Editor's note: how did Tencent grow into a big company from 1998 to 2017? The company, which started with the "network paging" business, stumbled upon the era of PC Internet dividend; after successfully marching into the mobile Internet era, it became an Internet giant with more than one billion users. It has experienced transformation, several organizational structure adjustments, and finally formed a unique cultural status quo.
Today, Tencent is most praised by outsiders for its strong "product genes" and open corporate ecology. How does this unique DNA grow and implant into a company? Zhang Zhidong, one of the founders of Tencent and former CTO, shared these issues in Frontier's near-field Research.
Tencent's "first Entrepreneurship": one is to live, and the other is to be scolded less.
When we first founded Tencent, we didn't know anything about VC and venture capital.At that time, several founders just got tired of working and came up with the idea of being a small company engaged in Internet products and being able to support themselves. under such a mistake, they broke into China's Internet industry.
Tencent was lucky to meet the right time and place. When Tencent was founded in 1998, we originally wanted to build a network paging system and sell it to the paging station.Being an OICQ does not make money, it is a by-product based on interest, and it can add some calls to the paging station.. However, a year after the development of the enterprise, the paging industry began to decline, paging stations continue to close or merge, the general trend of mobile phones to replace pagers has been highlighted.
And our sideline OICQ is growing crazily. At that time, the bandwidth was very narrow, there was no entertainment on the Internet, and instant messaging became a rigid demand. In addition, China Telecom Corporation invests heavily in Internet line expansion and backbone network construction every year, while Guangdong Telecom is the province with the fastest network infrastructure, and Shenzhen is a hot place for young people to start businesses. We stepped into the river of our time by mistake.
At first we were just a small company of a few people. We hope, first, that the company will not go bankrupt and can survive; second, that users will not be disconnected and that they will be scolded less. The company does not have any written system, not even the standard time for commuting to and from work. Several members are Internet worms who like Internet products. After getting up, everyone will run to the company and lie on the PC to see the users' opinions on us.
We have a very simple statistical chart, which has been used for several years, count the number of online users every minute, and draw a dot on the chart. If the curve falls suddenly, it means there is something wrong. I didn't even have to call my colleagues. I called a taxi back to the company. By the time I got back to the company, everyone was already locating the repair plan. We are heavy users of these products, and we empathize with the discomfort of users when they are offline.
There are a lot of accidental factors in this.If we had not lived in China, we would not have felt so deeply about the pain points of Chinese netizens and China's network facilities, and we would not have had such an opportunity; if we had graduated a few years earlier and had some achievements and titles in the original industry, it may not be so easy to leave the original industry and resolutely embrace the Internet as a new thing.
How to make the choice of internal road?
When it comes to the business tuyere, some enterprises can develop very quickly, but for the inheritance strength within an enterprise, team training is a process in which slow workers can do fine work. What's more, the world is constantly changing, and enterprises must keep changing in order to adapt.In this process, the enterprise's determination to change is very important.
In the course of Tencent's later development, we faced such challenges several times.
From 1998 to 2004, this was Tencent's first venture. It has grown from a small workshop with several people to a medium-sized company with nearly a thousand people. The company was listed on the Hong Kong main board in 2004. By 2004 and 2005, there were two ways for the company to develop:
One option is that we only do communication and entertainment, which is Tencent's original DNA, which is also what the original team is good at, and also makes more money.
The second option has a large span. At that time, Pony (Ma Huateng) summed up this direction with words similar to "online life".
The team argued for a long time and finally chose the second path. This is a relatively difficult road, at the same time, it also has a great impact on the original organizational structure of the company.
Before the company's business line is relatively single, several founders can vertically handle their own business, we communicate frequently and efficiently, relying on our character and diligence, we can maintain the operation of the company. ButAfter carrying out diversified business, we realize that there is a big bottleneck in the ability of founders, and problems such as resource allocation and organization between product lines will emerge.It's a big challenge.
Tencent's solution at that time was that organizational change was driven by the Business Department (BU), merging the research and development and market of products in one direction into one BU, so that a leader was uniformly responsible. The challenge of this is that the first person in charge of BU is very demanding, he must have comprehensive ability and internal cultural identity at the same time. Tencent later several important members of the management team also took office at that time, the founder turned into horizontal support, everyone will think that as long as the company is good.
From 2008 to 2009, the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the company, our feeling is that the company is growing well, the business has a steady growth rate, and the team also has the ability to train people. But things usually don't go so well, and every time you feel good, the crisis has been lurking for a long time. This change came from the wave of the mobile Internet, and by 2010, suddenly we didn't feel right.The organizational structure can not adapt to the mobile era, which makes Tencent face the barrier of revolution or being revolutionized.。
In 2011, we took apart the mobile BU at that time and combined with the PC team of various products to do self-closed loop, do the main colleagues of PC transform the research and development of learning mobile, and transfer to the mobile era in an all-round way. There are also challenges in this process, and the interests, inertia and feelings of the original department will all be affected. But in this era, if you don't change, the world will change. If no change had been made at that time, Tencent would not have kept up with the tide of mobile Internet in the next few years.
At that time, a dispute with Tencent gave a lot of external stimulation. At that time, Tencent was criticized for why he had to do everything by himself and lacked ecological thinking. AndThe outbreak of Wechat in 2011 has given enterprises great confidence in change.
When Wechat was first released, it was quiet for the first three months, but it suddenly broke out in May 2011 because of the addition of voice function. The user growth of Wechat in the next three months is the fastest I have ever seen in my career. What is the concept of three months? Wechat users are growing by 10 per cent every day, and active users are growing by 70 per cent a week.
In the past three months, I personally feel that Wechat has seized an important time window in history, and this growth rate has also strengthened Tencent's determination to change his organization and transform the mobile Internet in an all-round way.
Later, Tencent's organizational reform and reorganization, dismantled the wireless BU, and then Tencent invested in Sogou, Dianping, and JD.com, gave the search to Sogou, and the e-commerce to JD.com. This is the second major organizational change in Tencent's history. At that time, many colleagues did not understand, this and gave this to Sogou, that and JD.com, what do we do ourselves?I think Tencent's future is based on a connected company and a company based on big data's services. If Tencent does a good job in connecting people, enterprises and services, there will be opportunities to promote the change and upgrading of many industries.
The advent of the wave of mobile Internet, external stimulus, and the rise of Wechat have all contributed to the company's organizational change in 2011.
A thrilling change, or a "warm boiled frog"?
Looking back on this process, I personally feel that the change of time is very thrilling.If the time had been one year later, we might have missed the tide of the mobile Internet.When I left the management team in 2014, I wondered why a company that had been operating for more than a decade was so caught off guard in the face of change. I think this may have a lot to do with the mobile era. In the PC era, maybe our product is only 70 points, put on a few large traffic portals, it can still survive and get a lot of income.
But it is different in the mobile era, the ability of users to make their own choices has been greatly improved in the mobile era, and your products and services will soon be eliminated if they fail to achieve 90 points. In the process of these changes,Historical achievements can easily become a burden on the transformation of an enterprise.. Managers will be nostalgic for the results, think that I still have a lot of income, market share also has a "quack status". But within a certain time window, if you can't revolutionize yourself, you may be old and can no longer adapt to the new era.
It is easy for enterprises to make some mistakes. after the initial success of the product in the PC era and the business model, the team keeps pursuing to make it bigger and more profitable, unwittingly making the product heavier and heavier, and doing a lot of stiff bundling. In this process, the organization will also become larger, and the interference of various buttocks of big companies will also become greater. What we often have to consider is whether the KPI assigned by the boss can be over-fulfilled, but the understanding of users will become slow.
Whether we can grasp the time window of this change, the core is whether the management team has a sense of crisis.When you feel safe, your reaction becomes slow. Without the leaders' awareness of the sense of crisis and the superficial "transformation", this would not have been possible. Pony's management style is relatively open. As long as time permits, he hopes that everyone can disagree with him. He can spend time discussing it. He can quarrel for a second or third time. The structure of Tencent's founder team also enables us to trust each other.
In hindsight, the matter of transformation is taken for granted and the general trend of the times. But at that time, it was not so easy, management determination and timing are very important, if there is not enough external stimulus and internal determination, things will be like a "warm water boiled frog", so the past. Enterprise transformation will certainly bring labor pains, a large enterprise will have a lot of Bug, we can not expect every step to be very accurate, because of a variety of reasons, the time of transformation is late will be very painful, but if we can Debug together, spend together, that is also a good thing.
How to define a good product
So, how on earth should we define a good product?
Sometimes we will see some industry phenomena, for example, some teams like to beat their own chicken blood and celebrate the record high product revenue in an exaggerated way at the annual meeting. Some managers use the very tough 996 to promote all kinds of management pressure on the team. But in my opinion, this is not a really good product team.
There is no need for a really good product team to beat the chicken blood. There is no need for CEO to tell the team that we are good and good.. Instead, every user and member involved can feel that what they are doing has greatly enhanced the original experience. This may be a mouthful, but I think it is an obstacle to the development of many enterprises. We often see an increase in the income of a product, it is difficult to give up. But we sometimes ignore the question: is it the next step in the world?
In fact, with the change of time, the importance of the product to that era will change. If a product can generate considerable revenue, but makes users feel uncomfortable and uncomfortable, from a product point of view, this model is not ideal. With this kind of income, if you are the head of the enterprise, what do you think of this situation? If you can look down on it earlier, maybe your team will create something new somewhere else, and if you keep clinging to this income, the team will easily get caught up in all kinds of butt-determined head-to-head self-proving problems. the perception of industry change will be slow and creative.
In the mobile era, I believe that the revenue model of good products will also be very elegant.. For example, Netflix is a very elegant product. Netflix doesn't rush to fill your screen with solo shows and commercials. Netflix has a clean interface, but a lot of details are considerate. In fact, users stay on Netflix for a long time, and users will be happy to pay for Netflix. It is the pursuit of a good product that users are happy to pay for it.
Social responsibility of products
When a good product develops to a large scale and takes up a lot of time, the product begins to have its social responsibility. For example, Tencent's fastest growing Wechat and "Arena of Valor" in recent years.
For example, after Wechat has more than 800 million users, there will be many problems of interpersonal overload, information overload and time overload of many heavy users. After a high degree of digitization of society, it is estimated that new and more complex social problems will continue to emerge in the future. Whether products and technology can be used to alleviate these problems will be a future issue for Wechat team.
"Arena of Valor" faces another problem. The product and technology of this game are very excellent, but when the product popularity is very high, the mission of this team should not only be to make the game more fun and more people to play. You also need to take care of family harmony. Now this game has been added to the parents' tools to regulate the playing time and consumption of minors, but how to promote family harmony among family members, the product still has a lot of room to optimize.
When the product influence and take up the time of users to a certain extent, its social responsibility attribute increases. On the surface, a team does something like this that has nothing to do with revenue or business volume, but in the long run, I think these are things that good products should strive to do.
To fight aging, we need glowing product people and a culture that encourages truth-telling.
A large enterprise with multiple product lines will have a lot of Bug. Between multiple product lines, multiple departments and teams, there will also be a lot of buttocks to determine the ideas generated by the head, and it is easy to let the "sense of existence" and "short-sightedness" affect the team, unable to see clearly the changes in the world and their own aging.
From the perspective of human and cultureOn the one hand, there should be "luminous product people" in the enterprise.. Such people are always scarce, and they pursue product ideas more than to please their superiors. They have a strong belief and insight into the product and the future, and their experience and ability can be trusted by their colleagues, and they can lead the team to find the dawn when the team is confused. Young colleagues, in fact, do not mind hard work, they care about doing meaningless work, if what they do can have a great positive impact on society, team members will feel that they do not have to give them chicken blood. the team will naturally get excited. "glowing product people" can pass on such product beliefs to the team.
On the other hand, the company needs an open mechanism to encourage telling the truth.. In a team, whether or not to tell the truth depends to a large extent on the first leader of the team. If this person is very face-saving and has his word, it will be very difficult for anyone in this department to criticize him. When the company was young, it was easy. CEO and members of the management team often had dinner with everyone, and we could communicate frequently enough. When the company grew up, the opportunities for meeting and communicating were greatly reduced, so it might be necessary to create a low-cost internal complaint mechanism.
Within Tencent, there is a platform called Le Man, where you can ask questions anonymously, but answer with your real name. Within Tencent, if you do something that is offensive to users, colleagues in other departments will not be polite to criticize you. If you are thick-skinned and do not want to change, that is your freedom. But most of my colleagues want to make good products. Instead of treating many things as invisible, it is better to face them more actively. Anonymous questions and real-name answers are a kind of communication and matchmaking experiment within Tencent.
Some people worry that every employee will feel full of negative energy as soon as he opens this question in the morning. After several years of experiments, such a situation will not occur. If your enterprise is open enough, even if some people are extreme on some issues, there will inevitably be mature colleagues who can participate in speculation. For individuals, teams, and enterprises, it is a more efficient multi-angle ideological collision and effective communication.
Whether an enterprise can tell the truth or not is an important soil to help enterprises fight against aging.
Two challenges for the future
In the face of the future digital society, it feels that Tencent will face two major challenges.
One is the challenge of socialization.New technology is promoting the rapid digitization of society and greatly improving social efficiency. At the same time, it will also bring many social problems. As a connected Internet company, whether Tencent can effectively help society alleviate these problems through technology and products is a big challenge to be faced in the next stage.
The other is the organizational evolution within the enterprise.The rapid development of big data, AI and cloud computing has given birth to the upgrading of various social industries, which should be a great opportunity for innovation for Tencent. Tencent's internal organizational structure is not yet ready to match such an era, the original completely BG organizational structure in the face of such a new era, there will be a lot of organizational walls and pits.
These two are not only Tencent's future challenges, but also Tencent's future opportunities. I hope that every Tencent person can stick to their original intentions and cultivate more "glowing product people" to help Tencent overcome these challenges.
Source: geek Park