What is the Internet product

In the actual consumption process, when you mention the word "product", a very clear entity emerges in most of the human brain. But in the internet industry, "product" is very abstract: first, the Internet products usually refers to software, rather than physical; second, the software is not usually installed on your computer, but it runs directly on the remote server, or even in the abstract cloud.

Therefore, most web companies because of the size of the site is too large, we need to artificially split it into many small "products." The Web sites of large web companies are generally split into many (usually dozens of) small "products" that are structured only to accommodate internal organizational requirements (organizational needs), which ordinary users are unaware of.

In earlier articles I mentioned the key point of splitting a large web site into multiple manageable modules. Now, I want to talk about the product: What do we mean when we refer to the product? The product here can refer to the entire site or to one of the modules.

I think the object of discussion today is very important. I think most teams just work intuitively. They define the product and organize the team is unreasonable, directly caused the good product "Dystocia". After interviewing such teams, I think it might be possible to improve the status quo by making people aware of what products are.

I define typical web company products like this:

Product = User's overall experience = function + Design + Profit + Content

-function refers to what the product can do.

-Design refers to interactive design, visual design and industrial design (for physical devices).

-profitability refers to the profit model. may be various forms of advertising, donations or transactions.

-Content can be original, provided by the user, or a combination of both.

Although seemingly simple, no rocket manufacturing technology so profound mystery, but for me, there are two key points:

1. The appearance and function of the product are indivisible and they should be considered as a whole.

2. The product owner of the website must balance the relationship between function, design, content and profit.

For example:

-If the designer is not working on the same front as the product manager or the engineer, then everyone's job is hard to carry out.

-If the site staff is divided into two teams, one team is responsible for the development of products to provide users with value, and another team responsible for marketing, you will find it difficult to optimize the overall user experience, and even cause a conflict of interest between the two parties.

-If you focus only on functional development and ignore the creation of content, you will not feel the benefits of consolidation.

Prompted：

-In an e-commerce, the definition of "product" in addition to the above four points, but also includes order fulfillment (fulfillment), commodity packaging, customer service, return replacement strategy. Also, we often call the goods sold on the website "goods" to avoid confusion with the "products" mentioned here.

-In media companies, editors are the creators of content, and content is an integral part of the product.

-At the same time, the company also needs to have a specialized product team (see the following article for details), and the team's "performance" is measured by the product scorecard (Products scorecard, details see subsequent articles).

As a product manager, designer, or developer in the Internet industry, if you can look at product features, designs, profits and content with a systematic perspective, you will benefit from it.