If you want to gain more users and gain effective growth after the product is launched, you need to combine the efforts of business personnel in each link, and the support of the product design layer is also a key aspect. So when the product is in the growth stage, what aspects c

product positioning is easy to understand, which is what services our products want to provide and what value to the target users.

• Douyin -Record a better life;
• Alibaba 's initial product positioning is to make no business difficult in the world;
• JD - Self-operated e-commerce that allows consumers to save money and feel at ease;
• B site-what you are interested in is to be on B site;
• Himalaya -Every second of companionship is love (the above positioning may have been adjusted, mainly for example).

are these things that we often feel very vulgar, but in fact they are the differentiated services these products want to bring to users. It is equivalent to the vision of an enterprise, and product positioning is the vision of this product at this stage. The positioning of

is indeed difficult because it depends on the decision-making of the senior management from a more macro perspective. If this link is not available in the growth period, it will lead to people being able to adjust or keep a close eye on the heels of competitors based on the original basis. It is difficult to make innovative and differentiated content to break through the current bottleneck.

Of course, this product positioning is not unchanging throughout the ages. It will be adjusted according to different product stages and strategic directions. should perform better every time the product and designer complete bold optimization.

3. Find the right goal, find the right direction, and then do things

. Some students may have questions. Can you make a good product design by clarifying these seemingly empty things that cannot be more empty?

First of all, we all know that before doing something, the most important thing is to establish goals and directions, otherwise the aimless deer will collide, spending a lot of time and energy, but not getting the desired result.

becomes more complicated in actual product project work. We not only need goals, but also goals that meet the highest interests of the product, that is, growth goals. Otherwise, no matter how hard you work or work overtime, you will not have any value. The reality is so cruel and ruthless. So a correct growth goal is like a compass throughout the product’s life cycle, helping us avoid detours and reach our destination at different stages.

The first time I learned about the word growth target was from the book " Growth Hacker ". I felt my eyes lit up at that time, which solved the problem that I had been confused for a long time. Growth indicators are quantifiable indicators for product differentiated positioning. It is a sea beacon for everyone, and the direction of everyone's navigation. Only by focusing on growth indicators rather than existing problems can we break through the rules and try every means to improve the indicators, and ultimately achieve "bold innovation and consolidate differentiated product positioning."

What problems will be there when designing according to traditional business processes without a unified growth indicator:

1. The directional information of different functions and positions is not equal, resulting in inaccurate upload and download information. Everyone knows the game you gesture and I guess (several people look at the content of the previous person gestures in order, and the last person guesses the idiom) Just like this game, the idiom guessed by the last person may be the first one. What people want to express is not the same thing... The demands received by
2. emphasize performance too much, and may ignore important work but time cannot be quantified (or short-term unurgent issues); the demands received by
3. have to lose longer-term benefits in order to solve the immediate KPI (the need to tear down the east wall and repair the west wall); the demands received by
4. have conflicts and conflicts in various departments and functional positions due to inconsistent KPIs. There are too many similar problems with

because of the lack of a clear and unified and valuable indicator that can run through all functional departments from top to bottom. The final result is that everyone is very busy, but the product has not developed in a good direction, so it is no longer possible to grow.

's unified growth direction is particularly important for designers. Whether it is interactive design or visual design, has a clear direction for progress. It will not only look at the tasks in front of you and focus on the overall situation, and will not only blindly follow the tasks in front of you and passively output. Designers can also think and take the initiative from a global perspective.

This is particularly important for a designer to realize the real design value. If you keep staring at the KPI in front of you, you can only improve it on the original basis. It is difficult to completely create a brand new thing.

(For example: in order to increase the click rate of banner, try to be attractive as much as possible, but the click rate of banner has increased. However, users found that they were deceived and suddenly developed a repulsive mentality, and they lost more in the next step of conversion.)

So everyone must start from the overall perspective and see whether this indicator is beneficial to the overall growth indicator, otherwise everything they work hard is futile. Therefore, designers should communicate more with the upper class and listen more to the upper class.

Assuming that the differentiated product positioning is: a vertical IT online classroom learning ecosystem platform centered on online learners. Then the growth indicator is an indicator related to the retention and recommendation of online learners.

does not emphasize the number of course viewers here, because the content/instructor popularity of each class will affect the soaring number of viewers, which does not indicate the long-term value of the product, and then makes this indicator a subjective indicator and result indicator. Because subjective indicator data cannot explain any problem, nor can it prove the actual value brought by the product.

Only when objective indicators such as conversion, retention, and recommendation are good can the product bring actual value and indirectly prove that the product experience is good. Some design students will have the opposite opinion: there are too many factors that affect product conversion, retention, and recommendation, which is not something that designers can dominate.

Indeed, this puts higher requirements for designers: we cannot only focus on interface-related adjustments like before, such as whether the banner's pictures look good or not, but we need to take a bird's eye view of the overall situation and make judgments and promotions on factors that can affect the improvement of indicators.

4. How to use the "compass" of growth indicators to find the correct design direction?

First, the relationship between product positioning, growth indicators and design directions is explained: product positioning represents a long-term strategic direction and includes growth indicators and design directions. Growth indicators are the quantitative and extensible extension of the objective data form of product positioning.

growth indicators can guide the design direction and verify the design results (note: product positioning will not change easily, it is a long-term value direction of a product. However, growth indicators can be adjusted according to different product life cycles and different concerns, etc.

The following is the relationship between them:

designers ( interaction designers , visual designers ) can better make designs that meet the direction of the product through growth indicators as the focus point, and can avoid many detours.

and the designs made will be more evidence-based and convincing, because this design is not designed from the designer's own subjective thinking, but is designed with objective quantifiable growth indicators as the starting point. From then on, designers can be confident and not afraid of being again Others challenged.

is still taking the previous project as an example: at that time, the project of scrap recycling products was responsible for the project. The senior management still regarded youth in first- and second-tier cities as the main target user group through directional adjustments. By increasing the operation of this user group's new activities (the cost of attracting new products is very high, and there are two days of online activities promotion, new people can get a 5 yuan red envelope when registering and binding a bank card) and the locations in concentrated work and offices have increased the increase in delivery equipment. After about a month of hard work, the analysis of new user registration data has improved a lot.

But the problem has also come. According to the data, we found that 70% of users have no sign of reuse for a week after the first registration. Real gold and honeysuckle has gone out but did not achieve the expected results.

So the growth indicator at that stage at that time was:

1. User activity (Awaken users' enthusiasm for use);
2. recommended invitations (in addition to spending money to acquire customers, another low-cost way to acquire customers urgently needs).After the growth indicator of

is established, the subsequent work should be based on this. From the launch of new functions to the button style, everything should focus on the core of differentiated competition and the basis for decision-making and measurement of growth indicators.

If a designer does not understand the reasons for the overall growth, just literally, it may be to strengthen and highlight the recommendation invitation button on the app, put the price more obviously, operate the banner more fascinating, optimize the usage process... and so on. These cannot be said wrong, but how should we do it based on long-term growth indicators?

5. Insight into user differences and discover growth breakthrough points

In the stage of products and other competitors competing for market share, in principle, every product design optimization iteration is to gain greater advantages in competition and defeat opponents. However, traditional indicators are used to improve with the conventional idea of ​​"discovering problems - solving problems - achieving goals - verifying". This cannot be said to be wrong, but it is difficult to innovate. The fundamental task of products in the growth stage is to "boldly innovate and consolidate differentiated product positioning." Homogeneous content is difficult for users to remember. Traditional methods can be improved, but it is difficult to essentially surpass the other party. How does

understand user differences? Here we take the growth indicator of improving user recommendation invitations as an example:

differential insight method (PS: Different from the product early guidance report of professional research students, the ultimate goal of the survey is to explore and understand user differentiation and propose design growth assumptions. This research method is short and concise, with a short cycle, clear goals and fast implementation): Before

started the survey, we locked in the scope of research, conducted a survey on the youth groups in first-tier cities to understand user characteristics, and helped the product grow further. Let’s take a look at the reasons why these users are the first to use the product and other inner demands.

The following are the steps and methods for questionnaire interviews in the actual real scenarios I participated in:

1) Selecting representative users

First of all, you must select representative users, otherwise it will go in the opposite direction. The so-called representative is the part of the candidates who are most suitable for improving product growth that can be improved by combining current product data analysis.

For example:

1. Shopping frequently and people who can generate a large amount of idle waste (product packaging boxes, beverage packaging boxes, etc., cosmetics, clothes, electronic waste, etc.).
2. Because the offline delivery equipment is mostly resettlement areas with property maintenance, CBD business office buildings, etc., people who work and living places are nearby. There is no fixed limit on the number of interviews, either 20 or 40. The most important thing is whether you can see valuable information in the process.

2) Chat-style interviews plus user behavior insights

Because it was not an invitation-based interview at that time, it was a choice of weekend breaks, weekdays off work hours, locations near communities and office buildings, etc. (At that time, there were ground pushers on each delivery machine, so it helped us a lot). At the beginning, it was accompanied by a paid mechanism, and the visit was distributed with small gifts. Sometimes, many young people came to chat with curiosity (it was not as difficult as they were originally thought).

Generally speaking, interviews have a general scope. You will write an outline before, but you will not rely too much on the outline. It is best to conduct it in a chat form to have a deeper understanding of the user.

(toC product interview outline reference: motivation for use, behavior and preferences for use, perception and recommendation intention, work and life status, values... for reference only) The following is a refinement of user portraits sorted through interviews. But at that time, I always felt that there was something missing, and later it was found through user behavior insights, which eventually played a key role.

6. "Insight" must not be on the surface. To explore the potential demands and subtle psychological activities behind users

The important thing is to explore the things behind them. Once you find the "clues" you must dig deep.The key points of the investigation and insights in

were not found in routine problems. They were obtained through "deep digging on the spot" and careful observation of their behavior (this process is like solving a case and finding clues, which is very interesting). For example, solving the key points of the core insights in improving the growth point of user recommendation invitations is obtained by discovering the behavior of users. These "little Jiujiu" hidden deep in their hearts are rarely told you. This is the process of the "Xiaojiu" being discovered by

. At that time, when I was downstairs, I found that many young people who had just gotten off work were queuing upstairs to deliver scraps in groups of three or three. Most of the time it is during the rush hour, and there are quite a lot of people at the door.

Every time I see this kind of delivery scenario, I will have some questions. The reason for the doubt is that I can't figure out what the motivation behind their time-consuming and labor-intensive waiting is?

• Each person completes a delivery on average for about 2 minutes, that is, the people queuing behind have to wait at least about 5 minutes on average (it was the rush hour at that time, and the normal logic is to rush to catch the bus, bus and subway).
• observed that everyone delivered basically very little waste (different from the old men and mothers in the community line up, sometimes they deliver according to the size of the sack, and they have a motivation to queue up). Several girls only have small paper boxes in their hands. It is obvious that they just arrived today. The remaining packaging boxes should be removed according to the recycling price. According to the successful delivery price, it should be about 5 cents to 1 cents.
• We usually express anxiety and impatientness in line (such as queuing in the canteen, queuing in buying tickets, and queuing in waiting for the bus). But the people queuing here are the opposite. The feeling I feel is: positive, sunny, positive energy.

First of all, the two most common motivations I excluded. The first is that they are excluded from profits purely for delivering waste. The reason is that these young users basically have very few wastes delivered to more, and the benefits of each delivery will not exceed 50 cents; the second type of "experienced due to curiosity" is excluded. After observation, these users are more skilled in their operations, and there are already some amounts in their accounts, and they are not new users.

At the beginning, I tried to use the above user portrait to extract the corresponding content to explain this behavior, such as: simply using a sense of social responsibility and focusing on lifestyle to explain it. But none of them could convince myself completely.

finally puts its focus on the "sense of social responsibility", but it is not the main motivation generated by this user characteristics (it is only a hypothesis here). is instead the behavioral motivation generated by the next step of the psychology transformation of psychological needs - "wanting to gain the sense of identity of others" after doing the "sense of social responsibility". These two psychological characteristics are interdependent in causality.

can be understood as: psychological activities are because after I do something that is beneficial to society, I have the need to be recognized by others. This is the psychological change of people with the characteristics of "social responsibility".

So the people waiting in line are very positive and positive, which is completely different from waiting in line to buy tickets. This kind of need to be recognized by others when doing good things is easy to understand. To give a very simple example: when we were young, we did good things or got high scores, and we always wanted to get praise from teachers and parents as soon as possible.

The various subtle emotions and experiences of these users can help us gain insight. By rising to the human-level insight feature points, product and design discussions have developed a new functional point, which compares the data of users' waste delivery with the earth's environmental contribution value. Users can generate a "Earth Environmental Guardian Personalized Business Card" on the app and can share it through Weibo, WeChat and other channels. The shared business card will automatically add the app download QR code and registration invitation code.

This meets the needs of users to share and get "recognized" while meeting the growth indicators of product recommendation invitations. After this function is fully launched, the number of invitations for active recommendations increased by more than 30% month-on-month (note: first qualitative mining, then quantitative verification, and any conclusions drawn from interview results and behavioral insights cannot be finalized. The above assumptions were also confirmed through secondary research, and were finally launched on the premise that the test results were better with Grayscale release).

I really like a saying from a senior industry leader I met before: It’s like rushing gold. If you don’t wash it, the last grain of gold will still be a pile of sand, which is useless.

Summary: Please believe that designers can also do growth

Some of the content mentioned above mainly focus on the way of thinking of growth development. I want to express several views most:

) Product growth is closely related to the role of each functional position. This requires the concept of self-awareness, otherwise you may have been an outsider and a passive person all the time.

) The so-called "wild approach" method may be an advantage, don't be confined to one. As long as the goal can be achieved, simplicity and practicality are the kingly way.
1. ) Do not blindly follow your peers in the growth stage of products, differentiated advantages are the key to success.

   Author: Zhang Lei, Tencent Cloud Design Center Product Design

   Source public account: Tencent Lecture Hall (ID: TX_DJT), focusing on the cutting-edge, creating the highlight moments of Internet people

   This article is a cooperative media of everyone being a product manager @Tencent Lecture Hall Authorized and reprinted without permission is prohibited.

   's question picture comes from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol

   's views only represent the author himself, , are both product managers and only provide information storage space services.