We can learn from the Internet giants

What are you going to learn from the giants such as Tencent and Facebook?

Qu Lin

After WeChat laid a beautiful battle for Tencent and another Board, Zhang Xiaolong, the vice president of Tencent and general manager of Tencent Guangzhou R & D department, transformed himself into a Red Man in the domestic IT circle. Some time ago, he "know almost" answered "What is a good user experience?" The problem has also been reproduced by many colleagues. But in fact, the "product manager" has long been one of the most popular topics in the know, and since the "post" turned out, the experience sharing on product manager has never stopped.

In today's increasingly low recognized technology threshold, if you want to stand out from the product, it is obviously more and more difficult things. And new products will always encounter homogenization of the competition, so Internet entrepreneurs will look to focus on becoming a celebrity product manager. These people seem to hold a golden key.

However, we want to discuss the issue of product system, that is, through which architecture, process for product-driven and implementation, or for product managers and other product managers to supervise.

In the "entrepreneurial state" for the "product system" survey, most entrepreneurs mentioned that from the lightweight small team, the need to establish a clear product line, increase the number of products, increase team personnel, specialized thin Points, there is always a point in time (or even a long period of time), will tangle the question of the product system:

What kind of product mechanism is suitable for their own team?

Should the CEO be the product manager? How to tie in with the product owner?

Is it necessary to supplement the inheritance of company culture by establishing product system?

Is the product system of multinational giants such as Facebook and Google too idealistic?

With countless product manager Tencent, what point in the system can learn from?

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This is a topic that varies from company to company, with almost every one exploring, and almost every one of them has gone its own way. As a result, we looked for some entrepreneurs, some of whom worked for the Internet big company, became a pawn in their product system. Some were product managers. After starting a business, they did not set a position as a product manager.

From their own product system, we can conclude the following entry points:

It is a very basic question to set up a new project as a project team, including designers, engineers, product owners, or the functional departments. Each new product is fought by the entire team. Many companies use this as a source of "public resources," such as a shared team of designers, a common "code base," or some research and development that can be developed once and for all.

Different business companies will use different systems, but the premise is the ability to cut the product. A big company like Facebook, which looks like a whole product, actually splits it into smaller functions, where each function is split and the updates are redeployed as new products. These small updates, great features are easily borne on the ground, and the challenge for CEOs is to clearly understand the boundaries of these products, as well as the overall game's deployment and changes.

Mobile era, mobile development into a standard, as a separate "mobile" group, or the task of disassembling the mobile terminal? Many start-ups have been or are facing this question.

Why set up a product system? The three main goals are to enable rapid iteration of products based on the guiding principles of "agile development," a development approach that emphasizes the rapid iteration of cutting projects, and to improve product drivers so that each Position colleagues can drive innovation; the first product after the split combination, so that the entire product more three-dimensional, more business contacts.

Pea pod technology and design dual drive

Affected by: Google, Facebook Features: Project team form, change "Product Manager" as "Product Designer"

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

Google's product system, the project's main driver is an engineer, but Google and Facebook's engineer culture is not the same. Facebook engineers thinking pretty product, users need this thing, if there is this technology to go into action; Google engineers can do to achieve the technology, even if the project does not seem particularly tricky. Before the financial crisis Google has a variety of strange projects around the world, similar to driverless cars, cut off some after 2008, but there will be a new pop.

Each of Google's project teams has a different mix, everyone's role is not as clear as the domestic company, I was brought to a different project, kept rotating, serving a variety of roles. Only engineers are less mobile, they are the real backbone of the project.

The core principle of competition for pea pods is "how well it works," so I hope that innovation drives not only from technology, but also from design. In this case, the boundaries between the two are obscure, so we simply merge the roles of both into one and the same person: product designer. The company has six or seven product designers, they have a certain design background, as well as better product decision-making ability.

The main person in charge of each project is not assigned, but naturally formed. Some projects are similar to improving the success rate of connection between a mobile phone and a computer. Product designers can not help too much. Naturally, an engineer will be responsible. Some functions such as photo synchronization are considered from the viewpoint of product design. Products, Designers will be better at leading. We do not have a product manager because we do not want a "manager" to be considered a superior Title.

The product system This matter is very important to us, not only the division of products, but also the structure of the entire company. We want to be a design and technology company, in which case we need an institutional guarantee. After the introduction of the system, there will be as many as two dozen new projects released quarter by quarter, of which five or six are major projects. Usually I will be responsible for killing some new projects, or go to another group to go.

We do not want the division of labor to be too fine, putting everyone in our own sphere, beyond which we can not touch. Why everyone's recruitment will be so strict? You are not striving for this person, but his mind. You can think of different people's minds as different CPUs. You need to schedule these CPUs to do the job you specified. If you limit his brainpower, he loses his ability to make independent judgments and is detrimental to overall productivity .

However, the premise of this system is to ensure transparency. For example, we are divided into several product lines according to media, PC-side, Android-side, server-side, etc. There are often some products that need three media to do together. Increasing company, asymmetric information will be more serious, my task is to let everyone understand what our main line is, do not think too much time in Idea, improve the efficiency of internal cooperation.

For example, one project team is now trying to put a bunch of cards on the wall to tell all colleagues about the progress of the project; we have a plenary meeting every week to answer all the questions people ask; the design team makes twice a week design Discuss, look at the company's other different products, contribute to the design of the views. Our e-mail is also used quite wild, and may later try to use the weekly.

In addition, we do not want to be a multi-product company such as Google and Tencent, but also want to become a Facebook or Twitter company whose product line is very clear. In the past, each of our projects was called "pea pod xxx" and also had sub-brands such as "Pea Pod Mobile Wizard" and "Pea Pod Guardian Elf". Last year we removed the latter one, called "Pea Pods" , The user is simplified, the company is also simplified, I hope we do not feel like being an independent product.