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

“Everyone only has 24 hours in a day. The mission of developers shouldn’t be to make users spend all their time on their phones aside from when they eat and sleep. We are more concerned with when our users communicate, post a picture, read an article, make a payment, or find a Mini Program, that they can do it as quickly and efficiently as possible... See more

WeChat has integrated both approaches in the product development process. However, it leans more heavily on the Grand Design approach given Allen’s top-down management style. All features have to go through Allen for approval. As a result, WeChat has benefited enormously from having a singular and coherent identity.

WeChat follows the “Grand Design” approach to innovation vs. “Design Thinking” Popularized by the design firm IDEO in the 1990s, design-thinking is defined as a non-linear process which seeks to iteratively understand users, challenge assumptions, and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. In other words, it is an incredibly user-focuse... See more

Allen is known in China to be more of a “humanistic philosopher-creator” as opposed to a business mercenary. At the start of WeChat's creation Allen’s mission statement for the company was to not perceive WeChat as a commercial product, but rather as an impressive “work of art”.

Though he has a Godfather-like status in China’s tech community, he rarely appears in public or gives interviews. Instead, he prefers to have “the product speak for itself.”

I often think if WeChat can’t give our users even a little bit of hope, then we can’t judge whether what we’re doing is right or wrong. So, this is also how we measure ourselves. When a platform only focuses on pursuing its own benefits, it’s short sighted, it won’t last. When a platform can benefit the people, then it’ll take on a life of its own.

Allen has proclaimed many times that WeChat’s style is to improve product and not get better at operations/growth.

Despite hundreds of features, the navigation bar at the bottom of the WeChat screen is four icons: Chat, Contacts, Discover, Me. Zhang: “I told the team to establish a rule that WeChat shall always have a four-icon bar, and never add anything to it.”

His product philosophy focuses on combining intuitive design, human psychology, and what’s technologically feasible. After these are melded, economic viability naturally comes afterwards.