Chapter 074: Joining

Lin Luyao pondered for a long time and finally decided she ought to fight for herself. Otherwise, how long would she be stuck on the sidelines, waiting for her turn?

Tentatively, she raised her hand and waved at Chen Xujia.

“Um, about this project… I’d like to join. Can I take part?”

Chen Xujia was taken aback, glancing over at Tang Xiao. When Tang Xiao nodded ever so slightly, Chen Xujia continued, “Sure. When Xiaoxiao has meetings or anything, she can bring you along.”

After that, Chen Xujia discussed the details of product rating criteria and the issue of daily rotation in the product pool. Following last week’s ‘nine-grid’ model, the challenge of selecting products for the pool had been largely solved. Yet, since the process still relied on daily manual selection, it was quite labor-intensive.

“Tan Fang, you all need to finalize the rating criteria soon and then coordinate with the colleagues in algorithms and development. Get them to automate the daily product pool selection. That way, we can save time and focus on other tasks.”

“Right, right, I was just discussing this with Zhenzhen and the others,” Tan Fang nodded in agreement. “We’ll try to settle the specifics in the next couple of days, then reach out to development. But the big promotion is coming soon—do they have the manpower right now?”

“Let’s get it done as soon as possible. It’s only the preheat phase now, so ideally, it should be ready before Singles’ Day. Otherwise, they won’t be able to fit it in until the end of the year.”

Once Chen Xujia had assigned everything and announced the end of the meeting, Tang Xiao scooted her chair over to Lin Luyao’s side.

“Luyao, since you weren’t here over the weekend, let me fill you in on a few things.”

As she spoke, she pulled up a rough draft of their plan in PowerPoint on her computer.

“The weekend?”

“Yes, while we were on duty over the weekend, the user operations team approached us for a discussion.”

As if she’d anticipated Lin Luyao’s puzzlement, Tang Xiao explained that their department required weekend shifts, scheduled at the beginning of each month.

Full-time employees were paid hourly; weekend overtime not only increased work hours and employee points, but also came with triple pay and additional benefits like transportation and meal subsidies.

But—none of these perks applied to interns.

Back to the point.

With the rising popularity of smartphones and internet access, their e-commerce platform needed to maintain its existing consumer base while also targeting groups outside their primary audience.

Although children nowadays have their own smart devices, they aren’t independent consumers. Max, therefore, set his sights on the retired population aged fifty and above.

Clearly, this group’s shopping needs differ significantly from those of the younger adults aged twenty to forty. If they applied the same product rating standards, the efficiency of attracting new users from this demographic would be poor.

“But… why did they come to us in business operations? Isn’t personalized recommendation more effective for things like product suggestions?”

Tang Xiao paused for a few seconds, as if searching for the right words. She returned to her desk, fetched her notebook, and began sketching a flowchart.

What is personalization?

It’s the practice of recommending suitable products to each potential consumer based on their historical behavior and personal characteristics, maximizing the likelihood of a transaction.

However, for new users without a history of operations, personalized algorithms are of little use.

Therefore, before personalization can be trained on a user’s historical behavior, a product pool that matches the customer group becomes especially crucial.