What Is The Most Important Thing For Entrepreneurship Management

For entrepreneurs, there are two things that others cannot do for them, that is, finding people and products.

Yesterday, Ma Huateng from QQ came to us for a chat and talked about the importance of the founder's products to the success of the enterprise. Even today, when QQ is so successful and has a market value of nearly 10 billion dollars, he still has to spend a lot of time on products. This approach sounds simple and natural to me, but now many company founders can't do it.

An entrepreneur has too many things to worry about: products, markets, sales, finance, technology, hiring, firing, public relations... but you can't do everything yourself. For a start-up enterprise, I think the most important resource is the founder's time and energy. How to allocate these two resources is the most important issue. So for entrepreneurs, what can be delegated and what needs to be done by themselves?

I think there are two things that others can't do for us, that is, finding people and products.

Finding a good person is very important. I have written many articles about what kind of people the company should recruit, whether it should find "sea turtles" or "turtles", and what to do if it can't find a satisfactory person. I just want to add that what kind of people you look for determines what kind of culture the company will have, so entrepreneurs must find their own people. To find a good person can let him take charge of the market, sales, finance, technology, public relations and many other things; Find good people and let them manage a department of the company with confidence. He manages better than the boss. That's great!

The second thing that must be paid attention to is the product, which is the soul of a company. We look at the world's leading products, AMAZON、APPLE、NINTENDO， Their CEOs or founders are crazy people who focus on products and never delegate power. From my own experience, when I was working on eBay, I delegated a lot of power to products. In 2002, eBay's products should score 75 points, which is directly related to the founder's daily involvement. After the platform was migrated to eBay in 2003, the product became worse and worse, and the score was terrible. It often takes nine weeks for a website to change a word, and nine months of waiting in the headquarters to change a function. The change of the company's cultural atmosphere is fatal to the product.

It is not easy to do a good job in the product. It needs to integrate the needs of multiple departments: understand the target users and their needs from the market, balance the different opinions of the sales department and the marketing department, and decide what the technical department should and cannot do:

Market: Who are our current users? What are their needs? Who are our potential users?  

 
What are their needs? Many times, people (especially managers) will pay too much attention to existing customers and ignore potential customers. People also pay too much attention to the needs that users can express (obtained from market research), and ignore the needs that users do not know how to express (need to be explored by entrepreneurship).

Sales: What kind of products can sell and are easy to sell? In some companies, the target users of the market and sales are the same; In some companies, users (people who mainly use products) and customers (people who pay) are different, or even completely opposite. How to meet and balance different needs?

Technology: Which products are easy to do and which are difficult to do? How to balance time and function? The Technology Department will often say that the functions required by the Marketing Department cannot be achieved, or it will take a long time to achieve such functions. Sometimes the technical department has a good idea to make a new function, but the marketing department doesn't want it. Whose judgment should we trust?

Customer service: How much attention should be paid to user feedback and problems? What was put forward by 1% of unimportant users, what were the requirements of our core users, or the problems of potential core users (if this problem is solved, he will become a core user)?

In short, besides selecting people, products are the most important thing for a company. An entrepreneur should take the long-term development of the company as the goal, weigh the interests and prejudices (even inertia or inertia) of various departments, and make decisions based on his own intuition.