Lately, I have switched my reading habit from short paragraphed writing (like online news articles and pieces of post) to a more detailed reading, like that of Medium.com. Came across a letter by Allen Zhang who talked about his vision of a product and why WeChat became a lifestyle to more than a billion active daily users. As a technology enthusiast and a person with product managing history, I am fascinated by the likes of Allan Zhang.
Many people outside of China, don't really know what is WeChat other than a messaging platform like Telegram, WhatsApp etc. I just checked my App Store to see when I first downloaded WeChat. Back in February 2014! Holly cow đ€Ż
I probably installed it to see why it was so famous in China and wanted to see stores and mini programs I read online. Never figured it out, perhaps, due to limited capabilities outside of China.
If you like to read a good quality writing, go and read it here đđŒ
Here are my highlights that I will reflect my thoughts in relationship to building running community of DAV.TJ in one end of the spectrum and one mobile app - Alif Mobi in the other spectrum, in my next post.
> The first** is a good product is innovative; it must have creativity.
The second** is it is useful.
The third** is it is beautiful.
The fourth** is it is easy to use.
The fifth** is it is unobtrusive, modest.
The sixth** is it is honest.
The seventh** is it is timeless; it wonât become outdated.
The eighth** is it doesnât skip over any small details.
The ninth** is it is environmentally friendly and does not waste any resources.
The tenth** is it is not overly designed, meaning âless is moreâ.
> Because the companyâs objective is to increase traffic and make money, hence everyoneâs KPI is also to increase traffic and make money. This means the product managerâs work objective is not to create the best product, but to use whatever means necessary to obtain traffic.
> What we advocate more is to use WeChat to create good products for our users.
> Once I asked my colleagues a question: âIn the PC era, what page has the most views?â The answer is Internet Explorerâs 404 error page. Then I asked, âWhy didnât Microsoft put an ad on the page?â My colleagues couldnât answer. This question is very meaningful, right? Why didnât Microsoft place an ad on a page with such high traffic? Why doesnât WeChat place an ad on its startup page? Everyone can think about this.
> If WeChat was a person, certainly it would be your best friend, thatâs why youâre willing to spend so much time on it. Then, how could I stick an ad on your best friendâs face? Every time you saw him, you would have to watch an ad before you could talk to him.
> The important thing is that we make sure our products adapt to the era we are in, rather than failing to adapt it out of fear that users will complain.
> we had one principle: if a new product canât grow naturally, we shouldnât market it.
> First, we didnât import users and automatically add them as friends within WeChat, instead letting users choose who to invite or send a friend request to one-by-one. Second, when the product wasnât yet widely recognized, we let it grow naturally rather than market it. These two things were the right way to do it.
> In order to create an excellent product, I think it is good to be obsessed about it.
> Once you know whatâs a good product and whatâs a bad product, you wonât accept a lousy feature being forced upon users.
> Whether or not itâs keeping up with the times depends on the user, not us.
> The second driving force is âlet creators cultivate valueâ.
> Keeping to this principle, when Iâve observed many products in our industry, Iâve often felt that there are many things that go against my beliefs.
For example, these two years, the goal of apps across the industry has been to try their best to keep users in their app as long as possible. This goes against my beliefs.
> The primary goal for technology should be helping humankind increase efficiency.
> For example, a good communication tool must be highly efficient. Thatâs why WeChat does not have a message status, the reason being that the most efficient method is to just send and go. You donât have to worry whether the message was sent or not, whether if it was successfully sent or successfully received, and even worry about whether or not there is a network issue.
> The mission of developers shouldnât be to make users spend all their time on their phones aside from when they eat and sleep.
> the most important difference is: what is your driving force? Things that benefit oneself but not others do not last.
> Definition of communitcaiton: âcommunication is the process of inculcating oneâs self-image into another personâs mind.â
> everything you post is in hopes of convincing your friends to see you as a certain kind of person.
> Online socialization is just a reflection of offline socialization.
> But here is a dilemma. If we want users to communicate freely at the lowest stress level possible, the only situation is talking to oneself. But when you talk to yourself there are no responses from your friends, meaning there is no social benefit. The more people the user talks to, the greater the social benefit, but the stress is also greater. Thatâs why many people set their Moments posts to only be visible to friends for 3 days, so that they feel less stress.
> The number of users is always limited, service is unlimited.
> Of course, I know many teams wonât ask about meaning when they do things, they only ask, âWhat is our KPI?â Honestly, since the beginning, the WeChat team has never worked towards KPI before.
> Everyone in our team has developed a habit of ensuring every feature and every service has a meaning or a dream behind it. If a feature is made for just gaining traffic, and it doesnât provide value to users, then itâll have problems, it wonât last. We think about the meaning behind every detail of everything we do. This is a reason weâve been able to make it to this day, and its helped us make many right decisions.
> WeChat also doesnât have competition, no need to pair us with competitors. If there is a competitor, it will be ourselves, it will be whether our organization can keep up as time changes.
What began as nothing more than a spark of a thought has now taken shape before us, alive and undeniable. We didnât just imagine it, we lived it, we felt it, and we proved that a simple idea can become something powerful when we dare to believe in it. This journey reminds me that every dream starts quietly, almost invisibly, yet with courage, effort, and heart, it grows into something that touches our lives and inspires us to keep reaching for more.
At the top of the Double Pass (northern), my brother Firuz asked me about our estimated plan of when we will be reaching the finish. Based on the information we had, I said: âBest plan is we reach by 7 PM, given or taken plus/minus 1 hour.â Little I knew how things could go wrong so fast.
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