Zheng Zhihao is the CEO of Maoyan culture. He worked at Tencent for eight years, leading the development of products such as QZone.
Tencent recently continued its bullish streak, surpassing Facebook for the first time with a market value of $522.9 billion, making it the fifth-most valuable company in the world and just over $10 billion behind Amazon at no. 4. In 13 years, the share price rose 656 times. Yes, that’s how Tencent has performed in the 13 years since it went public.
In the Internet industry, a single key product is often enough to change the landscape of an entire company. The really important question is, how to set up a set of mechanisms to make this disruptive key product more likely to be produced in their own company?
In this respect, Tencent is a good coordinate. Its mechanism always allows excellent teams and excellent products to run out, so that every time Tencent meets a bottleneck, there must be a team to help the whole company overcome the bottleneck.
In the Internet industry, it is possible for a company to do several things at once, with about the same amount of effort on average. But it’s unlikely that everything you do will be so successful that if just one of these things succeeds, it will lift up the whole company.
At Tencent, there are wildly successful products like wechat as well as more obscure ones. All attempts are meaningful enough if they lead to the success of one key thing. The wechat team is now less than 1,200 people, a small proportion of the entire company, but how much of Tencent’s market value does wechat account for?
At that time, Tencent also proposed QQ FOR WORK, QQ FOR SCHOOL and QQ FOR FAMILY. When put forward, it sounds quite reliable, but really go down to need to fall, fall the path of the plan how to walk out, and then quickly correct mistakes. People remember Tencent’s successful products and these concepts are forgotten.
In other words, there may be a lot of things that a company has done that are not reliable, but it doesn’t matter that much. After one thing is successful, all the things that a company has done together are very valuable. So the most important question becomes: how do you make sure that the most important thing is done successfully, and successfully within the company?
I have been working in Tencent for about 8 years. One of the reasons I left Tencent was that I wanted to “fight”. At that time, there were no competitors in the things I did in Tencent, such as GUANGdiantong, Qzone and open platform. Another reason is that I think why there are some people in the company with poor product and business capabilities who have been working for so many years, and whether there is something wrong with Tencent’s management and culture. From the inside of a big company, people can easily have such thoughts.
Looking back from Tencent these years, I think I was wrong. Look at this in terms of a system, not just a team or an individual. What Tencent does well with this system is that it ensures that the best teams, the ones that consistently win, always have a chance to get out.
How do you do that?
The first is how Tencent develops its products.
It is typical of Tencent that when one product is successful, the rest of the products will be managed as a product portfolio, rather than as a flower after a flower. The advantage of this is that it gives the best seed in the portfolio a chance to weed out the bad products and teams at the right time and in the right context.
It could be fast, it could be slow, it could be one year, five years, it could be ten years. But if you stretch it out long enough, the truly unreliable ones are bound to fall by the wayside. On the one hand, companies are certainly paying a price in terms of resources; But on the other hand, you allow time and space for promising products and talent to grow.
Let me give you an example. I made a product called Universal Access. I am to do QQ space one’s previous experience, do advertisement of social intercourse and effect advertisement have what reason to say I do certainly stronger than others? Don’t. Moreover, Tencent had come from Google at that time, there are from 4A company invited brand advertising experts, and from Microsoft and Yahoo invited over the effect of advertising experts. None of them are in my department. After its success, it took some time to bring in an expert from Google.
At that time, There were a lot of teams in Tencent at the same time doing effective advertising products. I sit in on the AD coordination committee. Our team’s strategy is to not argue and just get on with it. Under this combination mechanism, the final results are presented and the numbers speak for themselves. The product turned out to be so successful that it has now become the core technology platform for Tencent’s performance advertising and social advertising.
Then there is Tencent’s culture.
Tencent culture is very inclusive, with positive incentives to drive the whole team. Tencent is a very strong collective decision-making mechanism. Pony’s management style is that unless he has a strong desire to intervene, he is willing to let the team try and let different teams compete.
That’s what’s special about Tencent. Even if there are a lot of important people who have different views, if you’ve proven yourself to be trustworthy in the past, this can still go a long way. As long as there is a certain amount of communication, do not mess. Of course, you need to prove something periodically along the way. We are not amateurs, grasp their own pace, you can ensure that their door will not be closed by the company. Zhang Xiaolong’s wechat is the same, and many teams are doing it at the same time.
This culture is fundamental to the existence and continuity of the product portfolio. In this culture, a good and successful team and product will be supported by the company to make it more successful. For the rest of you who haven’t made it yet, the company will help you put together a product portfolio, maybe even compete with each other, but that’s ok, keep running, until one day you can see which one of you is running the right way, which one of you is running the head, which one of you is wasting the opportunity cost of the company.
Third, Tencent has a bottom-up environment and atmosphere in its approach to products.
When Things are discussed internally at Tencent, no matter how senior they are, someone must stand up and challenge the boss. This atmosphere is crucial. Zhang Xiaolong dares to keep saying “NO” to his boss. I personally know that wechat has several product features, and even if my boss presses me, it won’t change wechat’s core interaction and visual choices. And eventually you have to give reasons why you can’t change this, why you can change that. In each case, when people think logically about the matter, the room is filled with reason, not authority and position, which is important.
Let me give you a negative example of what happens when judgment on methodology and structure in a large company is pushed from the top down instead of being handed to the people who actually make the product. When I was at Microsoft, in 2005, 2006, something happened. The company hired a very expensive consulting firm to do strategic planning for Microsoft, and specifically for my division, MSN. The consultant’s advice: Microsoft has only one brand called Windows, so don’t take anything away from Windows. Focus on the Windows brand. Based on this logic, MSN was later changed to Windows Live Messenger, to do interaction and vision according to Windows. The entire Microsoft MSN product line was on hold for about two years while the UI and concepts were changed. It’s not really about user experience, it’s about brand consistency.
By 2010, MSN’s market share had fallen sharply. A bad decision that took five years to prove wrong. But the result cannot be changed. Battlefields and history cannot be repeated. There must be a few people who can see the mistake, but when their voices are not heard, the results are disastrous.
Fourth, the attitude towards the waste of resources.
Different teams are developing the same type of products to compete internally, and even some unreliable teams can survive in Tencent for many years. Of course there is a waste of resources. But looking at it another way, is the loss of resources more or less terrible than the loss of a huge opportunity? For example, suppose wechat lost this opportunity, how terrible? Including QQ space, including wechat pay, many products are the change of the whole pattern, is irreparable loss. Once missed, may miss an era.
Tencent internal there is a word: “Tencent do business easy to do, plug a shoulder can blossom.” Because it was easy to get enough traffic and support to do business on Tencent, the business seemed easy to succeed at the beginning. This is partly a strategy: I don’t know what opportunities will come tomorrow, what market changes will happen, but Tencent has a better chance of getting this dividend than others. Multiply this probability by day and by year, and the team with high probability can always PK the team with low probability.
From the logic of this system, it is no accident that wechat was born in Tencent.
When I was working on wechat, on the one hand, overseas products such as TalkBox and Kik were already available; on the other hand, there were many teams working on it within Tencent. It was in the second half of 2010, towards the end of the year, and Tencent had an organizational constraint that all of its wireless products were in the wireless business group. Two other explorations of instant messaging applications on mobile terminals, and more foreshadowing, are in different parts of the Wireless business. The only exception is Zhang Xiaolong.
Why is that? The first is Pony, in the past, QQ mailbox has won Zhang xiaolong a vote of confidence. This is an unwritten mechanism of Tencent. Its logic is that in order to give more opportunities to people who have made successful products, zhang Xiaolong should be given more opportunities to do things, which is inevitable. He had a successful QQ mailbox in history, and it made sense to give him more work this time.
Zhang Xiaolong also did not transfer to the wireless business division, or in their own team to do. A lot of people think that making Internet products requires a lot of people and a team. But the biggest thing about innovative products is that thinking trumps human resources. Zhang xiaolong’s wechat team consists of eight people who can be named by name. He’ll use some help from the mailbox team. But the real participation in the project is eight people, eight people on the organization for three or four months, not even a small room, it was done.
There’s another thing that people are missing. In addition to mailbox success, Zhang xiaolong also made a lot of other products before. It just didn’t work and people forgot about them. Today’s wechat circle of friends, the public account, have zhang Xiaolong’s early failed product mark.
And then when we analyze the product, we see that all the failures that you have become will one day become the ladder to success.
How does Tencent break the bottleneck
Tencent has faced a big bottleneck every two or three years in its history, but Tencent must have a team to step up and help the whole company overcome this bottleneck. The reason is that Tencent’s mechanism always allows excellent teams and excellent products to run out.
Tencent’s bottlenecks, such as SP (mobile value-added services). SP used to be the only business model of Tencent, leaving SP life can not go on. In the move of a small leader, Pony also want to personally receive. Later rely on Internet value-added services to break through this bottleneck. I’ve been there with my own team. The product that we helped the company overcome the bottleneck that year was QQ Farm. At that time the whole QQ platform basically did not rise. This is terrible. In the Internet industry, I feel that losses and unstable teams are not afraid of these, and the most terrible thing is no growth. From 2008 to 2009, all of a sudden QQ and Qzone stagnated, and if they didn’t break through, there would be a big problem. Later, we first engaged in grabbing parking Spaces, buying and selling friends, and then cooperated with a company to do QQ farm, which overcome the bottleneck. Wechat is needless to say, let Tencent get mobile Internet tickets directly.
Therefore, when we look at an organization, the strength of its organizational structure and departments is not the same as the value it brings. I have always believed that a company, including personal growth, may have a period of time wasted, some time and resources wasted.
You may not want to admit it, but you feel like you’ve done a lot in those five years, with a few girlfriends, a few jobs, and a lot. But it is true that a lot of times we are going around in circles, wasting opportunity and time costs. As for the company, some things that sound bright or toss a lot are not very helpful to the development of the company or really change the fate of the organization.
What really changes the fate of an organization is when one product or business suddenly comes out and changes the whole structure of the company. In this case, the most important thing is to be able to establish a mechanism and system, so that the product that changes the pattern, has the opportunity to come out.
The development trend of the Internet industry in the future is something that Ma huateng has been concerned about. “At what stage is the whole human race in the development of the Internet? Where will the Internet upgrade in the next decade?” Attracted many netizens to watch.
Perhaps it is this sense of crisis that allows Ma huateng to lead Tencent forward and stay ahead of the Internet wave. Today’s Tencent empire has also developed from the original social software QQ into an Internet ecological enterprise.
A Detailed explanation of Ma Huateng’s Seven Weapons (source: Jian Shu author: Skinny Goose)
From How Tencent Grew up
1. Minimalism
Tencent is built to be very light, very small, very simple, very detail-oriented.
Fast, stable, good function, good experience, this is the overall requirements of Internet products.
In an era of information overload, function overload and product overload, minimalism becomes more and more important. People in primitive societies only need to hunt (get food) to survive; In the age of agriculture, people need to plant, harvest and store, seemingly without worrying about food, but it brings more complicated processes. With the advent of the industrial age, the invention of steam engine and machine seemed to improve people’s work efficiency, but people’s work fell into a more complex cycle. The Internet is even worse. The explosion of information and the flood of tools seem to save us time, but in fact each of them wants to grab people’s attention. It’s the same with everything. If it’s good for you, it’s going to consume you.
Less is more, and more is nothing. In ma huateng’s product philosophy, he believes that mobile phones should adhere to the following points:
First, don’t force users. (Forcing users often results in abandonment, and there is no shortage of alternatives.)
Second, don’t harass 99% of your users for 1% of their needs. (This is reflected in wechat subscription number set and service number frequency to a certain extent)
Third, subtle art, touch and stop. (This is the MAC version of QQ to give a bad review)
Fourth, do not deliberately cater to younger people. (Ponder: Do losers really win the world?)
In today’s Internet age, pandering never goes very far. Consumers can not be catered to, only to guide, only to create demand, only to awaken the potential demand of consumers. Catering to consumers is always a dead end and will go lower and lower. The bottom line for consumers is free, there is no such thing as a free lunch, so never cater to the market.
‘The best Internet products are those that even idiots can use,’ Mr. Zhang said of product design. As a product developer, how much time do you let yourself become an idiot? This is an ability, the world’s strongest ability is Steve Jobs, he can become an idiot in 1 second, Ma Huateng is 5 seconds, and he is 15 seconds.
In terms of overall product architecture and operations, the best strategy is to have “Don’t make me think! Big sound xi sound, elephant is invisible, personally think, good product is about to change function at invisible.
2. User-driven strategy
If one of the most successful user-driven is Wikipedia, another is wechat. It can be said that the most understanding of user management is wechat, which has 650 million users.
Tencent had such a mechanism 10 years ago — the 10/100/1000 rule. 10 is the product manager’s monthly survey of 10 users, 100 is the blog of 100 users, and 1000 is the amount of user experience feedback to be collected.
Another magic bullet is big data. Alvin Toffler, author of The Third Wave, proposed the third wave — the information revolution — in 1980, and most importantly the emergence of “big data”, a term he coined.
Big data will become Tencent, Ali’s core competitiveness, but also for a long time difficult to subvert. Because, with big data, they will know what’s going to happen before anyone else.
3. Internal horse racing
In Tencent, it is difficult to live without war achievements, all the internal executives are beat up. This is also the charm of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Everyone is equal and everyone has opportunities.
Tencent games, which accounts for 70 percent of Tencent’s profits:
Is it possible to decide what games young people like? In the game port, Tencent has eight studios. In the game department, it can be seen that the income of each BU (Business Unit) in the studio varies greatly, some can be divided into 20 million yuan, while others cannot. So Tencent all games are the first internal fight, and then internal test, public test, trial operation, do good traffic to you.
Of course, this mechanism can work, the biggest factor is that Ma Huateng is a person who is very tolerant of mistakes. He rarely makes decisions on his own, but mostly makes decisions after full discussion, internal competition, which is also his management style.
4. Iteration strategy of trial and error
“Small iteration, trial and error fast” seems to be the spirit of all Internet companies, is the best use of MVP industry. Xiaomi and Dorpbox are typical cases of practicing this principle. Relying on users, satisfying users and constantly iterating and optimizing are the foundation of Internet enterprises.
Anti-vulnerability suggests that in a future where precise quantification has been replaced by machines, what will remain is a flawed, soft, grayscale capacity.
Following this logic, which skills can we absolutely not give up, and which skills can we take lightly?
5. Ecological cultivation mode
In 2015, there was a particularly interesting phenomenon, which summed up in the fact that it was Didi Chuxing, not another taxi company, that disrupted taxi companies. It’s not another microblog that’s upending Weibo, it’s wechat. So, when Ma Huateng asked KK, Tencent’s future enemy is who, KK very wise answer, this person has not appeared in your list.
In 2011, Tencent proposed opening up, and the two words it talked about most were purification and ecology.
In 2013, Ma Huateng put forward two very important ideas, one is “connect everything” and the other is “Internet Plus”. The emergence of these two things, so that the entire Internet from a virtual economy into the basis of all economies.
When QQ was listed, Ma Huateng defined Tencent as a one-stop Internet life service provider. QQ, wechat, payment, investment e-commerce jingdong, step by step, Tencent’s boundary is constantly expanding, is forming its own closed loop at the ecological level, and constantly evolving.
Ma Huateng proposed seven latitudes of gray scale rule:
How Tencent Grew up
6. Capital integration ability
Tencent has been run for a decade by Martin Lau, a capital-management specialist from Goldman Sachs.
Tencent open ability, one is flow, one is capital. Interestingly, Tencent’s big advantage compared with other investment companies is its traffic and business capabilities. After 201, Lau’s greatest contribution to Tencent is to reconstruct Tencent’s core competitiveness from the capital level.
Before 2011, nearly all of Tencent’s investments were holdings. After 2011, Tencent found that I wanted to make my company more soft and open.
Wechat made $3.7 billion in capital from its investment in JD alone. The price is that it gave up its e-commerce business, even gave paipai and Yixun to JD, and even opened its wechat port exclusively to JD.
The competition of future companies has gone beyond the industrial level to the securities level. I’m afraid I have a stake in every profitable company I look out at.
Therefore, the most conservative and safe way for large companies is through capital, because it is impossible to have any internal driving force, only through investment.
7. Focus on the original idea
What was your initial intention? This is probably a question most investors ask. I believe that now no entrepreneur will say, I am in order to make money, if there is, then I advise you to find a job as early as possible, dependable to make money.
This is a very interesting question, which relates to the future development of your company. Every time you encounter difficulties or temptations, the “beginner’s mind” will jump out and help you with a big favor. A great company has a founder and a team who are focused on the original idea. Steve Jobs is, Jack Ma is, and so is Ma Huateng.
– This article is from Executive magazine
