Product manager ushered in the Golden Age: Success can not be replicated regression beginner

One day in mid-October, I went to the 768 creative Garden of Haidian College Road to find my former colleague Zhou Yuan, who is now the founder of the "Know-what" web. He describes it in one of the company's recruiting messages: a start-up company; a social questions and answers website; a group of engineers who believe in pirate culture-"We have a simple idea of making the answers big and beautiful, and making our knowledge more beautiful." "To put it simply, Zhou Yuan made a product, the product is" know ". On this site, you can only do two things, that is, questions and answers. If you want to know any questions, just put them on the "know-how"-these are all sorts of problems, from "How to capture an IT otaku as a husband," "How many servers in watercress" to "what if you want to run a company?" "And so on, and then some people who feel or have a precise knowledge of the problem will answer your question in detail, and a group of people who are curious about the question or answer are watching." Onlookers can comment on these responses. The best or the most interesting of these answers is the high number of votes voted by onlookers. Out of curiosity or liking, both bystanders and questioner can go to the respondents and form their private or further communication. "Know" was established at the end of 2010, has just survived for more than two years-it has not been open to register, but already has hundreds of thousands of users. About tens of thousands of people speak on the site every day, and they spontaneously produce high-quality questions and answers every day--equivalent to a news portal, such as the amount of content Tencent produces in one day. The reason I'm looking for Zhou Yuan is for our topic, which is the article I'm writing now. The reason is that starting from around 2009, the new wave of entrepreneurship is emerging in the field of the Internet, and with the rise of this venture, there is a word that "product managers" are becoming more and more popular. More and more founders, even some giants or leaders of big companies, are willing to call themselves product managers. For example, the deceased Apple founder Steve Jobs, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. At home, the founders of Ma and Zhou are also considered to have a distinct product manager personality. Zhou Yuan himself is the product manager who "knows". And we want to know how product managers can make successful products and become more and more important in today's society-the founders of the big and small internet companies that I and my colleagues met in this interview will tell us: "I'm actually a product manager." Smartphones surpassed global PC shipments for the first time in 2011, and in the third quarter of 2012 it was the first time that tablets shipped more than laptops. There are comments that "the intersection of PC and mobile terminals is coming". But in 2011, global smartphone sales reached 500 million, up 61%, and in the second quarter of 2012, growth fell to 32.2%, well below 77.1% a year earlier. On the one hand, the trend of smartphone popularization has been irreversible, but itsHigh growth has slowed. Similarly, the investment craze for mobile internet is becoming more rational, and investors are trying to find "product managers" who have a unique understanding of the product and the Chinese consumer characteristics from those entrepreneurs who copy foreign popular concepts. In some ways, the golden age of truly reliable product managers has arrived. Product manager's World the word "Product Manager" is an interesting phenomenon. In China, the last time this large-scale entrepreneurial phenomenon occurred around 1999 to 2000. That happens to be Zhou Yuan admitted to Chengdu University of Technology, the computer department, he later explained his entrepreneurial impulse, said: "I was watching Bill Gates's entrepreneurial story grew up, and China is also in the popular internet business." "My most interesting memory of that time took place in 1999 years. September 3 of that year, "Shark Wei Sports" website was founded, 3 months later, one of the founders of Lu Xiaohu left, less than a year, Li Ka-shing's Hong Kong portal tom.com with about 50 million of the HK dollar to buy the vertical sports portal-it is a "content of the King" in an era of vicissitudes. At the launch of Shark's sports, I chatted with a young man sitting next to me. I asked him what his name was and what he was doing recently. The young man was round with his glasses on his face and replied that he was Ding Lei, the founder of a portal site called NetEase. During that period, I had never heard of the term "product manager"-the most authoritative title in the portal site was "founder", "editor-in-chief" or "channel director" and so on. In the traditional manufacturing industry, a product manager is a small one, which means only the role of a facilitator, is a screw on the industry chain-large consumer goods companies have long had the role of product managers or brand managers who manage their own product portfolios and lead the coordination of product development, distribution and promotion. Since the products of a traditional manufacturing company are always subject to the capabilities of upstream component suppliers, as well as the willingness of downstream channel vendors to cope with the impact of the external environment, its founders are more than responsible for a product-they are more known as entrepreneurs, is an important person who can influence the real world. Even in the 2000, the rise of the internet giants, Ma Yun, such as the founder of E-commerce is often seen as "entrepreneur", Lei himself in the millet phone before the identity is also very vague. A friend who once held a senior position at Microsoft told us that even in top software companies like Microsoft, an ordinary product manager is just a screw in the company's internal industry chain-at best. Their daily work includes collecting user information, conceiving the structure of the product, organizing and coordinating people to achieve the desired function of the product, and then listening to the feedback of users to continually improve it. Some of them are responsible for the great technical and coordination skills of the products in the growing, in the field of product managers become celebrities, people dug horns. ButAs long as they are in big companies, like Microsoft, they are always creating something for Microsoft and for Bill Gates. The friend finally tired of this life, he put in 2011 this wave of Internet entrepreneurship, want to do the pharmaceutical industry E-book Publishing. Manto, in 2004, Zhou Yuan a programmer at a small software company in Shanghai after graduating from a graduate school of Computer Science at Southeast University, and felt the boredom of his life: "Not to make anything of my own, like the workers next to the assembly line." "We have reason to believe that the wave of entrepreneurship that created the" Product manager "Craze was brought about by the rise of social networks and the flourishing of mobile internet. The former's best reference is Facebook, which was founded in 2006, and at first it was just a Zuckerberg dating network founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard student, and by the year 2012 Facebook had more than 1 billion users worldwide, The total market value of the issue is estimated at USD 104 billion. Social networks, or some community sites with this kind of functionality, are actually moving some of the needs of people's offline lives to the wire. The makers of these functional platforms want people to stay here for a long time-not only to reshape people's friendships and lifestyles, but because so many people spend so much time here every day, many lucrative business models spontaneously arise. The prosperity of mobile internet can be explained by data. In a public speech in October 2012, Kai-Fu Lee, the founder of the Innovation Workshop, quoted a set of data: China has more than 200 million smartphone users and more than 600 million of global smartphone devices, and there are 25 billion app downloads in the iphone's iOS field. Every user using the app, 94 minutes a day, more than 30% of the time spent on the internet-"mobile internet growth is probably 6 times times the Internet," Kai-Fu Lee advised us to consider the future on the mobile internet "how to deal with 300 million or 500 million users" problem. With the advent of social networks and the spread of mobile internet-one can walk around 24 hours with a mobile phone, the internet world is entering an era of highly coincident with people's real world, creating a strong incentive for Internet content distributors and tool makers. Carr, a technology writer in the United States, who published on the cover of Atlantic magazine, "is Google making us stupid?" "The article is famous) concludes that in this wave, Web content publishers and tool makers are making money by encouraging and satisfying people's thirst for a lot of lidengkequ of information-and that's what a variety of" product managers "do on traditional internet, Android or Apple platforms. "Internet companies rarely have dirty, despicable or barbaric acts, but they are often short-lived." "Because the Internet company's business and products are immaterial, Carr said:" They areis created by a string of invisible software codes, and thus the ability to withstand risk is fragile. The other side of this grim view is that Internet product production threshold and cost is far lower than traditional industries, in this world, no traditional channels, even do not need too much publicity, an internet start-up company can immediately through their own a good product directly to the user's liking, and then spread to the virus. Perhaps with my own example, I can explain how the product that Zhou Yuan made-"know-how" has affected my work. It is a journalist's vocation to ask questions, and it is easier for us than anyone else to find some experts to answer questions--ordinary people who, like reporters, casually grab individuals, may have been driven out of the way by a madman. But even so, I will still look at the "know-what" page before making a selection. Because there are a variety of experts and curious people who can provide professional answers. With luck, in the "Know", I can immediately find the right interviewee-the time I need to find someone through the phone and acquaintances in the real world is much shorter. At the same time, being a member of the community, I rarely get rudely rejected if I ask the members of this neighborhood to interview them. There is an unseen trust and a bond that connects us-"know" that most people are gathered together for the qualities of curiosity and willingness to share. This is the power of products and the way product managers influence the world. Many of my colleagues are using the internet company founders they interviewed, the product managers, such as "Rocking the car", "Down Kitchen", "watercress" and so on. Capital markets are always more sensitive to products and their creators, says Zhang Pengcheng, senior investment director at the Strategic and Career Development Department of Fashion Media Group. In fact, the investment boom in mobile internet products and social products began in 2009, culminating in the end of 2010 and the first half of 2011. In the second half of 2011 years, the whole capital market has already entered the stage of rational correction. "The product manager said that in the extreme case when Apple app was most popular, some investors ran to tell the product manager that you were going to follow the idea of the application abroad and add some sense of your own to it. "At that time some product managers talk about their own things also basically do not talk about income, as long as the user measured up on the line." "But by the year 2012, most product managers have felt that the entire investment community has entered the off-season." "The concept of mobile internet and social networking is of course what investors like," Zhang Pengcheng said. "But the concept of the concept, your product is very easy to replicate, you enter the market, your product is viscous, that is, users are willing to stay on the long??" Now everyone is starting to be rational. "The most important thing for investors is to find a reliable product manager," he said. "In terms of mobile internet, social platforms, good product managers can find people's pain points, in factIs the user's outbreak point. Encapsulates, an investment manager at Lenovo's innovation Incubator Park, said: "In addition, it is important that they have the resources and qualifications they have-that is, why you can do it ' whyyou ', not others. "There is nothing new about the forecasts of these market developments and the demands of investors. Kai-Fu Lee reminded everyone that the current 200 million users and two years ago 50 million to 70 million of the high-end user market is completely different. "More than 130 million of the young, students, blue-collar users. Their needs are different from the tool needs of two years ago, but they need to be simple, useful, fun and enjoyable. Countless investors concluded that in fact, the Chinese people, and even the rigid demand of the earth is "hope to be attention", "Hope not lonely." The problem is: "Simple, useful, fun, carefree", "attention", "viscous"?? All this specific to the product, how can you do it? There are tens of thousands of dimensions available for people to choose and trial and error, a person in life can get the entrepreneurial opportunity but 3, 4 times, in the end what is summed up what successful experience is called "Reliable product manager"? "Zhangxiaolong is now the most successful product manager, he has made a micro-letter. But I think the micro-letter is not replicable, because only Tencent can do it. "In other words, Zhangxiaolong or other now well-known product managers can replicate their success if they venture out?" This is unknown in the current mobile Internet arena. "No success can be replicated so you can imagine, when we use" Why do you think you are successful? "This is a normal problem in the real business world to ask one of the most successful product managers-the founder of Yantan, and hope he can sum up a successful business model of the MO, his expression looks distressed and full of tolerance." He probably thought the question we raised was very baffling. Yantan business before the job is NetEase website Department Chief editor. He left NetEase to start a business after doing a star product "Mo Mo"-This is a location-based mobile social tool, you can through it to know around the arbitrary range of strangers, look at each other's personal information and location. August 3, 2011, the MO version of iOS official online, the day there are 2000 people download installation. So far, there are 10 million users. "Simply put, now the product manager to do a product, they have to be a typical user to do." He said: "You are not a typical user how can you imagine to meet the needs of users?" "Yantan said he did the cause of the MO is extremely simple, he usually does not love mixed circle and people do meaningless social intercourse, in the real world, the Chinese people are not good at and advocating to chat with people." "I actually want to use this product to restore the whole society, when they said, you are too direct, you do not need to verify that you can talk to strangers online?" I said I just want to completely restore the real life of the original ecology. "If an entrepreneur decides what he or she does by analyzing market demand data, that is certainly not the case," he said. "Yantan before the stranger because of the media dubbed"About gun weapon" has caused controversy, but in fact, his idea is to do a location-based social platform, the future is hoping to become a "mobile Facebook." "If I wanted to make a gun, I wouldn't have to do that." "In fact, Yantan in the street to suppress harassment more stringent than other mobile social platforms, if the user complained of harassment, he will directly shut down the complainant's mobile devices, and other platforms may just seizure cell phone number." "So far, we've sealed off 3, 400,000 phones," he said. "I am a liberal and feel that the principle of freedom is the first." But the premise of freedom is that you can't hurt other people. "Before the stranger came out, Yantan of course knew that users would use it for men and women, but the proportion of the actual use of this part was higher than he had envisioned as a designer." Mo is a tool, it should be how to use in fact should be a large number of users after the influx of spontaneous search, rather than product managers can preset. Yantan himself with a stranger to recruit employees, in the community to know some owners, but also participated in an owner of the night running activities, "is to exercise, around the community running circle." Although there are a lot of investors around or not optimistic about the MO, and all can justify themselves, Yantan is not very interested in these remarks. "We are not going to define it at all." What is the definition of a product that has survived for more than a year? Yantan asked. The beginning of the MO is just a know what people around the simple product, and then its function will be a little bit as the user's increase and become more complex. The job of Yantan and his colleagues is to observe and visualize the reasons and scenarios that these users use the MO, and then slowly add other features, such as groups. And all of this is experimental--luckily, there are plenty of user behaviors available to him and his team to observe. Yantan on the issue of the most important lesson to us, is the mobile Internet Product Manager do not preset too many prerequisites or eager to summarize. The experience of the real business Society was summed up over the past hundred years after the Industrial revolution. The traditional internet has a path to success, thanks to time and a lot of product managers ' trial and error--compared to the time when the mobile internet went into the breakout period. "Mobile internet industry is still in the immature stage, the future of a lot of things we still do not understand, are in stones." You say who can really think clearly, and can continue to copy their own experience, I think it is unlikely. "Zhang Peng Chengye said:" Mobile Internet product managers than the traditional Internet product managers, must be more open, more exploratory spirit. "Before some people have discussed only 8 photos of the problem, the product design point, outsiders have a variety of speculation." Results Yantan said: "Why 8 photos?" Because at that time think 8 should enough, not enough words users will ask to put, then we change ah. "Such words tend to make one leng, but soon you will realize that heis really talking about truth. His truth also includes: "My basic judgment on mobile Internet is that if you're going to do something, you may have to meet three conditions, one is the basis of a larger user, such as tens; second, you can expect users to continue to use your product for a long time, and the third is that users use your products more frequently. We can now solve the first and third questions, but the second one is not resolved. "I think entrepreneurship is a bit like playing mahjong, and if it's a bridge, it depends on technology." Mahjong is not talking about technology, actually speaking. But a person does not have many opportunities to start a business, sample size is less. In this case, you only play Mahjong once also won the money, you say the technology is good or lucky? It's really not that clear. So technology has no use, useful, but it is not a sufficient and necessary condition, if you are not good luck. But entrepreneurship does not depend on luck alone. "Even if a person sums up the experience completely correctly, excludes the luck ingredient, he is relies on his intelligence talent to make this matter, also is difficult to replicate-the success is not replicable." "If we agree with Yantan-one of the most successful product managers at the moment:" Success is not replicable "and no path-dependent-this may sound brutal, but internet companies may not be able to" grow up "by nature. Each time entrepreneurship, each model each lead 35 years. The only thing the product managers can do, then, is to go back to their own logic of finding the product and consider it as a typical user. And indeed it is. In this interview, Zhang Jianfu, a product manager on the traditional internet known as the "grass-roots version of horse-making", is the most important talent for product managers to simulate and visualize the use of their products by users in two or three-line cities. And his past experience in entrepreneurship has all been focused on PCs. When he began to do mobile internet products, he did not go to the analysis report, and did not spend too much to communicate with the industry, but forced himself to "not touch the PC for half a year", only to play smart phones. "I have to cut off my path of dependence. "he said. Whether he can succeed on the mobile internet is an unknown. "I'm also constantly thinking about what it should be like to be a social platform for Chinese people," Yantan said. "I have to be able to imagine why or how a person uses a stranger for 35 years." "This problem does not solve, we (refers to the MO) always safe." "Back to beginner now, let's go back to the afternoon I went to find Zhou Yuan, and it took me a while to find the entrance to the" know-what "in this entrepreneur-gathering park-to save office costs, they were doing office makeover, planning to shrink office space, so they blocked the front door. Zhou Yuan to his neighbor, an online gaming company rented two large conference rooms to do temporary office, a group of young people crowded in this room to write code and day-to-day operations. There are some people in the aisle next to the temporary table to discuss the problem, the air is filled with the entrepreneurial kind of unique lifePour, do not care about the present environment of simple and passionate atmosphere. "Know" is actually Zhou Yuan's second venture. When we met in 2005, he was bored after a year of programmers in Shanghai and went to Beijing to become a journalist and a colleague. Zhou Yuan's editor said to him: "Very clever, very curious, and interested in things will understand very well." "This comment actually has another meaning, is that he does have a different kind of thing from the average person, he's never going to muddle through what he's asked to do--probably because of professional background and interest, and eventually Zhou Yuan's coverage and reporting areas are focused on the Internet and some emerging technologies. From August 2008 to 2010 of May, Zhou Yuan began his first venture, and the venture ended in a very complicated middle. But to be blunt, he had the urge to do something very much, but didn't really think about what to do-this is what he often talked about when he went to share his entrepreneurial experience with others, "don't start a business for a startup." But in his first entrepreneurial experience, he showed several features that a product manager should have: He was keenly aware of the business needs of the E-commerce company at the time, a good reporter can do in the interview, but may not be put into action as an opportunity; he has the courage to break free from the inertia of life--to know, Many people will express their desire to do something independent when they are dissatisfied with their daily life, but after a sleep, the days of the past, the last point is that in the two years of entrepreneurship, this is the largest number of only 12 people in the target of a small company several times because of unexpected changes, Zhou Yuan incredibly can pay Paul to pay for money, Solve the problem of the people. But in the end, Zhou Yuan's first venture was due to a failure to match goals and resources. At the time, he made a website called Meta Search, which provided the data needed to search and optimize services for e-commerce sites, and helped them watch the keywords in their websites change their rankings and competitors ' situations. He plans to let everyone use the online free version, and then for the company custom service charges. This business model sounds good, but selling to big e-commerce companies requires a strong sales team, and small e-commerce companies are unwilling to pay for it. Yantan said, in the beginning of the new venture to do, their own early understanding of their character-"strong relationship" of entrepreneurship do not do, meaning that if it is to run sales and people pull list can do business, he can not do. Zhou Yuan is also the same, and his company is too small to recruit people who can do big company sales. In this way, Zhou Yuan met Lenovo investment encapsulates said the product manager will encounter the "whyyou" Problem-May 2010, his first venture failed. During that time, he and Kai-Fu Lee's Innovative Workshop Development Investment fund senior investment manager Zhang discussed several times their future direction. Zhang sent a message to Zhou Yuan in July 2010 and he's still on the phone and showed it to me-this one shows 827 days ago The message to the effect is to tell him: Do not quick success, take shortcuts. Failure is normal, and it is important that you understand why it was not done. Zhou Yuan told me that this message meant a lot to him. The result of his hindsight is that he still does not understand the real needs of users, so there will be the lack of resources and users need to match the problem-"harm everyone to the wrong goal to go so far." Just this time, Zhou Yuan saw the American website quora-This 2009 on-line question and Answer website is the knowledge prototype. Quora's first batch of seed users are elite figures, and Zhou Yuan can see the real people with their CEO suffixes on the site to answer questions for others in detail and professionally. "The first time I saw Quora, I thought it was really cool," Zhou Yuan said. "I am the user of this site, this site fully meets my needs, and it is full of positive energy." This is the process of knowing the birth. Simple to say, but this is a product manager to find the "right" of the product process, although accidental, but this product must and do his temperament exactly match-Zhou Yuan once a journalist, know the value of the answer is important, but also understand the difficulty of obtaining these answers. This kind of match will make this product not only Quora version, but become a new thing. "In fact, over the past year or so, I have been thinking about why we should be aware of it," he wrote, in a "knowing how to go" question. Because of Quora? Because unlike Weibo, and search engines, Wikipedia is different, and blog, forum different, and Baidu know different? To tell the truth, these reasons are weak. I've spent a long time thinking about this, and it's always been an impossible answer, because every day I think about telling the team everyone that we can get back to our beginner at any time, on any occasion. I think the most important thing is the ubiquitous need--the knowledge, experience, opinion, and judgment that a person has never shared in the brain is something that another group of people want to know. "This is the first time that I have seen him fully describe his thinking process and confusion about" knowing "the product, quite sincerely. The question and answer was 428 votes in favor and countless comments, one of which was a vote of self, because somehow he did say what I thought-this time he was really able to think of a typical user's mind. At the same time, he said: "I do not want to use a variety of concepts to restrain my imagination, it is ridiculous, I turned over for a long time, did not see Facebook said that they are sns,linkedin to say that they are an x thing, Twitter said that they are a certain y things." We really should not take the community, tools, SNS such as the original concept of ambiguity on their own body. As Yantan said, Zhou Yuan is gradually emptying himself, using a real product manager's approach, rather than his own subjective judgment to observe the user. He found that in the face of a product that requires users to produce problems and answers on their own,It's not always good to do too much. There is a revision, he according to the usual way of thinking of the media for the knowledge of the question and answer done a number of sorting out, divided into eight "areas", that this will facilitate the user to read-but users do not play the known, and finally this "field" is canceled. "Only a huge influx of users can tell us more," Zhou Yuan told me. The next step he has to make is to keep it open-knowing that it is partially open and requires an invitation code to enter. But its usage and the usual BBS also has the forum, the group has the very big difference. "If you don't start a new user guide and don't teach them how to ask questions, it's likely that old users will be overwhelmed and new users overwhelmed-enough to overwhelm the community they've spent nearly 2 years building up." "Knowing that there are only hundreds of thousands of people and a very small community, in contrast, the watercress community, which already has about 70 million users, is still being questioned by investors whether there is a successful business model." And the uncertainty of product managers, from another perspective, is more likely to be unexpected growth in the search for mobile internet platforms or new products--and that's why investors are willing to gamble. But what I discussed with Zhou Yuan was not success, but how a product manager returned to himself, looking for his own "beginner" (as Zhou Yuan wrote in knowledge), and then started to understand his own user's process as the origin. In this process, the product is perfect, in fact, the product manager is the personal growth of the logo. "Plainly, every product manager has to find motivation for his actions." "Farewell," said Zhou Yuan to me.