Operations three major thinking, product thinking, scenario thinking and platform thinking are indispensable

　　When doing e-commerce operations, thinking is very important. If you just know how to work hard, then you may not be able to do e-commerce. If you understand thinking and operation, then you may succeed.

　　In this article, let’s talk about the three major thinking of e-commerce operations, namely: product thinking, scenario thinking and platform thinking .

　　Product thinking

　　The so-called product thinking is mainly divided into two parts: the core purpose oriented towards user needs and the work path oriented towards iterative optimization .

　　User requirements

　　Many people who make products often fall between two difficulties: is the product mainly based on user needs or is the company's profit-oriented?

　　At first glance, the two seem to be in conflict. However, in essence, these two are just a sequence of relationships. The birth of a product must be to solve the needs of a certain type of people, and the meaning of the existence of a product must be that it can become a tool to solve a certain type of needs.

　　Historical experience has proved that no one can create a trend. Shared power banks, shared umbrellas, shared stools, and the "pigs" who are trying to ride the wind in the sharing economy piled up by capital have long disappeared in the chaos.

　　From this point of view, the core capabilities of products and operations are shared: insight into user needs .

　　It should be noted that the insights here have special meanings: the user itself does not know what they need, and the product or operation needs to penetrate the surface data to see the real needs behind it (a analogy between nails and holes).

　　Although Gustav's "The Moon" has been in the communication school, the idea that the masses are mediocre has long disappeared with the era of Magical Cantonese Theory. However, from a group perspective alone, there are actually few users who know what they want. For most people, there is just a vague idea, and product thinking is an Occam razor, which requires all the fuzzy phantoms to meet the essence of demand.

　　As the most direct contact of users, operations can not only conduct user analysis through data, but also describe real user portraits and understand their real needs in daily interactions with users.

　　Only after you have clarified your needs can you prescribe the right medicine. Otherwise, I would have worked hard to organize an event, with few participants and few forwarding; as for turning new recruits into promotion of activity, and turning promotion of activity into revenue. Not every time I have such a lucky adventure to miss the enemy and defeat him.

　　Of course, if you break it down, user needs can also be divided into three aspects: positive and negative. The positive side is the types of self-growth, functional satisfaction, learning, participation in charity, etc. The focus of operation can be on obtaining dry goods and issuing social currency .

　　One dollar painting purchase and ice bucket challenges can all be classified as such. However, it is undeniable that positive demand is closely related to the economic foundation, and is more urgent than positive demand in third- and fourth-tier cities, urban and rural areas, first- and second-tier cities.

　　As for negative demand, it is just a simple and "positive" meaning that there is no praise or criticism. This type of demand may be appropriate to apply Zhou Hongyi’s “ Seven Deadly Sins Theory ”.

　　The so-called seven deadly sins refer to arrogance, jealousy, anger, laziness, greed, lust and gluttony . These desires are rooted in human origins, and are both the driving force that drives people forward and the source of weaknesses in human nature.

　　In actual use, the Seven Deadly Sins tend to be more on user psychology than on actual needs. For example, the VIP membership system and food broadcasts are based on jealousy and gluttony, while P2P and shared bicycles are based on greed. Although the p2p and long-term rental sectors have frequently exploded recently, there is no right or wrong, it only depends on the original intention of the creator. As an operator, sometimes, in addition to withdrawing customers, merchants, and users, we should think thoroughly about the essence of people.

　　Distribution can be done, fission can be done, and even data-level operations are occasionally forced to do it. However, when people are born with good nature, they should become the principle that operators uphold.

　　Optimization Iteration

　　If you call it by another name, then optimization iteration can also be replaced by growth hackers. It is necessary to trace the origin that the growth hacker here refers to its original meaning and does not include Chinese gameplay such as traffic pool and induce sharing.

　　The essence of optimization iteration lies in updating awareness. Users are constantly changing, and user needs are constantly changing, so products and operations are constantly changing.

　　The fundamental purpose of optimization iteration is to keep pace with the times at different stages of the product, better meet user needs and improve user experience.

　　For operations, small-scale iterative testing based on A/B testing and MVP principles are used to make operation adjustments through data feedback. The fundamental purpose is to adjust the communication channels so that the two parties (products and users) can communicate better without being infected by redundant noise and decoding errors lead to transmission obstacles and barriers.

　　Communication is always a dynamic process, and so is operation. In the process of dynamic testing, life cycle management is introduced to form the metabolic function of operational work.

　　The thinking of optimization iteration is that when a product is launched, it is not a complete state, but an initial state, and it is to continuously improve itself in operation and product iteration. Like people, products are constantly growing, and we need to give different stimulations at different stages.

　　If the pirate model focuses on user operations, then optimization iteration focuses on the operation of the product itself, which focuses on the actual sexual functions of the product.

　　For operators, to some extent, the product is a planning plan written by themselves and the product department. This planning plan is constantly optimized into version 1.0 and version 2.0 in the process of practice, and is constantly revised and upgraded.

　　Scene thinking

　　When I have no inspiration for writing an operation plan countless times, I always use this trick: return to the user itself and restore the initial scene.

　　After the flashes of life and creation are faded, the scene can be simply understood as a fragment of time and space. In "A Chinese Odyssey", Supreme Treasure watched the sunset warrior and Zixia standing in confrontation on the top of the city. This is a scene.

　　The core of the scene lies in time, place, characters and behavior, and the first three are all paving the way for behavior. Take the above scene as an example: In this scene, Supreme Treasure, Sunset Warrior and Zixia Fairy are characters, the location is the city head, and the time node is Supreme Treasure is about to Journey to the West.

　　If we understand the personality of Supreme Treasure (user portrait), we can basically judge the behavior caused by such a scene - Supreme Treasure possesses the Sunset Warrior and kisses Zixia. For an audience member who goes to the cinema to watch this movie, we can launch a potential user who has a desire for love and is a love story.

　　The important role of scene thinking is to restore user behavior and explore the reach of products and services from the user's perspective. But having scene thinking is not achieved overnight, it requires at least three points of support: user idiots, user experience maps and shelf thinking.

　　User idiot refers to a user who quickly abandons his operator identity and stereotypes when performing user scenario simulations and restores himself to a user who is about to perform a certain behavior. At this moment, I knew nothing about what was about to happen and did not carefully analyze the scene data.

　　Everything is based on choices and decisions made in a natural state (this is one of the advantages of field surveys over laboratory methods). Thinking of oneself as a user idiot is to some extent treating oneself as the object of field surveys, and to the greatest extent avoiding the influence of Heisenberg's inaccurate effect (observation is variable).

　　User experience maps are generally used in the field of interaction design. In operation, they use time as nodes to restore users' different behaviors in different spaces.

　　Taking the travel scenario as an example: restoring the user map can be simply summarized as before, during and after the trip. Here, the object of decomposition is only used before the trip. Specifically, it can be divided into: looking at the strategy - formulating a travel plan - choosing ticket purchase tools - booking hotels and transportation - checking the weather and safety of the travel place (whether an earthquake, flood, public security, etc.) - preparing travel supplies - travel.

　　The more detailed the travel steps are, the more service points you can provide. When the small scenes are broken down, we can enter the map as a user idiot, imagine what problems we will encounter in these links and what needs we have, so as to prescribe the right medicine.

　　As for shelf thinking, it was proposed by Hua and Hua and is generally used in product packaging design. There are three core elements of shelf thinking: information environment, competitors and virtual buyers.

　　Shelf thinking simulates the actual purchase scenario. When designing products, you must first understand that your products are placed on the shelves.

　　The shelves themselves are information environments, while the products are purchase information. On the shelves, not only do their own products, but also their competitors' products. Now, there is a virtual buyer standing next to the shelves, and the only channel that operators can access to purchase is the product.

　　This situation is very different from the user's map experience. The latter starts from the user, while the shelf thinking starts from the competitive perspective and supplements the existence of competitors. Although there are also sections for competitive product analysis in the product, it ultimately uses static models and data analysis, and is essentially a scenario-extraction.

　　Only by mastering shelf thinking and restoring the existence of competitors in the scene can we avoid falling into blind spots. Sometimes, when a product is in a deadlock, use shelf thinking to restore the scene and find that it is not a functional problem of the product or an operational strategy problem, but the information that reaches the user is too weak (the shelf products flash by, and the information cannot be retained).

　　After understanding the nature of scene thinking, scene derivation can be performed . Liang Ning once quoted a sentence:

　　All traditional business models are worth reworking in the Internet environment.

　　The Internet is an enhancer of services and an amplifier of scenarios. Internet operations need to combine scenes with the Internet and recreate scenes.

　　For example: a restaurant can develop an interactive mini-game when users are waiting for meals so that waiting is no longer boring. Or set up an instant community, and users who are waiting for meals can join. The restaurant will send red envelopes regularly and hold a red envelope series. Use this method to carry out community operations. When the restaurant releases new products, it will be notified through groups and friends circles, and forward and draw lucky users to taste for free.

　　These actions are completely outside the normal path of the user, but through combination with the Internet, many long-tail needs can be derived. After all, Baudrillard had long predicted that consumption in modern society has long been separated from the function of the object itself and is focused on the symbolic sense.

　　Platform thinking

　　What is the essence of the platform?

　　Maybe everyone has their own opinion.

　　For me, the essence of the platform is to connect with needs and services . Taobao connects to purchase needs and product services; Meituan connects to food needs and O2O services.

　　In this process, the platform mainly undertakes two responsibilities: formulating rules and maintaining rules . Of course, in the early stages of the platform, we still have to look for both BC. When a platform runs spontaneously, it can form an ecosystem and naturally produce other species.

　　Putting platform thinking into operation can often solve the biggest constraint - resource problem.

　　Many new platforms often return in a desperate situation because they are not attractive enough. If you use platform thinking to solve the problem, you can perform the following decomposition:

　　How many methods are there to add n numbers equal to 100?

　　The answer is n types. If 100 is equal to the kol you want to invite, then with the help of platform thinking, the best way is 1+1+2+3+4+5+6…

　　In Kol, Big Kol has its own circle, and Small Kol also has its own circle, but between the two circles, there must be cross-cutting kols. They are the leaders in Kol and the tail of the crane in Kol.

　　From this perspective, it is completely feasible to extend from small kol (1) to large kol (100). In the early stage, the platform can first contact the small kol with a level 1. If the small kol is accumulated, it can develop into the kol with a level 2. As long as the platform has a 2, then the kol with the same level will be quickly accumulated.

　　The difficulty of changing from 2 to 3 is much smaller than the difficulty of changing from 0 to 100. In this battle, the small kols with levels 1, 2, 3... (mainly their fan group) were placed at one end of the balance, constantly exchanged for the existence of the other end of the balance; each time they exchanged, the weight on the user side would increase in multiples, while the difficulty of fighting for advanced kols would decrease in multiples. Until the end, a level of 100 kol will be added to the platform.

　　Not only that, platform thinking can also be used in joint activities, such as: we want to hold a joint activity for reading and want to invite Luo Zhenyu to stand on the platform. At this time, we should look for a reading account that is comparable to Luo Zhenyu, such as Fan Deng’s reading club to communicate.

　　Both parties to the resources must be equal, and a certain undetermined weight must be cast out as a fixed weight.

　　To a certain extent, platform thinking is balance thinking, and users and services are placed on both ends of the balance. If you want to increase users, add weight on the server side; if you want to expand services, add weight on the user side.

　　Of course, platform thinking can only be used in difficult times in the early stages of entrepreneurship. Its real purpose is to build a platform and truly provide a place to connect users and services, rather than a skill in operation.