vol.33: 15 Mindful Product Principles from Allen Zhang, Father of WeChat

A good product is:

1. Innovative; it must have creativity


2. Useful


3. Beautiful


4. Easy to use


5. Unobtrusive, modest


6. Honest


7. Timeless ; it won’t become outdated


8. Doesn’t skip over any small details


9. Environmentally friendly and doesn’t waste resources


10. Not overly designed, “less is more”

And yet, in so much modern software today, you’re placed in a drab gray cubicle — anonymized and aggregated until you’re just a daily active user. For minimalism. For simplicity. For scale! But if our hope is to create software with feeling, it means inviting people in to craft it for themselves — to mold it to the contours of their unique lives an

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In San Francisco, while Zhao still believed he was right about his grand vision, he realized he was wrong about his market. It was a crucible moment. The first version of Notion was a tool that non-coders could use to make their own apps. Disappointingly for the co-founders, it turned out, even if they were Last’s and Zhao’s actual friends, non-cod... See more