Start-up companies ' product system: avoiding bureaucracy, first splitting and then combining

Source: Internet
Author: User
Keywords Tencent Alibaba People's network Google Facebook facebook poly-sheng Wan

Since the micro-letter for Tencent lay another beautiful battle, Tencent vice President, Tencent Guangzhou Research and Development department general manager Zhangxiaolong became the domestic it circle of the Reds. Some time ago he answered the question "What is a good user experience?" "was reproduced by many peers. In fact, "product manager" has long been one of the most popular topics, from the "position" turned out, the experience of product managers to share has never stopped.

In the recognized technology threshold is getting lower today, want to make products stand out, is undoubtedly more and more difficult. New products always encounter homogeneous competition, so internet entrepreneurs will focus on a star product manager. These people seem to be holding the golden key.

But we want to discuss the product system, that is, through what structure, process to carry out product drive and implementation, or product managers and other product owners to supervise.

In the "Entrepreneurial State" survey of "product systems", the vast majority of entrepreneurs have mentioned that the transition from a lightweight small team to a need to establish a clear product line, increase the number of products, increase team members, and specialize in subdivision is always a point in time, or even a long time, that is entangled in the problem of the product system:

What kind of product mechanism is suitable for your team?

Should the CEO be the product manager himself? How do you work with the product owner?

Should the establishment of product system be supplemented by the inheritance of corporate culture?

is the product system of a multinational giant such as Facebook or Google too idealistic?

has numerous product manager's Tencent, in the system what point can draw lessons from?

......

This is a different topic for the company, almost every family in the exploration, almost every family have gone through their own detours. As a result, we have searched for entrepreneurs, some of whom have worked for internet companies, as a pawn in their product systems, some as product managers, and no product manager positions after startups.

From their respective product system, we can sum up the following points:

is to set the new project as the project team, which includes designers, engineers, product owners, spite, or functional divisions, each new product by the entire team line combat, this is a very basic problem. Many companies will create "public resources" such as shared designer teams, shared "code base" or some research and development results that can be developed once and for all.

Different business companies will use different institutional approaches, but only if they are capable of cutting the product. Big companies, such as Facebook, seem to be a whole product, in fact, it is split into small functions, each feature of the segmentation, update is also as a new product, the deployment. These minor updates, big features are easy to border, and the CEO's challenge is to have a clear understanding of the boundaries of these products, as well as the deployment and change of the whole game.

When the mobile era arrives, is the development of the mobile end standard, a separate "mobile" group, or is the task of moving the end of the assignment? Many startups have been or are facing this question.

Why set up a product system? The three main objectives are to follow the guiding ideology of Agile Development, a development method that emphasizes segmentation projects to achieve rapid iterations, rapid iteration of the product, improve product driving force, so that colleagues in each position can drive innovation, product first split after the combination, so that the whole product more three-dimensional, business more connected.

Technology and design of pea pod with double drive

Affected by: Google, Facebook features: Project group form, change "product manager" for "product designer"

Oral: Co-founder Wang Junyu (former Google China front-end engineer)

Google's product system, the main driver of the project is engineers, but Google and the Facebook engineer culture is not the same. Facebook's engineers are very product-minded, users need this, and if they have it, Google engineers do it if they can, even if the project doesn't look particularly reliable. Before the financial crisis, Google had a variety of strange projects around the world, like driverless cars, which began to chop off after 2008, but there were new risks.

Google's each project group has a different collocation, the role of everyone is not as clear as the domestic companies, I have been brought to different projects, and constantly rotate, concurrently with various roles. Only engineers are illiquid, they are the real backbone of the project.

For pea pods, the core competition principle is "well done", so I hope that the innovation drive comes not only from technology, but also from design. In this case, the boundaries between the two are blurred, so we simply merge the two responsibilities into the same person: the product designer. At present, the company has six or seven product designers, they have a certain design background, there are better product decision-making capabilities.

The main person responsible for each project is not assigned, but is naturally formed. Some projects, similar to the success rate of the connection between mobile phone and computer, the product designer can not help too much, naturally have an engineer to be responsible for; some features, such as photo Sync, are considered from the perspective of product design, and product designers are better at leading. We don't have a product manager because we don't want the manager to be considered a superior title.

Product System This thing is very important to us, not only the division of labor of products, but also the structure of the entire company. We want to be a company that combines design and technology, which requires a system guarantee. After the system is introduced slowly, up to more than 20 new projects can be released in about a quarter, including five or six larger projects. Normally I would shoot off some new items or go to another group.

We do not want the division of labor too thin, put everyone in the frame within their own scope, outside things can not touch. Why are the job fairs so strict? It's not the strength of this man that you recruit, it's his brain. You can think of different brains as different CPUs, you need to dispatch these CPUs to do the job you specify, and if you limit his brainpower, he loses his ability to judge independently and is a detriment to overall productivity.

However, the premise of this system is to ensure transparency. For example, we are divided into several product lines according to the media, PC-side, Andro, server-side and so on, often have some products need three media to do together. More and more companies, information asymmetry will be more serious, my task is to let everyone understand our main line, in the idea of the time not too divergent, improve the efficiency of internal cooperation.

For example, there is a team now trying to put a bunch of cards on the wall, to tell all the colleagues about the project schedule; We have a weekly plenary meeting to answer all the questions we have asked; the design team will do two design discussions per week, look at the different products of the company, and contribute to the design advice. Our mail is also used very hard, and may try to use a weekly report.

In addition, we do not want to be Google, Tencent this product of many companies, but also want to be Facebook or Twitter, the product line is very clear companies. Before our every project is called "Pea pod xxx", also has the son brand, such as "pea-Pod mobile elf", "Pea-pod Guardian elf", last year we put the back of this together removed, are called "Pea pod", the user is simplified, the company is also simplified, I hope we do not feel that they are doing a separate product.

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