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Author | Edited by Wan Qi | Li Qiuhan
Source: Shenran (ID: shenrancaijing)
“It’s just a screw,” Wang Xingyao described his work.
He graduated as a graduate student last year, and finally entered a major domestic Internet company through school recruiting to work as an assistant to a product manager. The daily work content is to write documents and help product managers organize information.
During the outbreak of the mobile Internet industry, product managers were once regarded as “the closest position to the CEO”, which made many young professionals yearn for it. The phrase “everyone is a product manager” has also swept the Internet circle, which shows its popularity at that time.
Now, with the end of the dividend period of the Internet industry, the position of product manager has gradually faded away.
A large part of the reason is that there is less and less room for product managers to play. Tang Ren, the former product manager of JD.com, entered the mobile Internet industry in 2012, and has experienced the stage from development to stability. He said that the industry is indeed not like three or five years ago, where there will be some disruptive products every year. Now there are very few innovative products on the market.
Due to the high trial and error cost of enterprises, many products can only do “micro-innovation”.
“A large number of product managers are leaving the industry. This is an objective fact. Part of it is caused by industry adjustment and industry competition, and part of it is the survival of the fittest in terms of personal ability,” Tang Ren concluded.
Some choose to enter new industries to explore. Zhou Yan, a senior product manager working in a large factory, told Shen Ran, “There are many product managers who change tracks around.” Highly educated and powerful peers, many of them have moved to product tracks that are combined with physical manufacturing, such as flying cars, digital industry, etc., and their tossing peers have done business related to Web3.0 and NFT.
Gone are the days when product managers made great strides.
Once upon a time, everyone yearned for a product manager
In the explosive period of the mobile Internet, product managers are the trendsetters standing at the forefront.
As soon as he graduated in 2012, Tang Ren joined three classmates to start a business in the mobile Internet industry. “At that time, looking around, everyone was like chicken blood,” he said. At that time, “mass entrepreneurship, mass innovation” was not just a slogan. For those with product, R&D and other skills, opportunities were everywhere. , Many companies are rushing for VIPs.
When starting a business, they came to the company at 8 or 9 in the morning and got off work after 11 in the evening, sometimes even staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning, and sometimes working overtime at the company on weekends. much larger,” he said.
Among the four of them, he transitioned from technology to become a product manager, while the others were responsible for the front-end, the back-end server development, and the UI design. During the period, he developed a social tool product and worked together for more than two months. “After finishing it, it was thrown directly to the app without any advertising. After more than a month, the number of downloads reached hundreds of thousands.” He described that they themselves did not know what happened in the middle.
Everything was in the ascendant then. “Make a tool and send it to the app market, and you can quickly get a very high download volume,” Tang Ren said. It was an era when supply was greater than demand, and every year, the compound growth rate of products was very high.
According to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as of December 2018, the number of mobile applications on the shelves reached 4.52 million. After that, however, the number of shelves dropped every year. As of the end of May this year, the number of APPs monitored in the domestic market was 2.32 million, which has dropped by nearly half compared to 2018.
Senior product manager Liu Xing recalled that as early as 2015, he clearly felt the development speed of the industry. He happened to be leading the team and recruited new people every month. “At that time, the monthly salary of a junior product manager in the traditional industry was about 12,000, and the Internet industry could open to more than 16,000.”
A large space for imagination can make people more motivated to work.
Tang Ren recalled that he had made the most fulfilling product, which could realize the function of online remote consultation for doctors. When making this product, he spent a lot of time learning the medical business, understanding different departments, different diseases, and how different doctors are promoted.
Going through the whole process of making a product once gave Tang Ren a sense of accomplishment. “In the entrepreneurial stage, I didn’t pay much attention to how much salary I could get, and the whole company didn’t even think too much about the business model.”
At that time, the stories circulating in the circle all had a similar template. “Whoever goes public, whoever has free wealth, whoever can achieve acquisition”, he said, there are many similar stories. The emergence of top product managers like Zhang Xiaolong has also brought about an idol effect, attracting more and more people to become product managers.
“Many people who make products actually have a dream of making ‘great products’. This motivates them to continue to create in this industry,” an industry insider said with emotion.
When he entered the domestic mobile Internet industry in 2015, Liu Xing said that his idea was very “simple”, “I just want to make some tool products, change everyone’s productivity, and change the way people use mobile devices.”
“There is still some idealism,” he said.
Product manager halo fades
Compared with the period when “everyone yearned for a product manager”, in the past two years, some product managers felt that their work gradually lost “meaning”.
According to Liu Xing, for a product, the outside world generally believes that its innovation and demand improvement are determined by the product manager, but in fact, at that time, the product supply was less than the demand, and there were many products in urgent need of mobile scenarios to provide solutions. , under the influx of capital, “people who seize the demand” have become number one. “Whoever discovers user scenarios and can come up with solutions will have the right to speak,” he said.
Under the emerging technology dividend, new demand scenarios are born, and when all products suitable for redoing on the mobile Internet have been made, the opportunities are reduced.
Now, the infrastructure of the mobile Internet has been established, and under the existing technology, the general needs of users have been met. And because the technology has not yet undergone major iterations, there is no need for a major migration of users’ minds and behavioral habits. “In the past one or two years, the products on the market are not expected to change much,” Tang Ren said.
Zhou Yan also mentioned, “When I entered the industry, I always wanted to make a function to change an industry, bring in the traffic of explosive models, and bring all kinds of entrepreneurial opportunities”, but now, the cost of traffic is still high, it is difficult to imagine Do fission growth as before.
As a result, many product managers are now “tinkering” with existing products, making very small adjustments.
An industry source said, “In a company behind a social product, a product group is only responsible for one button of the product.” Some newcomers also reported that after working as a product manager for half a year or a year, they felt that they were “starting” every day, and their work was meaningless and had no sense of accomplishment. In terms of social products, many junior product managers even complained that “persuade people to be product managers, and the sky is thundering”.
Liu Xing found that in such a practice, some new product managers can write very detailed documentation requirements, just like writing a paper, but they have no perception of the implementation of the entire requirements and the needs of the user side. “Now come in and be a product manager, and you’re going to hit the ceiling very quickly,” he said.
In 2019, Tang Ren left the front line of the Internet and ran his own product manager public account “Tang Ren”. He concluded that there are also changes in the logic of product operation behind this phenomenon. In the early stage of the market, as long as a new product is liked by some users, it will be downloaded and installed. After 2020, the industry will enter a stage of fierce competition, and product competition will go from conceptual innovation to the need to bring value increment to users. “At this time, it is even more necessary to optimize operational efficiency and operate the user group better,” he said.
Behind this, the acceptance of innovation by Internet companies has also changed.
In 2020, Liu Xing was still working in an audio Internet company. He once proposed to his superiors that on a student desk launched by the company, the concept of “Internet of Everything” was adopted, and he tried to add a desk lamp. But the company quickly dismissed the need after an evaluation. The reason is very simple. When the financial report of Internet companies is tight, it is impossible to bet human and financial resources on businesses with low certainty.
“If the demand is raised and the company does not see any hope of making a profit within six months, it will not agree,” he said.
Innovation is still there, but the cost acceptance of innovation has become lower.
Even companies like ByteDance, which are still growing rapidly, have become cautious. An industry source close to ByteDance said that although most of ByteDance’s businesses still maintain a high human-efficiency ratio, under the same business, other companies need 2-3 times more manpower, but it is no longer Running blindfolded like in the past, this year’s exploration has begun to slow down, and many ROI difficult directions have begun to shut down or merge and reorganize.
In this environment, the industry beliefs of product managers began to lose focus. Tang Ren sighed that Marvel movies will launch a superhero every once in a while to bring freshness. In the product manager circle, “except for the old idols Zhang Xiaolong, Yu Jun, etc., in recent years, there have been no new idols.”
Can there be another outbreak?
The requirements of Internet companies for product managers are also changing.
Liu Xing said that he was also an “idealist” in his early years, hoping to make some tool products to change productivity. But now, the situation is different. When recruiting team members, “I no longer like to recruit people who are too idealistic. I am worried that they will have a psychological gap in the actual work, which will lead to a sharp drop in productivity. , come in and screw the screw'”.
Junior product managers who have been in the workforce for less than 3 years are becoming less important in the industry.
“When the big environment enters the stock market, there is no need for a product manager who can only draw prototype drawings. There are fewer and fewer opportunities for products to go from 0 to 1. The companies that survive on the market are mostly shrinking their boundaries and focusing on their main business. , the iterative needs of various functional types will be relatively less.” Zhou Yan said that even if there are some product micro-innovations, some main product managers who understand the business can directly complete it.
Under the environment of reducing costs and increasing efficiency, Internet companies also build product managers in the direction of compound talents, and adjust the degree of integration between positions.
Liu Xing mentioned that the team he leads will enable product managers to think more about problems from a business perspective and avoid becoming a tool person who only does functions. “In the past, the organizational structure was too perfect, causing members to act independently. This barrier needs to be broken. At the same time, it can also exercise members’ business vision, reuse manpower, and improve efficiency,” he said.
He also agrees with this change. In his view, if a person only does one thing, he needs to find a lot of people to communicate with, and he will face the loss of time and cost. “For example, the product manager goes to the operation, and then the operation looks for the corresponding audit, and the wasted communication time accounts for 60%. -70%. If a person has a deeper business perspective and has a macro goal thinking in the docking, the efficiency can be higher.”
As a result, the job search for product managers has become even more convoluted. Liu Xing said that there are still many people who want to become product managers in big factories. After all, the salary is still attractive. “Now the school recruits start with a monthly salary of 20,000.” Priority is given to candidates with excellent university background and internship background for credit endorsement.
In the face of this change, some people still in this position choose to improve their core competitiveness.
Tang Ren said that many people now have a narrower understanding of products, thinking that it is a specific function, that is, to draw prototypes, write documents, and do the design of a certain function, but the production of products is actually far more than that. “Product managers need To solve the needs of an industry, you cannot limit yourself to a certain field.”
Zhou Yan also mentioned that in large companies, junior product managers need to do their job well, but they can understand operations and technology, and have more opportunities to open up the way to rise. “There is no need to set limits for yourself. In addition to mastering basic skills, you also need to deepen your understanding of the industry and business. If you are rooted in a main road and expand your knowledge, you will have more opportunities in the future,” he said. It has increasingly become a core competitiveness of product managers.
Others combine the original professional foundation and look for new directions for integration.
Several product managers of major manufacturers mentioned that the current market needs are those who have many years of experience in specific businesses and can help the business break through bottlenecks, or those who can combine with new technologies, including Web3.0, smart cockpit, and autonomous driving. and other industries.
The demand for product managers with new technologies and new directions is indeed increasing. According to industry insiders, especially in new industries such as autonomous driving and smart cockpits that have been clearly implemented, related companies have a strong demand for product managers in the direction of commercialization. In the stock era, you cannot always burn money for scale, and each company pays more attention to the improvement of ARPU value (average income per user).
“When the next wave of technological revolution comes, there will be new things that can be remade.” Tang Ren maintains confidence in the future. In his opinion, “Product managers are not without opportunities. For example, VR, AR technology, virtual metaverse, If it does appear, or if there is another technical iteration, there may be some new requirements.”
Luo Yonghao, who focuses on the AR industry, mentioned in the live broadcast that he is recruiting a large number of talents for the new company, mainly product managers and designers. “Someone asked, what kind of products and designers do you want to make AR glasses. If you can ask such a question, don’t send your resume,” he said.
After technological innovation, there will indeed be a large number of new manpower needs, but on this basis, what skills will be needed in the future is still unknown.
Product managers who are still looking forward to the industry are dormant, waiting for the next industry explosion.
*The title picture and the pictures in the text are from unsplash. At the request of the interviewee, Wang Xingyao, Liu Xing and Zhou Yan are pseudonyms in the article.
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