How to be an excellent product manager?

The core competence of product manager is demand analysis, which is divorced from the needs of users. Even if the product is beautifully designed, it can't be recognized by customers. If a lot of manpower, material resources, financial resources and time are invested before the product goes online, but no one wants the developed product, then the previous investment will be in vain. What is demand analysis? Demand analysis is about what users need. Before QQ appeared, the most popular chat methods were Netease chat rooms, Zhanjiang Bihai Yinsha chat rooms and other network-based chat rooms in the same city. However, the chat room has a disadvantage, that is, it is impossible to establish peer-to-peer user communication. Qicq (the predecessor of QQ) is the first point-to-point and one-to-many chat software, also called web pager, which integrates the functions of chat, public chat room and single-point file transmission. Its appearance solved the needs of people who lacked communication tools at that time.

How to do demand analysis?

Not all user needs are needs.

In the stage of user demand analysis, the user demand information collected through demand collection channels is often scattered, unfocused and illogical, so we need to grasp the core from these discrete demand points, combine the actual use scenarios of products, and take the purpose of ultimately serving users as the guide to extract the core user demand.

Henry Ford, an American automobile magnate, famously said, "If I ask customers what they want, they will tell me: a faster horse." Of course, users can't tell Mr Ford that they need a car. The user's "want a faster horse" should be understood as: the user's goal is faster transportation. How to help users achieve this goal is a problem that product designers should think about. Maybe building a car, maybe something else. This should be

It depends on the judgment of the product designer to determine which product can better meet the needs of users.

2. Communication skills

In daily work, the product manager plays the role of coordinator among various departments, which requires not only the ability of product planning, positioning and execution, but also the ability of communication. Communication is what product managers do every day. A large part of their daily work is to convey the product concept to leaders or development designers to promote the progress of the project.

There is such a joke: a boy has a crush on a girl for a long time. One day in the self-study class, the boy finally got up the courage to write a note to the girl, which read: "In fact, I have been paying attention to you for a long time." After a while, the note came back, which read: "Please! Don't tell the teacher, I promise I won't eat melon seeds again in class! " This is a typical example of ineffective communication. It is said that it is invalid, mainly because the boys did not accurately convey the information they wanted to convey to the girls, which led to the misunderstanding of the other party. The premise of effective communication is to reach a consensus on the information content of all parties.

For example, when product managers communicate with program developers, product managers often use descriptive and descriptive language to explain their ideas; Program developers often use "webshell, SDK, controls, components" and other technical languages. Strangely, there is no problem with this communication method, which requires our product manager to understand some professional and technical problems and communicate with the other party in the language of the program developer, so that it is easier to be understood by the other party.

3. Know some professional skills

As a product manager, there is no harm in knowing a little professional technology. For example, what programming language is used to develop the newly launched Mata software product, PHP, JAVA or Python? After determining the programming language, we need to know what development framework is used in the whole product project, whether it is the framework developed by the team itself or the more popular framework in the market. Secondly, the choice of database, according to your business needs, is to use relational database such as mysql or non-relational database such as mongodb.

4. Commercial sensitivity

Commercial sensitivity is mainly reflected in the market analysis stage, including the analysis and grasp of market opportunities, insight and analysis of market demand, etc. Business sensitivity is established on the basis of long-term experience accumulation, paying more attention to industry trends, business reviews and product analysis, and combining with my own work practice to understand these views and gradually form my own way of thinking.

The daily work of the product manager is very complicated. He will consider all aspects of the work progress, but the ultimate goal of the product manager is only one: to build a great product with your team. Love our products as much as your own children, and grow up with our products, and you will benefit a lot.