Table of Contents

1. Understanding Product Management
2. Simplification: Breaking Complex Scenarios into Minimal Viable Units
3. Rapid Prototyping, Finding PMF, Defining MVP
4. Defining Target Users/Consumers
5. Establishing Product North Star Metrics
6. Product Architecture Design
7. Chairing Cross-functional Reviews
8. Iteration and user engagement
9. My Product Philosophy

1. Understanding Product Management

Product management can be understood through three key perspectives:

1.1. Product = Product-Market-Fit

Product success heavily relies on Product Market Fit (PMF). Understanding technology and users helps make a good product, but creating a successful product that delivers real value requires understanding business, capturing needs effectively, understanding users, and defining a clear monetization model. A product manager who hasn't thought through user acquisition strategy hasn't truly begun.

1.2. Management = Coordination = Building Consensus

Management is less about planning ability and more about empathetic leadership. It's crucial to understand your collaborators - operations teams focus on traffic and conversion, designers care about ultimate user experience, engineers prioritize security and scalability. Product managers need to earn trust and recognition from teammates, align everyone toward common goals, and move things forward according to plan. Shipping is everything.

2. Simplification: Breaking Complex Scenarios into Minimal Viable Units

When creating a product, the first questions to ask are: What kind of product is this? Who are the target users? What problem does it solve? How many people will use it? Are we building a niche product or a mass-market solution with high initial investment but low marginal costs?

Regardless of how complex the user scenarios are, it's recommended to break them down into one or more minimal independent product units for separate analysis and development. For example, creating a flying car service accessible to everyone primarily involves ensuring flight safety while reducing costs. This can be broken down into smaller problems:

• How to manufacture batteries with longer life
• How to create more powerful micro-motors
• How to develop new materials to reduce vehicle weight
• ...

Any complex large-scale project can be divided into several independent, interoperating, and potentially parallel products/services for independent development (Check MECE principle).

3. Rapid Prototyping, Finding PMF, Defining MVP

Finding Product-Market-Fit is crucial for product success, with user willingness to pay being the ultimate validation. Quickly produce initial prototypes - simple user interfaces, paper mockups, or even written concepts - and validate with 5-10 target users to verify problem authenticity, solution viability, and payment willingness.

Here are two key factors for evaluating PMF effectiveness:

Time Saved

Business has only two ultimate goals: faster and cheaper. Other actions are just steps toward these goals. Money ultimately represents time - people exchange time for value equivalents. Time is the ultimate business value.

Willingness to Pay

Users' willingness to pay is the strongest product validation and ensures sufficient future cash flow for team survival. Low payment willingness can reveal what solutions users actually need.

4. Defining Target Users/Consumers

Product managers need to quickly distinguish between target users and consumers:

4.1. Target Users

Target users are direct product/service users. Generally divided into two categories:

• Enterprise Product Users: Efficiency-driven, choosing products closely related to their work context, business processes, and task objectives
• Individual Consumer Users: Choices related to gender, age, family structure, personal preferences, values, income, lifestyle, etc., emphasizing value for money and emotional value

User needs and feedback are crucial for product design and improvement. Product usability, functionality, and user experience directly impact user satisfaction and loyalty.

4.2. Consumers

Consumers are direct buyers. Sometimes customers and users are the same group, but in cases like infant products, customers may not be end users. Customer purchase decisions directly affect product sales and market performance. Customer budgets, needs, and purchase cycles are key considerations for pricing and marketing strategies.

5. Establishing Product North Star Metrics

The "Product North Star Metric" directly shows whether a product and team can develop sustainably. Through tracking key data, it can warn of potential crashes and facilitate analysis of internal and external factors. Remember: metrics exist to improve product development - they're tools, not goals.

Product North Star Metrics can cover these dimensions:

5.1. Business Vision /Strategy

What goals do we want to achieve? What's important and what's not? Is each change remembered by the whole team? (Team consensus includes both business value and cultural/value propositions)

• Vision scoring (Are we on the right track?)

5.2. User Metrics

User metrics can be categorized into five key areas:

5.2.1. User Scale Metrics

• MAU (Monthly Active Users): Total monthly active users across Discord, Telegram, Twitter
• UV (Unique Visitors): Deduplicated registered users across platforms
• Social Following: Total followers and engagement rates across social platforms

5.2.2. User Engagement Metrics

• DAU (Daily Active Users): Average daily active users per platform
• Stickiness Rate (DAU/MAU): User retention metric measuring product stickiness
• PV (Page Views): Total user-content interaction instances

5.2.3. User Satisfaction Metrics

• NPS (Net Promoter Score): User recommendation willingness score
• CSI (Customer Satisfaction Index): Ecosystem partner satisfaction rating
• CES (Customer Effort Score): Ease of product usage rating

5.2.4. User Interaction Metrics

• UGC Rate: User-generated content contribution rate
• Interaction Depth: Average interactions per user, interaction duration
• Interaction Frequency: User-to-user interaction rate and continuity

5.2.5. Community Growth Metrics

• Community Conversion Rate: Percentage of new users joining communities
• Community Engagement Rate: Daily participation rate within communities
• Seed User Ratio: Proportion of influential core users

6. Product Architecture Design

Business architecture encompasses the business logic operational mechanism. Product architecture connects business and user presentation layers, where users build product cognition and mindset. Product managers need to abstract at the system level, using the most appropriate product architecture to support business architecture.

A product consists of various functions. Product architecture needs to categorize and integrate these functions around goals, clarifying their priorities and logically incorporating them into the product. As a product manager, my product architecture principle is from nothing to something, from something to completeness, from completeness to excellence. Here are my six steps of product architecture:

6.1. Requirements Classification

Requirements generally fall into 3 categories:

• Strategy-based Requirements: Product team's desired achievements and strategic goals
• User-based Requirements: While most users don't actively express their needs, everyone cares about their problems. Product managers must observe user behavior with current market solutions, capture pain points in their operation paths, and restore true user needs. eg: What's giving them a big headache? What outcomes can't they achieve? What do they struggle to get done? What costs them a lot of money? What blocks them from growth?
• Stakeholder-based Requirements: Stakeholders are individuals or organizations that influence or are influenced by product development and success, including internal teams (development, marketing, sales) and external partners (suppliers, investors). Their expectations and needs influence product strategic direction, resource allocation, and priority setting.

6.2. Requirements Gathering

Requirements gathering is about collecting as much information as possible. Don't reject information from anyone - more information means better understanding of the product situation and clearer decision-making. Two tips for requirements gathering:

• When collecting requirements, separate requirements from identity and motivation to aid subsequent analysis
• Focus on long-tail needs: Requirements follow the 80/20 rule, where 80% of people propose 20% of mainstream needs. In a fully competitive market, mainstream needs are well-explored and less competitive. Undiscovered needs offer innovation opportunities. Requirements that reflect product uniqueness should receive more weight.

6.3. Prioritizing Requirements

Great products aren't built by accumulating random features. A skilled product manager must identify truly important requirements through effective prioritization. Here's a framework to evaluate which requirements will deliver maximum value:

• What are the underlying motivations behind each requirement?
• Does it align with both immediate needs and long-term strategic goals? Is it truly the most critical priority right now?
• What are the advantages and potential risks of this approach?
• How is the return on investment (ROI) in terms of resources required?
• Are there alternative solutions that could deliver greater impact with simpler implementation and fewer drawbacks?
• Prioritize requirements from early adopters who are willing to use the product even in its basic form.

6.4. Task Flow Design

Requirements typically lead to functional solutions, resulting in multiple features within a product. To organize these features effectively:

• Group related functions that serve the same use case into linear operational workflows
• Create upstream and downstream connections between different features
• Allow workflows to intersect where they serve common business scenarios

6.5. Information Architecture (IA)

Design Information Architecture represents the detailed implementation of product design, translating business and product architecture into user-facing elements. This includes:

• Organization of information units within the product
• Hierarchy of main pages
• Navigation and transition functions between different sections

7. Chairing Cross-Functional Review Meetings

In the internet industry, product managers participate in various types of review meetings, including requirement reviews, design reviews, technical reviews, operational reviews, and compliance reviews. Among these, product managers typically chair two critical meetings:

Product Requirements Review

Participants:

• Product Manager
• Leadership Team
• Technical Lead
• Operations Lead

Key Considerations:

1. Technical Validation

• Technical feasibility
• Implementation costs

2. Operational Validation

• Competitive advantage assessment
• Potential impact on transaction volume

3. Business Validation

• Efficient use of existing resources
• Alignment with business strategy goals

Meeting Objectives:

1. Confirm product direction
2. Establish phased implementation plan with clear roadmap
3. Define OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)

Design Review

Participants:

• Product Manager
• Designer(s)
• Technical Manager

Objectives:

• Define product design style and tone
• Ensure strong aesthetic appeal and user experience
• Validate technical feasibility and cost-effectiveness of implementation

8. Iteration and User Engagement

After MVP launch, product success depends on effective iteration cycles. Product managers must establish clear iteration standards, continuously monitor NPS and segment-specific metrics, and leverage the Kano Model to prioritize features.

8.1. Establishing Testing Standards

• Participate in building test cases, testing optimization, and iteration processes (feedback/filtering/internal testing/external testing)
• Version control, reduce unnecessary updates, ensure smooth deployment: After reaching millions of users, any small change affects a large user base, requiring careful testing, gradual transition, and adequate user adaptation time.

8.2. Building Community Feedback Channels

Classify users by typical characteristics, abstract representative user types (personas), and analyze them. Before and after adding important new features, invite typical users for testing and refine based on feedback.

8.3. Overall Data Trend Analysis

Data helps reduce decision-making risks and validates results, providing effective reference for product decisions and planning. Data itself isn't the goal; it's the starting point for analysis. Data shows what happened but not why. Here are some metrics that I value at different stage of a product:

Early stage:

• NPS: Net Promoter Score
• Week 1 retention rate
• Core action completion rate

Growth stage:

• GMV: Gross Merchandise Value
• AOV: Average Order Value
• Repeat purchase rate
• CAC: Customer acquisition cost
• CLV: Customer lifetime value

8.4. Finding Key Segmented Data

Overall data is created by multiple key segmented data points. A product may have different key data at different stages and in different sub-businesses. Even when overall data trends remain stable, segmented content data may show changes. Identifying and growing key data in segmented areas is crucial for overall product development. Here are some example metrics for social platform engagements:

• Network Effect Indicators
  • Connection density
  • Interaction frequency
  • Network clustering coefficient
  • Viral loop completion rate
• User Activity Metrics
  • DAU/MAU ratio
  • Core action frequency
  • User-generated content rate
  • Cross-feature adoption

8.5. Setting Judgment Criteria to Avoid Product Complexity

As products evolve with community state and ecosystem participants increasing, product requirements grow. While product managers want to satisfy most people, different requirements lead to increased functionality, making products more complex or even chaotic. Once a feature launches, removing it becomes difficult as users are already using it - sudden removal causes "loss aversion." But continuously adding features eventually degrades user experience. Remember: Perfection isn't when nothing more can be added, but when nothing can be taken away.

The Kano Model is a useful tool for determining product priorities and here are the metrics:

1. Basic Features (Must-have)
   • Expected by users
   • Dissatisfaction if absent
   • Foundation for product

2. Performance Features (More is better)
   • Directly proportional to satisfaction
   • Competitive differentiators
   • Core functionality

3. Excitement Features (Delighters)
   • Unexpected but create delight
   • High impact on satisfaction
   • Innovation opportunities

9. My Product Philosophy

A product manager’s understanding of the product shapes its overall character, while the personal values of PM define the soul of the product. Even when products share the same positioning, different product managers will give them unique identities. Here are the product traits I value most in my role as a product manager:

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Stay Focused, Less is More

Focus on what truly matters - typically only 2-3 decisions significantly impact product success each year. Rather than trying to please everyone, target specific users and concentrate on one core goal per phase, even if it means sacrificing secondary objectives.

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Sustainability survival outweighs rapid growth

Once the product is reached critical mass, prioritize quality and continuous improvement over short-term user metrics.

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Fostering User Loyalty through Emotional Connection

While users may initially be attracted by functionality, they stay for emotional connections. Your product's true competitive edge lies in creating a sense of belonging - a digital home that feels uniquely personal to each user.

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Embrace simplicity in design.

While users may not always prioritize simplicity, I believe in its power, as some will appreciate the beauty it brings. I want the product to retain its unique style, soul, and creativity, not just be driven by numbers. This is what makes our work meaningful and make us feel proud.