Not Really a Recipe for Short Video Platforms

— Ep2: What Make a Short Video Platform Tik: An Overview

The longer I work on coordinating cross-functional teams in different tech companies, the more I realize the importance and challenges of orchestrating different teams that would otherwise work in silos to move toward a common goal and keeping a balance between competing goals. A UGC content platform is no different.

A simplistic view of how all the pieces within a short video platform (if not all UGC content platforms) work together to move things forward:

Sorry, this is probably way too simple… Let me try again:

Believe it or not, this was actually how I felt when I first walked inside a content platform startup. It took me a while to find a way to understand everything—by looking through the lenses of three main stakeholders: Creators, Audience, Brands/Marketers. The benefit of doing this: 1)you will see more clearly where and how to improve the experience for our users or clients; 2)it will provide you perspectives on how to structure the teams and communications.

Disclaimer: different companies at different stages may breakdown and name the teams differently, but the basic functions are more or less similar. And you may find Engineering and Data Scientist missing from all the pictures, simply because they are EVERYWHERE! Take them as a given for multiple functional modules.

1. Audience’s Journey

Goal: form user expectations and align product experience with their expectations

Metrics: conversion rates

*Content Supply and Monetization are two brackets of many things which will be explained in Section 2 and 3

2. Creators’ Journey

Goal: cultivate better content by empowering creators to achieve their goal

Metrics: amount and performance of their production

When it comes to the creator’s journey, which is less linear and more complex than the audience’s journey, I personally find below BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model helpful. To put it in a nutshell: When a behavior is prompted above the Action Line, it happens. Therefore, what we need to do is to help the creator to take the action toward their goal by moving the action further above the Action Line, and prompt it.

* 1) Audience Behavior is shaped by what is described in Section 1; 2) some functions are working on more than one aspect, and the above chart is just a rough description, but you get the idea

3. Brands/Marketers

Though advertising is not the monetization model for all UGC platforms, it’s still the dominant one up till today.

Goal: obtain profit by providing more value-adds to brands/marketers at a lower cost

Metrics: the ROI of the platform and the brands/marketers

One last thing I wrap up this article and let you go back to whatever you were doing before jumping into my blog: my takeaway from all the messy cross-functional situations I’ve been through is

1)always map out the process first and then structure the team;

2)breakdown clear goals and metrics for different teams;

3)don’t overdo 2). Sometimes co-shouldering one set of goals and metrics makes more sense for teams too close to each other;

4)don’t confuse the problems of “incapability” with “conflicting goals”.

this article is originally posted here.

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Reference:

BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Feb 2020