“Editor’s Note:
Wechat changed its splash screen two days ago, and the “blue marble” in the screen was moved from the African continent to China.
Some say this is an example of Ma huateng’s love of astronomy. But what does the lonely figure on the blue planet think of that?
The figure is the most artistic product manager in the legend and is called “The Successor of Steve Jobs in China” by netizens.
He was talented and became famous at a young age. 15 years ago, he was one of the TOP10 full-stack engineers in China.
He has a deep understanding of human nature. He once hit millions of people’s weaknesses with a bottle and a shake, but was once described by the People’s Daily as “a tragic figure who left his name on more than a million computer screens.”
He has said that while looking for growth, his past experiences have helped him to be humble, calm and unarrogant.
He is Zhang Xiaolong, now vice president of Tencent and the father of wechat.
But once he, is introverted do not understand the young communication, after many years finally understand:
“These underdogs will grow with confidence and one day bounce back higher like a spring in oppression.”
In 2011, Zhang xiaolong was invited back by his Alma mater, Huazhong University of Science and Technology. In a small self-study room, he first shared the product history of wechat.
At that time, wechat had just released its “shake” function, and the number of users exceeded 50 million for the first time, but only about 20 students came here.
This did not affect Zhang xiaolong’s enthusiasm for sharing. He took his junior and junior students to add wechat to each other with “Shake” and told them:
“The experience has nothing to do with technology, but if you don’t have a girlfriend, you don’t understand the experience because it’s a sexual cue.”
“Click” is a violent and sexy rifle loaded, and girls who shake it too hard will see a “bug”, naked David’s genitals.
Face under the stage students “malicious” guffaaugh, Zhang Xiaolong said seriously “don’t think I’m joking, I’m very formal!” It turned out that the design was based on Freud’s theory that all human motivation comes from sexual drive.
This is his basic methodology for understanding user needs.
“You need to understand their desires and satisfy them with your products. And they’re using it the way you expect them to, you know how they’re going to evolve, you’re just watching.”
The speech lasted more than 50 minutes, and it’s hard to imagine that 20 years ago, he was an introverted, quiet engineering guy in the same place.
Loneliness was zhang’s norm at an engineering college where there were seven boys for every one girl. When not in class, he spent most of his time kicking a ball and fishing for shrimp in silence.
“Shake it up is more of a bonding experience,” he told the audience. “I hope it will help young people find more ways to connect with others.” He seemed to be speaking to himself.
He was not good at interpersonal communication since he was young. He liked to stay away from people and read books or think alone. Zhang xiaolong’s cousin in his hometown in Hunan province recalled him as “quiet as a sister, who couldn’t come with us.”
Lonely, this word almost series zhang Xiaolong first half of life.
Even after becoming Tencent’s vice president, he avoided social events. Weekly morning meeting, he first excuse not to get up not to attend, Ma Huateng said let his secretary call him up, he evadable the road is too blocked.
He was not a good communicator, and this “weakness” contributed in part to his success. Foxmail, QQ mailbox, wechat, he has made products, are born for communication.
As he said in his monologue on Fanfou: “After all these years, I’m still making communication tools. This leads me to believe in the fate that every child who is not good at communicating has a powerful inner power to help others communicate.”
Later, when wechat became popular, he proposed the concept of “use it and go”, which was not understood by the outside world.
Drive users away, this is how ridiculous things. However, those who understand Zhang xiaolong a little will not be surprised that he said this.
When he made his first product, Foxmail, he had a different view of users.
At that time, he refused to work in the telecommunications bureau assigned upon graduation and went south to Guangzhou to make a difference in the Internet industry.
He went to work in two IT companies. In the first company, he met Mr. Mei, a Chinese American who used to work in IBM. Under him, Zhang xiaolong did a lot of high-level research on database.
But before long, the company closed and dissolved, leaving Mr. Zhang unemployed. He was only two years out of school.
He was so introverted, leaving his hometown and rushing about alone in Guangzhou where he could not speak well. He thought he had found a team with the right person, but he had to face the challenge of finding a job.
During this time, how he spent the restless and depressed every day, can be imagined.
Fortunately, he honed his skills at his first company and soon found a second job.
But this time he gave up. He was tired of working as a screw in the company and could only develop some software that he was not interested in. So he began to work by himself at night.
Do planning, coding, design, Zhang Xiaolong a person like a company, full fire.
Foxmail was born from the collection of those nights. Four years online, relying on him to write more than 70,000 lines of code, harvest 2 million users. However, the software is free.
Zhou Hongyi has “educated” him, “to add advertising, to profit.” But each time, Zhang xiaolong asks, “Why do we have to do this? As long as there are users, feelings are good.”
Zhou Hongyi is not the only one who doesn’t understand zhang, but wei Ran, a reporter from People’s Daily, writes that Zhang xiaolong’s impulse to create Foxmail is “the melancholy of a programmer who is unrecognized.”
Undeniably, what he interviewed at that time was zhang Xiaolong in his most abject period. He resigned from the company and did not have a fixed job. He made a living by writing programs for others temporarily. FOXMAIL has been updated three times and is gaining popularity, but Mr. Zhang hasn’t made much money.
He didn’t want to do commercial software.
And the growing number of users let him feel annoyed, he just want to do technology, but every day there are 2 million users chasing after him, urging him to “improve and upgrade quickly”, for Zhang Xiaolong, such a free software is too tired to do, he wants to give up.
He told Wei Ran, “I don’t know what to do next. Maybe if I can’t find a suitable development opportunity in half a year, I’ll just go to the United States.”
At the moment zhang Xiaolong dare not dream again, he just want to hand over Foxmail as soon as possible, and then walk away.
He didn’t realize the value of Foxmail until one day in 1998, lei Jun, zhang xiaolong’s age, called and wanted to buy Foxmail.
At that time of Lei Jun, only 29 years old become the CEO of Jinshan, and zhang Xiaolong that has product of millions of users still don’t have much confidence however, he feeblely offer 150 thousand, the Lei Jun that is busy doing association infuses however forgets in the back of the head finally.
Two years later, Boda found Zhang Xiaolong again, with the price of 12 million, the incorporation of Zhang Xiaolong and Foxmail. Zhang Xiaolong jumps to become vice president, did not get the sense of achievement that once yearned for however, pour into instead the remorse that betrays beginner heart.
On the night of the launch, he wrote a wistful letter: “I can count every detail of it (Foxmail), from soul to exterior… In my mind, it has a soul, because every piece of code in it has my consciousness at that moment when I shaped it. I suddenly felt the urge to go back on my words.”
After that, Zhang xiaolong was trapped in his emotions for a long time. Finally, he chose to take the money and, like most young people fleeing Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, bought a car and went to Tibet.
Reflecting on this period later, he said, “My transition to 30 was smooth.”
For the next five years, Zhang xiaolong, once a talented engineer, was almost at a standstill.
In these five years, Robin Li returned from the United States and founded “Baidu”, Ma Huateng’s QQ took shape, Alibaba went through the SARS crisis, the first time in Feng Xiaogang’s film advertising.
With the emergence of BAT pattern and the rise and fall of portal websites, the survival of the fittest is still continuing in the Internet arena.
Some people say that he missed the most golden five years, but Zhang Xiaolong miraculously in 2005 this critical juncture, and his Foxmail was packaged and sold to Tencent.
Zhang Xiaolong so “muddled”, and entered the Tencent camp in the future three points of the world.
Zhang xiaolong’s first three years at Tencent weren’t easy. He was no longer a frustrated programmer, but a product manager stuck in a rut.
He was put in charge of QQ mailbox, but delivered a disappointing answer.
Because he blindly imitated MSN and Gmail, and did not convert his thinking from computer client, Zhang xiaolong’s QQ mailbox looked like a tractor, which was bulky and extremely slow, and was criticized by netizens as “bad and poor”.
This is zhang Xiaolong does product development encounter failure for the first time. For two years, he could not break through himself, and QQ mailbox became Tencent’s most marginal product.
It wasn’t until Ma stepped in and exchanged more than 1,300 emails with Zhang’s team that they launched a stripped-down version of QQ email that the user base slowly took off.
“Zhang xiaolong’s biggest gain was that he learned how to think on the Internet: from doing something heavy to doing something light,” Said Ma huateng, looking back on the revision.
Zhang Xiaolong, who found a sense of feeling, pushed forward with the current and launched the function of large accessories to seize the blank market. In the experiment of drifting bottle function, he grasped the soft side of “loneliness” of the public and achieved unexpected success. QQ mailbox rises eventually, caught up with netease slowly.
This gave Zhang xiaolong a little comfort, which then stiffened his waist, began to grind QQ mailbox more like himself, in order to give it a soul.
The landing page contains a copy of Haizi’s poem or Xu Wei’s lyrics, which he has copyrighted, and, in the entry slot on QQ, perhaps a doodle by a friend’s daughter or a few quotes from Martin Luther King: “In the end, we will remember not the attack of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
And CAI Tou later evaluation, the success of QQ mailbox is zhang Xiaolong in Tencent a lonely deformation.
However, after the transformation, Zhang xiaolong’s situation did not change much. Mailbox profit model has been unclear, partial living in Guangzhou Zhang Xiaolong team is still free in the margin.
Until 2010, he saw the possibility of wechat from a product called Kik, so he sent an email to Ma huateng late at night to apply for wechat. Ma only replied with four words: “I will do it soon”.
This year, Zhang xiaolong was 41 years old, and he was best known within Tencent for winning an internal tennis tournament and being the man who liked smoking Kent cigarettes.
Had it not been for wechat, zhang Xiaolong, once a young hero, might have disappeared into oblivion.
In November 2010, Zhang Xiaolong’s wechat project was officially approved. In the same month, he opened an account on Fanfou and looked back:
“After two years of books and mountains and the Valley of Death and the Fountain of Sin, I can sit down and breathe.”
However, there is not much time left for Zhang Xiaolong. Lei Jun is leading the release of rice chat for three months outside, and there are two teams doing the same project development at the same time. Through the meal, we can glimpse his worry at that time:
“Enemies are imaginary: people don’t have much time for enemies.”
“No fear, no hurry.”
It was one more chance for zhang, 41, to prove himself, and he wasn’t ready for it.
So he took his team, like miners, to do development in the dark night, do push-ups, exercise barbells, really have to sleep in the camp bed bought by the company, like soldiers to grab the tide of this era.
Their stories inspired so many that camp-beds became a standard feature of many startups.
After the launch of wechat four months later, in the face of the attack of Micro blog, Mi Chat, Zhang Xiaolong said, “Brother is not like the product, is the war.”
Later story, we all know, this war, wechat won.
Six years later, wechat has more than 900 million users and has become China’s national social networking app. And wechat is becoming less and less like What Zhang wants.
He wants wechat to become a tool to connect people and solve their communication problems as they go. However, the appearance of thousands of wechat public accounts violated his original intention. He did not want to be a media platform.
He said he was worried that wechat was increasingly making some users anxious and restless, with endless messages and even neurotic tendencies.
So he launched a small program, hoping that there is still a function in wechat, quietly lying there, no push, no voice, when the user needs to use, can be realized on wechat.
This is probably what he calls “run out and go”, he is “curving to save the country”, in his own way to stick to wechat as it is.
“If you say I’m wrong, you better prove you’re right.”
Zhang xiaolong has become increasingly confident, not because of promotions, but because of disappointments and good judgment.
Foxmail, QQ mailbox, wechat, these three pieces of art zhang Xiaolong took time to hone out the soul, have been in the dark night climbing thorns groped, silent.
So, what is supporting Zhang Xiaolong in the dark night? Maybe it’s his favorite rock song, or maybe it’s Wang Feng’s one Million Tons of Faith, which he shared in 2015:
Don’t believe TV commercials
Don’t trust the list
Don’t believe the gossip
Don’t trust the savings interest
Don’t expect good luck
…
You need at least a million tons of faith
May or may not survive.
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* All quotes in this article are from public media interviews, personal dinners and public speeches by Zhang Xiaolong. All content in this article does not represent the position or opinions of Mantou Business School.
After reading the above article and thinking back to Jobs and Elon Musk, maybe the great product managers do need to be paranoid and lonely in addition to their excellent sense of smell. However, personality is important, as a product manager’s professional level is not not very impressive, how to quickly start product manager, master the necessary work methodology and tool skills? Click here to see the solution
