully prepared; but There is also a negative case. Huawei had more problems with program-controlled switches, but the market for program-controlled switches was still blank at that time, so Huawei dared to release products with incomplete quality.
How to arrange the “last mile” of the product in advance?
Both the logistics industry and the transportation industry have the so-called “last mile”. The product also has its own last mile. For example, I wrote an article earlier on “Catch more fish.” If you sell books, they get through SF Express in advance, and they will arrange SF to pick up the goods. This speed and experience are very friendly to users.
How to manage the product life cycle?
Product lifecycle management can be simply understood as a product roadmap plan. This is more useful for team coordination and communication, just as a GPS guides you to avoid congestion while driving. If there is mid-term and long-term product planning, the development team needs to consider subsequent product upgrades when discussing the current design plan. And expansion, such as whether the system architecture can support, technology continuity, etc.
six
It is unrealistic to try to clarify “product system design” in an article. In this process, there are still several stages and details. Each point can be written with 2000 words. For example, what to do if you can’t overcome technical difficulties, what to do if the product extension is urged by the leaders and customers, and how to remedy the problem after the release. These will be added slowly later.