Qingsong Innovation: Summary of Highlights of Seminar on the Transformation of Internet Product Managers to Consumer Product Managers

Recently, the online seminar on product manager transformation organized by Qingsong Innovation was successfully held. The meeting invited the founder of Qingsong Innovation as the representative of the Internet product manager and He Ming, who has rich consulting experience in the consumer product industry, as the representative of the consumer product product manager. At the same time, a number of experienced product managers were invited to discuss the current bleak Internet market, product The employment situation of managers is not good; under various policies, enterprises are more and more inclined to develop in the form of Internet + traditional, among which the consumer goods industry has received a large amount of financing in recent years. Can the industry deliver the same value?

The Three Difficulties of Internet Product Managers

At the beginning of the meeting, Mr. Zhang pointed out the current status of the Internet product manager industry and some problems it faces:

First, for product managers, whether they are consumer products or our Internet product managers, they are actually product managers, and the bottom layer of product managers is the same. In this regard, you may say that you only need to do some learning and understanding. You can quickly transform. Maybe you have done a lot of training in recent years, but it is difficult for practitioners to know what they need to learn, which training is reliable, and where to learn and promote?

Second, in the past two years, product managers have had a lot of layoffs in the Internet industry. It is actually difficult to find a job after being laid off. For example, the product managers of large factories, many with an annual salary of one million, what happens after they leave? If no company can handle it, what else can it do? This may be a problem: the skills are too single, and you are not really a product manager, and you may not be able to land in other industries. So under the contradiction of this professional background, how should product managers improve their professional skills and relieve their pressure of this kind of work? So we have crossed from the Internet industry to many traditional industries, such as the field of consumer goods, can we cross over?

The third is to achieve self-improvement and become an entrepreneurial product manager. However, the current entrepreneurial environment may not be very good, and the early investment is not easy to get, etc. There are a series of problems, how to solve these problems, and how to solve them well? Including I saw yesterday that a product manager in JD.com had an annual salary of 2 million yuan to start a business, and then the project died, and after the death, he was kidnapped and returned to work. As a result, he couldn't even find a job. There are certain problems in this. The knowledge structure we have in a large factory may not be applicable to such a small company or to start a business. What should the knowledge structure look like?

Requirements Analyst vs Product Manager

Let's take a look, where do Internet product managers come from? The book "Everyone is a Product Manager" written by Su Jie and the website "Everyone is a Product Manager" have guided the entire Chinese product manager for ten years. We can tell from the book structure of this book that he actually trains demand analysts.

why? Because in the early days, in the subject of software engineering, there was no product manager in the team, because at that time all the courses were studied abroad, and he did not have a product manager for this kind of globalization course. At that time, only the requirements analysts were relevant in the team. This is a very core point. In the future, this kind of executive product manager will actually have narrower and narrower employment opportunities. This is why many product managers in some surveys and analyzes actually do chores or execution work.

It will be very difficult for such a product manager to transfer to the consumer goods industry.

The knowledge structure of a consumer goods product manager is completely different from that of a demand analysis product manager. The consumer goods product manager is doing innovation and product management. The entire product team conducts business opportunity identification, customer group insight, product innovation, marketing planning, business design, and investment decision-making within the strategic framework. We call it Product Lifecycle Management. Therefore, the occupational requirements, skills and knowledge structure of consumer goods product managers and Internet product managers are very different. This is business thinking.

If we say that the past ten years have been an era when everyone is a product manager. The next ten years will be the era of business thinking. That is what we can see many commercial product managers now. Many major manufacturers, including JD.com, Tencent, and Huawei, have redefined product managers, all of which focus on clarifying the cognition of product managers and transforming them to commercialization.

Meet Consumer Goods Product Managers

Mr. He Ming explained what kind of product manager the consumer goods industry needs from the perspective of the consumer goods industry:

First, increase sales and do a good job in the market. The product manager is more like the brand manager called before. For a business, it is not just to do a demand analysis, but more importantly, to improve the actual performance, that is, to do a good job from the early business analysis, market planning to the later stage. Landing revenue, sustainable revenue development, and even subsequent innovation and transformation also require a certain degree of foresight. What the product manager has to do is to continue to be responsible for the value of the product throughout the entire life cycle of the product. In fact, what a company needs to do is to innovate products and then sell products, and the product manager has to do these two things;

Second, a very important point is the problem of backwardness in the industry, that is, can you switch quickly after the transformation of different industries? If an Internet product manager wants to transform, he needs to ask himself whether he has the underlying business knowledge logic. If you have this kind of knowledge structure, you can learn quickly and integrate into the new industry faster after industry switching;

Third, in fact, everyone who is a product manager should have an ideal: to prove himself through the commercial success of a product, not just move bricks in a product line. The first appeal of a product manager should be to realize personal value. If you just do a demand analysis or a demand analysis product manager, you will not be able to achieve this achievement.

Online 1V1 Q&A with guests

1. What is the actual scenario of a product manager in the consumer product field?

The big ones may be like ideal cars, Xiaomi mobile phones to hire a product manager; the small ones may be a small category of food, clothes, etc. They don’t have a strong concept of products, but there is such a business line in JD.com, consumer goods Innovation and growth.

2. Why should a product manager choose the field of consumer goods for transformation?

Foreign product managers come from companies like Procter & Gamble, which is a traditional industry. In fact, from a certain perspective, it is the consumer goods industry. From a foreign point of view, there are product managers in the consumer goods industry first, but China is different. The profession of product managers in China comes from the IT industry. From 2010 to 2020, capital is looking at the Internet track. It is precisely because of capital investment that drives the vigorous development of Internet product managers. At present, capital basically does not invest in such high-tech projects, why? The investment period is too long. And what is the capital doing at this time? Capital invested all its money in consumer goods. Tiantu Capital invested in more than 160 projects in the field of consumer goods last year. That is to say, when capital began to pay attention to this traditional industry, we have to keep up with the country's policy orientation, or this development trend. The track of consumer goods is very big. If the Internet technology industry is a trillion-dollar industry, then consumer goods is an industry of tens of trillions. When everyone’s resources or national policies go here, this is the return of value. when. What we are discussing today is a trend and the future. At the same time, Internet thinking can also allow us to reflect more value for traditional industries.

3. The threshold for a product manager to transform into a traditional industry is very high, and he does not understand the business. How to solve this problem?

We are going to be a product manager in a traditional industry. The most important thing is not technical thinking, but a kind of business thinking. Maybe you don't understand the technical realization of medical products in the medical industry, which is actually the same as product managers who don't understand the code. It considers issues from market sales, customer needs, market needs, competition, etc., rather than from technical considerations. When a product manager is in charge of this matter, the technology actually plays a supporting role, and the product manager is responsible for leading the technology. What we need is not technical thinking, so there is no technical threshold because of technical problems. However, if you can master the methodology and commercial thinking structure, you can quickly enter a new industry.

4. What are the innovation capabilities of product managers? How to exercise?

The innovation ability of a product manager is mainly reflected in product life cycle management. From business opportunity insight, it is actually looking for opportunities in the market, and then to customer group insight, product innovation, marketing planning, business design, including measurement, because what do these jobs do? It’s all thinking about the business end, what product I want to make, instead of taking a demand from me, drawing a prototype, and developing it to go online.

5. Internet product managers do not have the experience of product managers in all aspects of project establishment, design, production, and sales. How can they make up for this if they transform? I want to transform, what should I do?

As an Internet product manager, although we have not done all aspects of project establishment, design, production and marketing, what can we do? We can accept some of this kind of training, take the initiative to learn, and read some books. Then there is the knowledge structure. When you go to the interview, you should not be overwhelmed by the basic skills of the knowledge structure.

The second is experience. You may not have experience, but even if we are in the Internet industry, the company still needs to collect money. So is there a commercial product for collecting money? It’s just that you may not be in that link, and you are not responsible for that matter. Then we can introduce this kind of things of the company, according to this knowledge structure, to introduce our commercial products in Internet companies, how we make money, what we sell, I master the underlying logic, I must be able to .

The third is that it is best to find some cases for practice. At the company level, you can try more experience in related positions.

The summary speech of Qingsong Innovation Founder Seminar

Finally, Mr. Zhang made a summary of the theme of this seminar "On the Possibility of Transformation from Internet Product Managers to Consumer Product Managers": First, under the current environment, it is an excellent opportunity for Internet product managers to transfer to the consumer product industry ; Second, the difference in knowledge structure can be made up for by reading books, applying for classes, and other learning methods; third, do some commercial practice work based on the learned knowledge structure to gain some experience; we need to have some experience in commercialization will and value recognition.