The team I work with is building a ToB product that has considerable influence in its vertical. This article is a review of key events for the team, and also contains some personal reflections.
1. Be the Best in a Familiar Setting
On the internet there is far too much shoddy content, and products that win broad attention and influence are few and far between.
Only a deep understanding of users’ pain points makes an excellent solution possible. And those pain points are right beside us, in the environment we know best. Every dilemma and challenge a large team faces is an opportunity for a small team or an individual. This is in fact a process of growing and rising through the ranks, and it is this competitive mechanism that lets society advance.
To be the best in a familiar setting means solving well the problems the team faces right now. Such problems come in every shape: for example, a flood of complaints, with the team busy firefighting β time-consuming, exhausting, and thankless. Complaints are the last thing a leader wants to see, and the real trouble is that there are so many of them.
A problem that the leadership cares about and that is genuinely thorny β if you can solve it well, it will certainly add a great deal to your credibility and buy you more time.
2. Introduce a New Concept to Build a Brand-New Product
The one who breaks the deadlock is usually an outsider.
Whatever beats Taobao will certainly not be Taobao; whatever beats WeChat will certainly not be WeChat. Once a domain concept takes hold in people’s minds, it is hard to change.
Think of it the other way around: running into problems and facing challenges also necessarily means that the internal mechanisms originally designed can no longer satisfy current business needs. Internal reform alone does not provide enough momentum to push things forward. In the course of change, a large number of vested interests become obstacles, and there is simply no time or opportunity to refine the product.
Introducing a new concept takes a certain technical vision. The new concept needs to accommodate the existing technologies; if no ready-made concept fits, then you have to invent one yourself. Docker is a good example: virtualization and containerization technologies had been developing for decades, yet it was not until Docker came along that they took off. Docker technology in fact absorbed and accommodated a large amount of existing technology, integrating on top of it.
That is how change works: the prelude has been playing for a long time, and all that is awaited is the final bugle call for the charge.
Introduce a new concept and use the window in which other teams are not yet familiar with it to build a product quickly and meet the needs of the business. Building a product with real value density is the key; if it is only old wine in a new bottle, there is little point.
3. Make It More General and Bring More People In
The essence of the internet is sharing; information constantly travels among nodes. The volume and quality of a node’s traffic determine its value in the network. Likewise, the size and quality of the population a product serves determine that product’s value. Being used by more teams and more people is of course better, but it is very hard to achieve.
Perhaps the product was never meant to grow this large, yet now it has to fit all kinds of scenarios. The original intention does not matter much; what matters is that you have already set off on the road and can keep adjusting your goals and optimizing step by step.
This will be a long-term undertaking. You need to unite more people and bind more people’s interests to the product. Many projects are gradually marginalized in this process: they cannot unite the inside, nor win on the outside. When the leadership changes, the whole product may simply be abandoned.
The following are things my team did well. They relate to the product’s particular characteristics and cannot necessarily be copied directly.
3.1. School Club Partnerships
School clubs want to understand production technology and hope to connect with companies to boost their competitiveness at graduation. Planting a seed in students while they are still on campus is an extremely high-value thing to do. Students can be a source of recruits for the company, and a sustainable, bulk source at that. Even if a student does not later join the product’s company, they will play a large role at other companies all the same.
That seed planted at other companies will, when the problem scenario arises, actively promote the product.
3.2 Training Newly Hired Graduates
Graduates carry little historical baggage, learn fast, and are highly malleable β a place worth mining.
Large enterprises hire a great many graduates every year, and those graduates are assigned to every corner of the company. Train these graduates and plant the product in their minds. Train them, teach them to use it, teach them to develop with it, and build connections with them.
Compared with school club partnerships, training newcomers works even better. This is building an internal marketing network: these seeds will help spread the word and will grow into positions of authority, so it is only a matter of time before the inside is united and everyone is brought into agreement.
3.3 Support High-Exposure Internal Systems
The flaw of technical people is that no one concedes to anyone else, and reinventing the wheel is no great difficulty.
Promoting a product requires a certain level of exposure. If no one even remembers it, there is no question of anyone adopting and using it. The internal office administration systems of a company draw extremely high traffic and are a good entry point for promotion.
At the same time, office administration is a cost center, perpetually short of developers and budget. If you are willing to lend a hand, they will be endlessly grateful.
3.4 Open Source
GitHub officially launched in April 2008. By November 2018 its repositories had passed 100 million, bringing together 31 million developers from around the world.
The open source movement changed the entire software R&D system. A great deal of open source software is used across companies; everyone shares the same foundation, developing, using, and maintaining together. More and more people gather together, pooling their wisdom and effort to complete a project.
Open source gathers developers and users alike. The more people who participate, the greater the likelihood the product will be deployed and put into use.
4. Cultivate Service Providers
Doing ToB takes two things: relationships and product.
It is risky for an enterprise to adopt a new product: when something goes wrong, whom do you call, can the after-sales support be relied on β these are all problems. And relationships, that elusive Chinese specialty, can solve them.
The other thing is the product. In IT services you must have a few presentable products, otherwise you really are just doing on-site deployment β a one-shot deal that cannot keep providing follow-on value-added services.
Service providers need products, and the product needs to be promoted outward β a very good match. At the same time, as the user base keeps growing, the number of service providers can expand too, so that you do not have to face an ever-increasing number of customers directly.
5. Strengthen the Product’s Credibility
With service providers’ promotion and deployment cases and articles widely shared online, the product has already gained a certain influence. But by this point others may have caught the scent of opportunity, and quite a few competing products of the same kind have appeared on the market.
To repel and isolate these competitors, besides working harder on the product side, you can also ally with higher-level interest groups. Since the product is certainly positioned in a particular niche, you can inevitably find a higher-level organization or government body. They have their own agenda β standardizing the industry. Seizing such an opportunity, you can elevate the product to the status of an industry benchmark.
It would be even better if one or two standards could be put in place. Then service providers would present proposals with full confidence, and you would hold the initiative in campus negotiations too. This is the best endorsement a product can have.
