Product manager above the altar-the application skills of acquiring memory

In the past two days, there was a news screen: the product manager and technology of Ping An Property & Casualty app development team fought, which was the real fighting and bleeding. There are pictures to prove it:

In this hot summer, watching and beating, of course, is the excitement of the people waiting for me to eat melons, not to mention why it is so bloody. So everyone made up a lot of plots:

I was surprised to see the plan of pupil reflex, and then I would roll around when I saw the brain wave scan. . . However, the parties obviously did not feel this happiness.

What hatred can make two gentle little white collars fight in the office? Don't they know that this will affect their personal image? Aren't you afraid of being a stain on your career? Sure enough, they were fired immediately after the incident broke out. The meaning of the peace statement:

It seems that this situation is an example, a personal quality problem. At most, hr recruitment is not strict, and the company has no responsibility, just saying that they are temporary workers.

However, we eat melons, not vegetarians, and have long been indifferent to the contradiction between product managers and technology development, otherwise we would not have made up so many happy bridges. I wonder if peace is a pure land. In short, the online search for "technical contradictions of product managers" yielded as many as 600,000 results. What caused this situation? Are product managers and technology really natural enemies?

Actually, it is not.

Many years ago, there was no product manager in the software industry. It was called a demand analyst at that time. Demand is dominated by customers. The analyst's main job is to interview customers and then logically organize the requirements into documents or models that customers and technical developers can understand. They are the bridge between customers and technicians, and ordinary senior analysts will gain the respect of both sides at the same time.

Since the Internet tide hit, especially after the mobile Internet swept all traditional industries, the situation has changed. Analysts have become product managers, and real big customers have become thousands of small users in Qian Qian, so we can't interview them one by one. At most, you can only send a questionnaire and find hundreds of small samples for research. Of course, the rich local tyrant team can also make AB version, that is, without knowing whether a function is good or not, simply make two versions, one with new functions and the other without, and release them to two groups of users respectively, and judge whether they are popular or not from user feedback. In addition, if the functions to be realized have been realized by mainstream products in the industry, then refer to the existing implementations, because they are likely to meet the needs of users.

However, after the emergence of some product gods, this standard action of doing user research and getting user feedback has gradually become a low-X behavior-because "real" product managers should surpass users and peers:

The success of the iphone is so dazzling that Mr. Qiao himself has died for many years, and his "distorted reality field" is still everywhere: many people still think that as long as Apple does it, it is right. Nowadays, apples with a market value of over one trillion yuan are edible oil for fire and flowers. Isn't this all thanks to the great product manager Steve Jobs? It was he who stood at the crossroads of science and technology and humanities, pointed the way, led us ordinary people and told us that there was such a product. So this is what we need in our hearts!

The rise of the penguin empire is simply shocking. Wechat has become a part of the human body and is indispensable. Even the richest man, ali dad; The 300-fold return of Tencent's stock makes small investors envy vomiting blood. Isn't this brilliance all planned by Zhang Xiaolong, the super product manager? He is the legendary hermit, peerless master sweeping monk, who jumped out of the Three Realms and watched the world of mortals roll with laughter, and WeChat was born with laughter. When he came to power, he became relaxed and spent three or four years in the Jianghu, so the world was unified.

This is the product manager! So the bosses with bad business found that the core problem of their own enterprises is the lack of good product managers; Investors believe that the dazzling resume of the product manager is the key to whether the team is worth investing in; The product manager was shocked, and his biggest shortcoming was that he paid too much attention to customer feedback. It turns out that meditation is the ultimate means to obtain the essence of demand!

PM (the abbreviation of product manager) has become a gold mine post, and the market is crazy about it, and various trainings and books are also emerging one after another. There is a book, simply called "God-like Product Manager".

This kind of thinking develops to the extreme, that is, PM becomes the de facto CEO-within the team-he decides everything about the product, but is not responsible for the operation data-that is the business of the operation team, not the product quality-that is the business of the technical team, with a real high position and light responsibility.

So we have seen the emergence of all kinds of wonderful products. They are either busy stacking functions or keen to "create" requirements. The representative of this kind of wonderful work in the near future is the new version of "Get" app.

The following is the dividing line obtained by tucao.

First of all, I want to declare that it is an excellent knowledge service platform with many excellent courses. I have subscribed a lot myself and made many like-minded friends. Its classic column "Luo Ji Thinking" can even be said to have inspired me in the early days.

However, the difference in the user experience of the app is also recognized, which can be said to be completely below average.

First of all, it has two classic problems from birth:

Playlists cannot be adjusted in order. You should know that any knowledge payment product based on audio is a music player at the bottom. Have you ever seen a player that can't adjust the playback order? What's more, this listening course needs to be sorted out more than music. In an application, the default order is reversed. If you decide to listen in reverse order from the beginning (that is, listen to the new lesson first, then listen to the old lesson), then you can only listen in reverse order; It is estimated that few people are willing to listen to the lecture backwards, but if you want to listen to the last few episodes of a course in order (the course will be updated every day, and the ones you haven't heard will of course come later), it will be miserable. You can only drop down the course list from the beginning and watch it scroll from page to page until the last page. A big column with more than 500 episodes like Luo Ji's thinking feels like a fool every time it is operated.

Let's talk about collection first, let's not talk about what apps provide. Collection is the basic function, right? After listening to a class, I feel good. If I want to review or share it in the future, I will have the motivation to collect. However, the hidden depth of "My Collection" in the library is appalling. Please see the screenshot:

So that after I found it once under the guidance of others, I forgot it again and needed to look it up again. This is really a shame for a programmer! I just want to ask, why is "My Collection" not in the "My Collection" label? Is this app actually a puzzle game? !

What's more strange is that most courses have audio and text manuscripts at the same time, and they need to be collected separately? Moreover, the collected manuscripts are well arranged according to the course, but the audio is piled up together! Is this to avoid duplication and let users have fun exploring?

I don't know how many people have responded to the above two classic questions. Although the app is frequently updated, it is determined not to change. A recent major revision was highly anticipated by Luo Pang. Let's not talk about how ugly the revised logo and style are. The key is to directly disrupt the curriculum order!

You can't listen to the class in the order the teacher told you, but listen to the column given by the app. It will divide a class into many small columns according to an internal rule. As a result of this division, you don't want to attend classes on a certain day of the month, and you don't want to attend classes happily from beginning to end. Some teachers put eggs in their courses once a week, and now they are all assigned to the same column. What's it like to listen to eggs? At the beginning of each episode, you will be hit by "We talked about xxx this week", and then you will think, "Holy shit, which week is he talking about?"

For this "product upgrade", the user's reaction can no longer be described as anger. To borrow one of Lu Xun's big words, it is "leaving anger".

Can you feel that deep sense of powerlessness? And what is Luo Pang's response to this?

Yes, you read it right, and you said it clearly, "I won't listen!" " "We are working on a century-old project, so don't make noise here, you birds." ? I really don't know how to get the "30 lectures on Liang Ning products" subscribed by as many as 6.5438+0.5 million people on the platform. Have Luo Pang and Qingyi heard of it themselves?

Who gave the courage to make the app despise users so much? It is the god perspective of the boss and product manager, and that kind of god-like satisfaction makes them feel omnipotent and is the king who leads the market. In fact, people attach too much importance to the role of star product managers. The success of Jobs and Zhang Xiaolong is unrepeatable. They have their own unique ability background and market opportunities:

* Steve Jobs is the boss and the first generation entrepreneur. He used all his wisdom and lost entrepreneurial experience to make products. Even without the later iphone, his iMac and Pixar are classic cases that can be loaded into business textbooks.

* Although Zhang Xiaolong is not the boss of Tencent, he is also the first generation entrepreneur. Foxmail, which he founded, is still the largest mail client in the world. He is a general invited by Ma Hua Teng to Tencent, and he has enough trust and respect from Xiao Ma. Even so, his WeChat was put into the market after winning with another internal development team PK.

* There are individual differences between people. Joe Wang and Zhang Xiaolong are both geniuses, with keen insight far superior to others. They are humanoid quantum computers that can intuitively analyze "big data".

More importantly, if there is a PM with the same talent as Jobs or Zhang Xiaolong and the full trust of the big boss, will he succeed? Hope is actually very slim, because the environment is different, and all external environments are changing rapidly. Even if Jobs is resurrected, it may not be possible to recreate a star product. The success of iphone and WeChat, to some extent, is a kind of black swan event, which is the result of the complex reaction after the collision of genius's mind, shrewd capital and the subtle mentality of the public.

A truly rational product manager should put down his attitude, admit that he is not a genius, let alone a god, return to the origin of making products, and listen to and sort out customer needs in a down-to-earth manner.

A real boss must first analyze whether his business is product-driven: it is true that some companies are made of excellent products, but not every company is, and some should obviously be business-driven: for example, Meituan and Didi; Others are content-driven, such as Get and Himalaya. Here again, although there are so many things above, they are all aimed at app products, and I still like the content, including Luo Pang. After all, he created this platform and brand, and occasionally "fainting" is excusable.

As a loyal user, I sincerely hope that it can turn over a new leaf and its product manager can take the initiative to step down from the altar. If not, then change it. To obtain such a platform, a normal product manager is enough.