1. Demand analysis ability
The core ability of a product manager is demand analysis. Without user needs, no matter how beautifully designed the product is, it will not be recognized by customers. If a lot of manpower, material resources, financial resources, and time are invested before the product is launched, but no one wants the developed product, then all the early investment will be in vain. What is needs analysis? Requirements analysis considers what users need. Before the emergence of QQ, the most popular chat methods were web-based local chat rooms such as NetEase Chat Room and Zhanjiang Bihai Yinsha Chat Room. However, chat rooms had a drawback and were unable to establish point-to-point user communication. QICQ (the predecessor of QQ) was the first point-to-point, one-to-many chat software, also called a network pager. It integrated chat, public chat rooms, single-point file transfer and other functions. Its emergence solved the problem that people lacked at that time. The need for communication tools.
How to do needs analysis?
Not all user demands are demands
In the user demand analysis stage, the user demand information collected through demand collection channels is often scattered, unfocused, and not logical. We need to seize the core from these discrete demand points, combine the actual use scenarios of the product, and extract the core user needs based on the ultimate purpose of serving users.
American car king Henry Ford famously said, "If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me: a faster horse." Of course, users cannot tell Mr. Ford, They need cars. What the user says "want a faster horse" should be understood as: the user's goal is a faster means of transportation. How to help users achieve this goal is what product designers have to think about. Maybe it's making cars, maybe it's something else. This depends on the judgment of product designers to determine which product can better meet the needs of users.
2. Communication skills
In daily work, product managers play the role of coordinators between various departments. They must not only have product planning, positioning, and execution capabilities, but also Have communication skills. Communication is something that product managers have to do every day. A large part of their daily work is to convey product concepts to leaders or developers and designers and promote project progress.
There is such a joke: A boy has a crush on a girl for a long time. One day in the self-study class, the boy finally got up the courage to write a note to the girl. It said: "Actually, I have been paying attention to you for a long time." After a while, the note came back and it said: "Please! Don't tell the teacher, I promise I will never eat melon seeds again in class!" This is a typical example of ineffective communication. It is said to be ineffective mainly because the boys did not accurately convey the information they wanted to convey to the girls, resulting in misunderstandings by the other party. The prerequisite for effective communication is to achieve a consistent understanding of the information content by all parties.
For example, when product managers communicate with program developers, product managers often use "descriptive" and "descriptive" language to explain their ideas; while program developers often use It is a technical language such as "webshell, SDK, control, component". When communicating like this, it would be strange if there are no problems in the middle. This requires our product managers to understand some professional and technical issues and communicate with the other party in the language of program developers, so that they can be more easily understood by the other party.
3. Know some professional skills
As a product manager, there is no harm in knowing some professional skills. For example, what programming language is used to develop the newly launched Maita software products, PHP, JAVA or Python. After determining the programming language, you also need to know what development framework is used in the entire product project, whether it is a framework developed by the team itself, or a more popular framework on the market. The second is the choice of database. Depending on your business needs, whether to use a relational database such as mysql or a non-relational database such as mongodb, etc.
4. Business sensitivity
Business sensitivity is mainly reflected in the market analysis stage. This ability includes the analysis and grasp of market opportunities, insight and analysis of market demand, etc. Business sensitivity is based on the accumulation of long-term experience. Pay more attention to industry trends, business reviews, and product analysis, and then combine it with your own work practice to understand these viewpoints and gradually form your own way of thinking.
The daily work of a product manager is very complicated, coordinating and taking into account many aspects of work progress, but the product manager has only one ultimate goal: to build a great product with your team. Love our products as much as you love your own children, and you will benefit a lot from growing up with our products.