卫哲的3+1提问法Wei Zhe's 3+1 Questions

In recent years, around the start and end of the year, I keep running into things like this: “Small-business owners these days all keep their accounts in a little notebook, it’s terribly inconvenient. This year we should give small and medium enterprises a tool for managing their finances; that way we can help them get their money under control.” “Let’s build customers an electronic fax feature, so they can save a fortune on fax charges and paper.” “Let’s build customers an open platform for buying software services online, so they can buy every software service they need right here.”…

The moment we decide what to do, success or failure is already 50% sealed. So what, exactly, counts as sound? It seems you only find out by doing it. Is there a way, then, to raise the odds of success? Once, Wei Zhe came by doing management by walking around and asked 3+1 questions of every product line. It left a deep impression on me:

At the time we were building a management tool for Taobao sellers, and one of its features helped sellers research market conditions. Then came the questions:

Wei: “How did you come to build this product?”

Me: “In our contact with sellers, we found many of them spend a great deal of time finding out what their competitors are up to and what sells well in the market.”

Wei: “How many sellers do this? How often”

Me: “Most sellers do it a few times every week”

Wei: “How do they currently find out what competitors are doing and what sells well in the market?”

Me: “Right now they go on Taobao every day and search, find the sellers whose similar items sell well, then study what’s distinctive about their keyword setup, what their prices are, how many units they’ve sold, what promotions they’ve run. It costs them a good few hours a week.”

Wei: “And with your product, how do they do this?”

Me: “With our product, on the one hand, for any given listing of theirs, they can see which similar listings their peers have, at what prices, with what sales. On the other, they can see which listings sell best in a given category under a specific keyword.”

Wei: “So what you’re doing is saving them time? A small business’s time is worth nothing. True in China, and true in America too.”

Me: ”…”

Wei: “Can they see this data themselves online?”

Me: “They can, but some of the statistics and analysis they don’t know: things like the average price, or how many people are priced above them.”

Wei: “And once he knows all this? What can he do?”

Me: “He can make some keyword changes, some price changes, or swap out which items he promotes, and aim more precisely when he runs Zhitongche.”

Wei: “Then does our feature hook into promotion at all, say, integrate with Zhitongche? Let him optimize his Zhitongche campaigns directly?”

I froze for a moment; the question had never crossed my mind, but I realized at once it might be a direction: “Not yet, but that really is a very good direction.”

Wei: “And after customers use your product, how will it show in the site data?”

Me: “Sellers’ search behavior will probably decrease, and their number of edits will increase”

…

The product went live a month later, and within a month it drew over ten thousand paying customers. Yet these customers’ retention was very low, and many of them raised the same issue: you’ve told me all this, and then what?

At this point, looking back on that conversation, several things are quite startling:

1. Wei Zhe had never actually touched our business, and perhaps had never dealt with Taobao customers either, yet through these questions he quickly branched into several valuable ones that brought the essence of the business to light. Such as: “And with your product, how do they do this?”

2. All of the information came from us, yet many of the questions were ones we had never thought of before, and so were the conclusions.

So we wondered: could this line of analysis apply to any unfamiliar setting and any unfamiliar business, letting us learn more valuable information by asking the right questions, and then make a judgment.

Wei Zhe calls this method of asking questions 3+1:

3:

Where does the need come from? Who is the target customer?

How many people have this need? Is the need urgent?

What is their pain? What is the scenario? (before / after using the product)

+1:

Once it’s solved, how will it show in the site data?

The first 3 questions help us cut into the essence of the problem and set off further thinking; the last one makes us think about what result we actually want, and how to measure it.

Question one: where does the need come from, and who is the target customer

This question splits in two. Take “where does the need come from” first. Personally I feel this is the most powerful question of them all; it summarily executes more than half of all the unsound requirements: is it that we want to build it, or that customers want it? We constantly find that many requirements are what we want, or what we believe customers want. For instance, “let’s build financial management software, and we can help small businesses get all their money under control; their bookkeeping is far too chaotic right now.” But when the product came out and we visited small businesses, most of them didn’t think this was a problem at all: “A business as small as ours, a notebook to jot things down does fine.” “We’ve already hired a part-time accountant, and she can handle everything.” That project actually came with a little side story: the finance software was in fact the big boss’s strategic plan. We run into such projects often. Based on group strategy, we decide to march in some direction; but when it comes to the doing, we turn the “direction of action” straight into the “plan of action” all too easily. In this project, what the boss wanted was a product in the finance space, yet in execution it became, without further thought, a piece of finance software; who’s to say some sort of “finance service” wasn’t what customers actually needed?

Now for “who is the target customer.” This is an old chestnut, but it’s still critical, and the fault we commit most often is letting the target customer group blur into generality, swelling ever larger. Recently we’ve been working on a logistics-referral project: letting Alibaba’s TrustPass customers enjoy VIP pricing when they use Deppon or Xinbang logistics online, cheaper than shipping on their own. Who is the target customer here? “All TrustPass businesses” is of course the most correct answer, but it’s useless; it solves nothing. The next question must be: “Who needs such a logistics-referral service the most?” Those who ship the most in a year, naturally. What sort of people ship a lot? People whose business is thriving. How do you tell whose business is thriving? Those with heavy transaction and browsing volume on the site. BINGO, we discovered that doing logistics referral well should be tied to transactions and browsing, with marketing and service going to these people first. At that point it can begin to guide practice, and a great heap of related ideas comes leaping out: should customers whose transaction volume tops ** get an extra discount? Should customers receive targeted guidance after a deal closes on the site? Should we recommend precise logistics routes based on a customer’s location once his deal closes?…You see, good questions bring good ideas! Of course, “people whose business is thriving” isn’t the only answer up there; it could equally be “customers who ship heavier, bulkier goods,” and what follows might then be precise marketing and service for particular industries, hardware, for instance.

Question two: how many people have this need? Is the need urgent?

This too is a mighty question. How many people have the need speaks to the market’s size; how urgent it is speaks to the value of solving it. Size + value = whether it’s worth doing at all. Neither can be spared. The shop-management tool we built earlier was exactly such a case: many people truly did have the need, and were happy to use it to save time, but what pressed on them most was growing the business and finding new customers. Hence, though plenty of people paid, we were fated never to charge much for it, because the value we brought was “saving time,” and a small business’s time is worth nothing (related: a piece iamsujie wrote around the same time). Recently a classmate who runs an English-training school was chatting with me. He’d noticed that his students all need to buy a great many things before going abroad, and he hoped to launch a website that tells students what to buy, where they could also buy it on his site. That kind of study-abroad preparation information, while needed, is by no means the most urgent thing. How many people would pay for it is hard to say.

How do we get a read on market size and urgency? Generally speaking, urgency can be had through in-depth interviews: go chat with 10 small-business owners, and you’ll come away with a gut feel for how many find financial management pressing. (Take care here, of course, not to bring your own wishes along and lead them on as you chat, or what you hear will be nothing but the answer you wanted to hear.) Market size is more complicated. Online surveys and the like all too easily draw the very people with the strongest need to fill in the questionnaire, handing us the wrong conclusion. Interviews after random sampling do somewhat better; if a person hears what you’ve come for and doesn’t care to talk further, then odds are he doesn’t much need this thing.

Question three: what is their pain? What is the scenario (before / after using the product)

This question is the crucial link where strategy lands in execution. Whether a thing is sound can’t in fact be seen from its direction alone; my own feeling is that “there are no sound directions, only sound ways of doing.” And where does the way of doing come from? Precisely from the two questions here:

1. Have we truly found the scenario of the customer’s problem? (the scenario before using the product)

2. Will the usage scenario we’ve set for the product actually happen? (the scenario after using the product)

This reminds me of the B2C business Alibaba has been building recently: Wuming Liangpin. Simply put, Alibaba brings its B2B suppliers onto Taobao and opens up an independent market, supplying products from the factory straight to the consumer. Our premise was that B2B suppliers are mostly (all?) factories, so they command better sources of goods than Taobao’s sellers and can offer consumers better products. In this venture, the final customer is the consumer, and if we run this question over it, we must ask, “What is the consumer’s pain?” A consumer coming to Taobao today who is willing to spend time hunting bargains and loves to haggle goes to the marketplace; one who wants quality-assured goods fast goes to the Mall. Where is the “pain point”? What comes to mind: “they want first-hand factory goods, not a middleman’s,” “they want export surplus stock,” “they want higher-quality service.” Anchoring on different pain points extends into different approaches afterward. As things stand, Wuming Liangpin is still positioned on “factory goods” and “export surplus.” Well then, can buyers get “factory goods” and “surplus” on Taobao? Search once and you’ll see: they exist by the armful, the true and the false past telling apart. Can Wuming Liangpin tell them apart, then? Not at present. Should it try to? Perhaps, but the previous question must come first: how many people on Taobao today are looking for factory goods and export goods and going away unsatisfied? Only that decides whether it’s meaningful as the core strategy. And so long as we still can’t pin down the customer’s present pain, the scenario after that pain is solved is naturally nowhere to be discussed. So although I don’t know how Wuming Liangpin’s operations are faring at the moment, I think, being a consumer myself, I will keep asking one question: when I’ve come to Taobao, under what circumstances should I go to Wuming Liangpin to buy something? Solutions welcome…

Another example comes to mind. Lately I’ve been discussing with Taobao colleagues the business of Taobao opening a supermarket. In short, Taobao opens an online supermarket in Shanghai that sells what a traditional supermarket sells. Here too, let’s fit these two questions over it:

Q: “What is the customer’s pain?”

A: “Right now you can’t buy a case of cola on Taobao, or a big roll of toilet paper, or a carton of instant noodles”

Q: “Does anyone want to buy these things on Taobao?”

A: “I’d like to myself”

Q: “Then why not buy them?”

A: “The shipping is too expensive, and besides, there isn’t a single shop where you can buy all three of the above” OK, the customer’s pain is out in the open, and what value we ought to provide becomes instantly clear as well (the after-use scenario): let customers buy those daily household goods from one shop, at fairly low shipping.

+1: once it’s solved, how will it show in the site data?

We hold that we’re providing customers value; then something has to measure whether that value is being recognized, and how much value has been provided. For instance: if search is optimized, customers’ click-through on the results page after a search should improve; if the homepage is optimized, homepage click-through should climb; if the payment flow is optimized, the number of people paying successfully should climb. This question forces us to think about what our customer value really is, and what result we really want, and from there to set KPIs that mean something. As large as a department, as small as a feature: it’s the same all the way through.

Recently we’ve been building a web-call feature that lets buyers phone sellers free from the website, without worrying about long-distance charges. Will such a feature be recognized? Certainly, the number of paying users is a fine metric, but it’s tied to too many factors; is there some standard that lets us see plainly how much value we’ve provided? We found one metric: calls connected per day, both the total and the per-person average. The logic runs: this product’s value is the buyer’s call, and if a buyer is willing to place that call, value has been created. So by watching this metric, we began to watch: “why hasn’t the buyer called,” is it that “the button isn’t visible enough,” or that “too few buyers reach the seller’s storefront in the first place,” or that “the calling flow still holds many worries (charges, for one),” or that “buyers never liked making calls to begin with.” And so we set about a few things: “add more placements, and make the button more visible,” “open it first to sellers with many inquiries, and promote it to them,” “give the issues customers worry most about a prominent explanation within the flow.” This question forces us to think about how to provide customer value and see it delivered. Just imagine, if the focus of our attention had been “the number of paying customers,” we might well have cared more about the payment flow, the ordering flow, bundling and selling, that sort of thing.