What is operations? Labor around website products

1. What is operation?

From a broad perspective, all manual intervention around website products is called operation. So to a certain extent, I think Internet product companies have only three business departments: product, technology, and operations.

The concept of product operation = operation, but maybe your company or product is based on products and supplemented by operations, so there is no need to separate a lot of people to do operations at this time, so it is Collectively called product operations.

To be more detailed, I divide operations into several categories: market operations, user operations, content operations, community operations and business operations.

Market operation:

Using Marketing as a means to carry out a series of intervention measures for product promotion, exposure, marketing and other behaviors without spending money. It is more common in products that require a certain degree of spending money, but spending money and market behavior are not the same. There are market behaviors that do not cost money, and there are also other operating methods that spend money.

This is often the main operating method for some companies that are close to money, because only those that are close to money and have a complete profit model will continue to expand investment in market operations.

User operation:

People-centered operation method, common in UGC communities, is an operation method that focuses on getting close to users, uniting users, and guiding users. You will find that the website operators are very willing to communicate with users, make jokes, chat, and gossip. Sometimes you can’t tell whether they are users or official staff. For example, Zhihu is like this. Zhou Yuan, Huang Jixin, Chengyuan, ourdearamy.... In the early stage of a product, the active use and intervention of the operators themselves is very important.

Content operation:

There are two approaches. One is to process high-quality content generated by users in the UGC community through editing, integration, optimization, etc. Collaborate with other means of dissemination. This is often done in conjunction with user operations. For example, if you answer a question on Zhihu and the answer is wonderful, Zhihu students will sort out your answer and other people’s answers, and then publish them through Weibo, daily newspapers, and weekly magazines. dissemination by other means, this is content-centered operation.

There is also a type of media products, such as The Paper, Titanium Media, and 36kr, which are also operated with excellent content as the core. What is different from the former is that they collect, edit, organize and write by themselves. There are many ingredients, not necessarily from the user.

(Of course, many students who answered questions on Zhihu were very angry that their articles were plagiarized, reprinted without signature, etc. But in fact, for those students who are engaged in content operation, plagiarism is one of their jobs, so most of them Don’t worry about it. I understand you very well, so plagiarism and reprinting of this article are welcome. No signature is required, but it is updated frequently, so please remember to reprint it in full)

Community operation:

Earlier In 2016, I put community operations and user operations together to talk to others, but later I discovered that this was actually a bit problematic, because operations for UGC users and operations for ordinary community content consumers are two completely different types of work. So I’ll talk about it separately.

Community operations refer to intervention activities for community consumers, such as organizing activities on the entire site, drawing draws, voting, reprinting some good articles to the community to trigger discussions, etc. . The ultimate in this kind of work is to constantly stir up trouble in the community, triggering everyone to complain about each other, and activating the entire community.

(Students who are interested can study nga’s “Spray Fighter Arena”. This model has also been cited by many other forums or communities in recent years, and the effect is quite good)

Business operations:

This type of method is more common in some business B2B products and is divided into two types: BD and sales. Sales means selling products directly, while BD is more of a mutually beneficial cooperation. These are all means, and the purpose is to get users and then retain them. Many enterprise-level products use this operation method as the main means, such as BAT's cloud service products, or attract merchants to settle in, and attract enterprise teams to use this method.

As for operations, or the growth of operating personnel, we must first understand the role that product technology operations play in an Internet product.

Product: come up with something

Technology: come up with something

Operation: put something to use

Strictly speaking, product And operations also have different positioning and boundaries depending on the company, which varies from person to person. Different products have different focuses in these three areas. For example, take BAT, Baidu focuses on technology, Tencent focuses on products, and Alibaba focuses on operations. These are common concepts in the public mind. To some extent, they are all related to the company's initial business and the core business. Of course, if the company is big enough and other parts are also very strong, it won’t be that bad. But some small companies still have early focus.

2. What should operations do?

But when it comes to operations, I think the core psychological quality of all students who are doing operations is:

Don’t push the product and technology, but have the awareness and ability to make people eat it and get good reviews even if they make a piece of shit.

Whether you are a junior editor, Weibo account manager, or operations director, coo, the thing you care about most can only be one thing from beginning to end:

Get users , and then continue to retain them.

All the work you do must be closely centered around this point. Any work (including the work of your team members) must directly or indirectly point to part of this purpose and be responsible for the data results.

It looks simple, but in fact it is not simple. For example, all operations students, please ask yourself, what work you have done in the past month, which work has clear "data results" for this purpose, and which work does not. If the proportion of work without data results is too large, you need to reflect on your work.

This item can be broken down into the following four core links:

1. Find where the users are

User portraits, surveys, and needs analysis Waiting for work, yes, you need to understand your product, even if it is a piece of shit.

2. Get users at an acceptable cost and let them use your product

Market launch, channel expansion, business cooperation, content editing, social media planning activities, etc. , Spending money or not is all for this purpose. Sometimes it is better to spend money to hire professionals to do something by yourself.

3. Let users continue to use your product

User operation, community operation.

4. Keep in touch with users when the product is not in use

Recall, Weibo and WeChat operations, feedback, and business cooperation with other products.

3. The upward trajectory of operations

In my opinion, there is no strict dividing line between junior operations and senior operations.

To a certain extent, if you are in the above four links, you are only responsible for one sub-project of one of them (such as Weibo operation specialist, WeChat operation specialist, content editor, community activity planning, etc. ), that can be defined as primary operations.

Often junior operations are in 2-3-4. 1 You only need to understand and implement it, but you have not yet participated in decision-making. At this time, you are an executor, so just do it in a down-to-earth manner.

To be honest, at this stage, your work is measured in days, and it is very replaceable. I have seen the recruitment data of Lagou, and it is generally between 5-8K. This job is only Worth the price.

When you do better and better, understand the link you are in more and more deeply, and begin to gradually cover the entire link with your ability, you are already considered an intermediate operator. . You may not care about market launch, only about retention, or even about retention, only about repeat purchases/sticky user UGC.

To put it bluntly, as the manager of a certain link in the entire product business chain, you have formed a certain level that cannot be bypassed. This is where your value lies.

At this time, your value is between 8-15K. Unless you are in the core part of the enterprise, you are still replaceable. At this time, start to use weeks as the unit of calculation to consider the effectiveness of your work.

Then as you continue to do it, your abilities are getting bigger and bigger, your vision is getting wider and wider, and you start to figure out how to move upstream and downstream.

For example, if you are a marketing manager, you have begun to consider whether the traffic you have brought can be retained, and you have actively started to cooperate with community operators to do some activities, or if you are a community operations manager, you have planned a community UGC activities, and then proactively coordinate marketers to spread these wonderful UGC to the outer circle, you are constantly expanding the scope of your capabilities.

At this stage, you have advanced to advanced operations, with a wider vision and more resources. The layout that needs to be laid out begins to be calculated in units of months or even longer. Any of your Decisions will affect operations for a long time. The greater the risk, the greater the responsibility.

The core purpose I mentioned before actually has two levels, the first is to attract new customers, and the second is to retain. If you break through from 1 to 2, or from 2 to 1, and do both well , you can start to control the market. According to the different needs of different stages of the product, pay attention to where the breakthrough should be first in the entire operation link at different stages, and use overall consideration to reasonably allocate resources, whether it is money or manpower, it is all in your eyes It is a time when resources can be deployed, regardless of the gains and losses of one city or one place, and when considering problems with a relatively long timeline. You have initially acquired the capabilities of an operations director, and the next step is to be a COO. In some companies, the COO also needs to consider investor relations, PR, deployment of various vendors, and large-scale business cooperation, but these have already entered the company and are not just operations at the product level.

This level is also the most difficult to break through. The bottleneck is that if you have been working hard in one of the fields of "attracting new people" or "retaining old people" before, the longer you work hard, the deeper you will go. , the harder it is for you to jump out and understand another area.

Because the values ??and ways of thinking are completely different. Because the users are completely different, it took you a long time to understand what unfamiliar users think and how they started using your product step by step, while you need to spend almost the same amount of time understanding your familiar users. What features do they have and how can they be used continuously?

Let me give you an extreme example, such as Baidu’s Fengchao system (the backend of search promotion).

If your purpose is to attract new users, you need to let users have this understanding: "It is reliable to advertise on Baidu", and you may have to spend a lot of time instilling "simple" to users. , easy to operate, large traffic, help you make money" these points, this is the focus of attracting new operations.

At this time, in the minds of users, your competitors are Tencent Guangdiantong, Weibo Fanstong, portal banners, and offline advertising systems. And because your users are too "stupid" to understand these points of yours very quickly, you need to work hard at sales, door-to-door, hold various meetings, do case promotions, etc., place advertisements in various places, and paint walls.

And if your purpose is to make people who have already started using Fengchao spend more money, then you not only need to make the user feel good about you, but also make the user feel that it is good for him to be here. . I've seen too many people use Phoenix Nest for a while and then throw it away.

At this time, your thinking dimension has become, how can I let users earn more money from Fengchao and continue to increase investment in balbla. Then you need technical guidance, care about the user's account status, and provide more and better tools. Your competitors or distractions at this time have become internal factors such as sales, customer service, or products, technology, etc. in the previous stage.

These two things are actually mutually exclusive, because from the perspective of attracting new users, you are not afraid of hurting users, because users don’t know you, so there is no harm. In the latter, you may have to harm users and make a game and balance between the interests of users and your interests.

To put it in layman's terms, it's like telling you that this person is so bad at the beginning and asking you to kill him, and then telling you that this person is so good and asking you to save him.

Most people are confused at this point. As a result, they are unable to be ruthless when killing people and worry too much when saving people.

Only when you understand it, can you truly understand the two channels of Ren and Du, and be called a high-level operator.

This is like two sides of the same coin. You must not think that you only need to look at one side, otherwise your development will stop at an operations manager whose annual income will not exceed 200,000. , and once you break through, uncapped positions are waiting for you. Even if you don’t have product capabilities or technical capabilities, you can be a very cool COO, leading a team responsible for recruiting new people or retaining old ones.

I have seen countless people die here. A UGC community product starts advertising when there is nothing, or a product with a great experience cannot inspire praise from users in a timely manner and is used as a market weapon. Spend money to spread the word, but it will be quickly killed by copycats from big factories. There are countless such cases.

Do the right thing at the right time, not everything.

4. Summary of Operators

I think the career development curve of operations is step-like, which is different from the smoother upward curve of products or technologies. When you have time, you can refer to the salaries of Liepin, Lagou and other websites. The span of operations is very wide. There is no need to envy programmers who have very high starting salaries just 1-3 years after graduation. Look at how many positions and how many people an architect with an annual salary of 7 to 8 million can have.

Operation is a job with a very low entry threshold. Low entry threshold means a large population base, so the competition will be very fierce. Every time you move up a rank, you have to accumulate time or money. Operations is the most like fighting. You start out as a small soldier, and then slowly you start to become a veteran. You start to command a small squad, and then a company, battalion, and regiment... out of 100,000 people, in the end there will be a general. , and when you become a general, your victory comes in exchange for human lives. Some people have to be sacrificed, and some people have to be abandoned...

The same is true for operations. Similarly, the success of every company is based on a large number of people who have no career development, no promotion opportunities, no accumulation, and do work without growth day after day. Your decision-making is great, the company succeeds, you get a raise, new business, and growth. But if your decision-making is wrong, you waste countless people's precious time.

If you think of a product as a route, the product is the direction, ensuring that it flies to the destination, and technology is the foundation, ensuring that it does not fall down. But when a company's products have been basically finalized and start to take off , only strong operations can make this product fly higher and faster steadily, and get rid of those competitors who copy your products and learn your technology.

Because in an enterprise, the closest thing to users is operations.