Article | Zhang Yuxin
Edit | Yang Xuan
“Develop a company as a product.”
When Zhang yiming posted the message in late 2015, it went unnoticed: there were only 20 replies that month, most of them product complaints, not the message itself.
But looking back, it was a key sentence to understanding Zhang and ByteDance.
“From the very beginning, [Yiming] didn’t mean to make money from one or two apps, or to do Toutiao or Douyin.” Xu Min, head of corporate culture, told 36KR that many early investors recall that From the very beginning, Zhang had a clear vision around which to build byteDance.
When we started, the world knew Toutiao but not ByteDance. But gradually, its business has become difficult to be defined by a single App: from Toutiao, to Douyin, Watermelon, Huoshan, Feishu, Tongche Di… Bytedance is one of the few companies that has quickly found a quadratic growth curve.
It also raises the question: What exactly is ByteDance’s core competency?
“Core competitiveness is directly our products, behind the products is our technical system, behind the technical system is our team and culture.” This is the answer given by Zhang Yiming in a conversation with Qian Yingyi at Tsinghua University. In his view, Internet technology is not monopolistic or top-secret, and market barriers are fragile.
“In my opinion, a startup is actually doing two products at the same time, one is a product that provides services for users, and the other is the company, and the CEO is the product manager of that product.”
It’s not an easy product to make. Bytedance’s rapid growth has been accompanied not only by traffic, revenue and valuation, but also by the size of its team: now nearly 50,000. Many companies suffer from cultural dilution and management difficulties when their teams expand rapidly.
How do you make an organization, not just a product, consistently competitive, especially as the organization grows so rapidly?
The flow of information is the underlying logic
At ByteDance, it’s all too easy to figure out what Zhang yiming is up to: Any employee can directly see his OKR in the Flybook — or, more specifically, any employee can see any colleague’s OKR, as well as basic information and reporting relationships. “Being able to see a person’s OKR means you know exactly what they’re going to be focusing on for the next two months.” One employee told 36kr.
What’s more, in the bimonthly “CEO face to face” and department business communication meeting every two months, Zhang Yiming will publicly talk about his OKR progress. “He scores his OKR for the last two months, tells everyone what he hasn’t done well, and doesn’t hide what he’s not satisfied with.” Xu min told 36kr. Zhang yiming will sort out and explain the company’s important decisions, strategic direction, and even crises. For example, why ByteDance wants to be social and why internationalization is important to the company.
Bytedance advocates “asking and answering questions to the point.” An employee expressed fierce opinions at a bi-monthly meeting, pointing out that the management and Zhang Yiming did not pay attention to the business and did not care. We discussed whether to send the minutes of the meeting directly according to the “original”, Zhang Yiming was also on the scene, and finally agreed to send it to all the staff of the department.
Toutiao advocates “do not pack the results, do not manage upward and be favored by the leader”. Encourage group conversations rather than individual ones; The core of cultural values is “clarity”, while the underlying logic is to pursue the efficient flow of information. “The foundation of our company culture is the efficient flow of information, so to speak,” Xu told 36kr.
Even, as an ordinary employee, you can see all the product data of the Toutiao department — just apply to your immediate leader, no higher level approval is required.
“[Zhang] Yiming is one of the entrepreneurs I know who pursues fast information flow and sharing the most.” “Information creates value,” Zhang Yu, who left CCTV last year to join Bytedance, told 36kr. “This is his philosophy on products and management of the company.”
Such transparency is unusual in most companies. After all, there is a risk of information being leaked to competitors, and Toutiao is a company with many competitors.
Why is Zhang Yiming so obsessed with a transparent information flow environment? At the 2017 code conference of Source Code Capital, Zhang Yiming once explained: “Provide more context, reduce control, decision-making instructions are not simply uploaded, but let colleagues through providing context, through internal information transparency to solve problems, make decisions, improve efficiency.
Even Zhang yiming prefers to wait for fuller information before making decisions. “Management has an unspoken understanding that major decisions are put on hold for 24 hours before they are widely announced, in order to allow more information to come in and give people time to reflect.” Zhang Yu told 36 Krypton.
Earlier, Bytedance used to include “judgment” as part of its “bytestyle.” Judgment, on the other hand, is related to the level of information a person has access to.
In other words, byteDance sees every employee as an equally important node in its network of nearly 50,000 people.
Today’s headlines, deputy chief editor yi-long xu four years ago, feeling a bit “little shake” : two girls in the office to have a meal, a moment later yi-ming zhang came in, the two girls saw his one eye, also did not greet with yi-ming zhang, continue to have a meal, talking and laughing do anything she likes, yi-ming zhang sat to flip phone, look at things, and others point to a meeting. If Zhang yiming was late for a meeting, he would sit in the back silently, and no one would give him a seat.
Li Hang, director of AI Lab, summed up byteDance’s internal efforts to reduce hierarchy, such as not allowing teachers to be called and calling everyone by their first name instead of “you,” in order to “avoid the oppression of grassroots nodes by the sense of form, so that everyone can easily express their opinions.”
Network structure, 50,000 nodes
Xu yilong is in charge of a “headline-seeking” project. But for the most important first step of the project — signing a contract with the Ministry of Civil Affairs — he did almost two things: recruiting a journalist who had worked for the ministry and signing a contract with the ministry.
The former reporter, who was in charge and just entered the job, looked for legal affairs to see if the contract was standard, and called the company’s chapter for administration. He finished according to the process.
“When you need to collaborate across departments, you can find the person in that department in the flybook, look at their reporting relationship, and then look at their OKR, and basically determine the scope of their responsibilities and determine whether they are the right person for you.” This is Xu Yilong’s experience.
Last year, Xu came up with the idea of involving Douyin in the search — a product with a high DAILY active user means information can spread to more users.
The idea was quickly endorsed by douyin’s head of operations, but Mr. Xu immediately ran into his first problem: There was no existing map popup tool. So he turned to research and development to complete the tool. Another problem is that the graphic content on the headline search cannot be directly transferred to Douyin, because What Douyin needs is video content. Xu thought of AI Lab, which developed a tool to quickly convert graphic content into video content in seconds.
Cross-agency collaboration like this is everywhere. According to Xu Yilong, the project did not involve the top head of any department, so colleagues at the business level could make all the decisions.
At ByteDance, OKR is a special presence, not only for goal management, but also as a communication tool between everyone, the latter being even more important than the former.
At ByteDance, almost everyone emphasizes OKR “alignment” : alignment with Zhang and his superiors, as well as with colleagues. “For example, If Tiktok wants to do an event next month and needs my support, the person in charge of the event will come to me and ask me to include this cooperation in my OKR, so that I can guarantee my time and energy investment.” One employee told 36kr that if he made a change to an OKR, colleagues associated with the project would be notified on his flybook so they could adjust their OKR in time.
OKR here is not just a top-down disassembly, because it’s not just about your boss, it’s about your colleagues, it’s about colleagues in other departments, it’s an adaptive process of nodes in a network.
As for measuring results, ByteDance does “360-degree reviews” — anyone can rate anyone.
This means that, in addition to self-rating, an employee will not only be rated by his or her superiors, but also by colleagues with whom he or she has worked, making rewards and punishments clear and transparent. “If someone doesn’t approve of your work, it’s a good time to speak up.” One employee said it made “managing up” ineffective.
“Toutiao’s revenue targets are high every year, and it dares to set goals that are several times higher when the base is already large.” Huang He, bytedance’s former product partner and CEO of Banyu, said in an interview with Zuolinyouli, however, that “Zhang yiming’s vision and goals are very big, so it makes everyone work extremely hard, be imaginative and dare to take on challenges.”
If you don’t read the headlines, it looks like a big overstatement. Getting “everyone” to work as hard as possible seems like an impossible task, and “fishing” is the norm in big companies.
Delegate power and act boldly
At byteDance’s 7th anniversary celebration, Zhang yiming told a story:
“Last year we said we would accelerate the process of internationalization. One of my colleagues was very active and told me one day that he would go to India for research next week. A few days later, I asked him which city were you in, Delhi or Bangalore, and he said still in Zhichun Road… He was stopped while going through customs in India. I said why? He said he didn’t have the right papers. I said, what kind of id do you have? He said APEC card. He took a Pacific Rim card and went to the Indian Ocean countries. ‘It says India,’ he said. I looked for a long time and saw an acronym IDN. This is Indonesia.
Of course, this did not hinder his enthusiasm to go to India, a week later, he still set foot on Indian soil. He also posted a short video on Douyin, riding in a “Tutu car” and finally crossing the border after a long journey twice. He did a lot of industry analysis and research in India and recruited a lot of candidates. I don’t know how he did it because his English wasn’t very good, but he did it.”
Bytedance’s overseas war is unfolding in such an “absurd” way, and the hero of the story is Bytedance’s senior vice president Zhang Lidong. “Later, Zhang took English classes at the company twice a week.” “Zhang Yu, who also studies English, told 36kr.
Zhang yiming has his own tolerance for employees’ dereliction of duty or mistakes. “He has a mild personality and almost never loses his temper” is the evaluation of most employees. They believe that the essence of anger is laziness without providing solutions. However, the biggest reason for zhang yiming to tolerate mistakes is that he does not want to stifle innovation and challenge.
One bytedance employee who used to work at BAT marveled at the company’s tolerance for suggestions and “magic” ideas — the former company was more execution heavy and less “crap.” But Bytedance’s logic is to use inclusion to encourage innovation.
Bytedance is open to information and other attempts by default, and there is no complicated process for management. Delegating is a respected culture within ByteDance that helps keep employees on their own.
Mr. Zhang isn’t strong on business decisions, either.
At first, Zhang Nan (male) and Zhang Yiming disagreed on whether the watermelon video should be separated from Toutiao and become a separate App — Zhang yiming had reservations, while Zhang Nan insisted that it was time for China to have its own YouTube, and presented data to back up his judgment. In the end, Zhang nan’s decision was upheld.
Mistakes are not scary at ByteDance, and the company even encourages a “bug-finding” culture. “There are groups in the flybook so you can throw in any bugs you see.” Xu min told 36kr. And the TV in the lunchroom shows just one thing: global users poking fun at toutiao products.
In Zhang Yiming’s opinion, what is the more serious mistake? “Zhang Yiming will pay attention to whether the occurrence of a mistake is caused by the absence of a perfect mechanism or process as a guarantee.” “It’s like flood control,” Xu told 36 Krypton. “If the dam breaks because you didn’t reinforce it beforehand, it’s hard to tolerate.”
From 0 to 50,000
After more than seven years, ByteDance now has nearly 50,000 employees. If the challenges of internal management were small and the corporate culture could maintain its original purity when the team consisted of several hundred or even several thousand people, how can this huge organization continue to run smoothly under a proven and effective logical framework today?
Zhang’s first answer is to hire good people, people who identify with each other, and try to maintain some consistency in the sprawling organization by increasing the density of good people.
Zhang yiming has his own way of recruiting, caijing reported. In byteDance’s early days, Zhang’s rationale for hiring was to fill in the gaps in his business and hire as if he were investing in an early-stage entrepreneur. At the time, the “good” qualities were focused on “entrepreneurship” — Chen and Zhang both had their own startups and joined ByteDance as their companies were acquired.
“Recruitment” has always been an important topic in Zhang yiming’s micro blog. He once said, “I take the initiative to require the HR department to position the market salary at least once a year to keep the market salary leading in the industry. Of course, if the cost of manpower is high, in turn, the company must be able to deploy these people well and perform well, which is an aggressive attitude.”
In recruit a person on this matter, Zhang Yiming once let Zhang Yu eat a surprise. He had already passed a very good candidate, and only needed to sign for Zhang Yiming to go through the process. But to his surprise, Zhang Yiming, who was on a business trip to the United States at that time, said to him, “I have called up all the articles he wrote before and read them, and I think they are ok.” Zhang Yu can only secretly ashamed, he is not so careful and serious.
But once the number of people reaches a certain level, it is almost accepted that the alignment depends on values — but bytedance does not mention “values”, which implies a positive or negative judgment on people, but “bytedance”, a consensus of behavior. A total of “honest and clear, the pursuit of perfection, pragmatic dare to do, open and humble, always entrepreneurial” 5.
However, with Bytedance fully internationalizing in 2017, managing overseas employees has become a new challenge for Xu and the corporate culture team.
“People in different countries have their own working styles and habits, which conflict with the consistency required by internal management.” Xu gave an example: After chatting with her overseas colleagues, who often couldn’t respond to their messages in time, she realized that foreign parents were rarely able to help them with their children. They had to spend a whole chunk of time with their children every day. “We thought we should embrace this difference,” she said.
Currently, about half of bytedance’s employees in its international business are local employees in various countries and regions. With the rapid expansion of its overseas teams, Bytedance’s workforce has become very diversified. Faced with the differences brought by diversity, and even differences between countries, Xu min believes that “bytesy” (corporate values) should not be too strong, but should be based on it, “tolerance of minority groups and respect for differences”.
Behind this, is zhang Yiming often talk about a sentence: reduce their ego. “Ego creates blind spots, and self-knowledge, self-control and self-reflection are especially important when few or no one is able to make effective demands and criticisms.”
The way a business chooses to act is closely related to the nature of the business. There is no one right answer. However, running a company as a product means that a logical and self-consistent system supports and promotes the operation of the organization, which is the origin of Zhang yiming’s “enterprise management methodology”.