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

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

Allen doesn’t think much about competitors. Instead, he sees the competitor as WeChat itself - and whether his organization will be able to keep up with users whose tastes and needs change every year.

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.”

Despite all the advertising revenue potential with an app that has over one billion daily active users, WeChat limits ads in its social feed to just 2 per day. In contrast, westerners tend to see 10,000 ads/day.

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”.

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

I believe this is necessary, because a good product requires a certain degree of ‘dictatorship’, otherwise it will embody all sorts of different, conflicting opinions and its personality will become fragmented.”

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

A person’s world used to be how far they can walk, but now it is the breadth (and the quality) of information they acquire, because what you see & read determines what kind of person you are and the thoughts you’ll have. - Allen Zhang