Talk about Tencent’s internal consumption.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Liu Yanfei language” (ID: Liufeinotes).
I am often consulted and asked for help from my fresh-spoken friends. I was impressed by the fact that there was an intern in the past.
He has been internship in Tencent for more than half a year. He wants to turn positive. The internship department has no quota and can only go to other departments. However, the resume cannot be written in the project. why? Because people who are afraid of other departments of Tencent know.
Yes, it’s not afraid that people outside the company know, just because people in other departments know that they are secretly doing this project. Similar projects, no less than five or six in Tencent, have no information exchange.
There are such hills inside Tencent, each fighting, and full of hostility, often beyond the imagination of ordinary people. Rather than office politics, it is better to say that it is for the spy war of their respective KPIs.
1
In the interviews of Wang Hua and Kai-Fu Lee, which were widely spread a while ago, Wang Hua mentioned that the key reason for missing bytebeat is that the traffic platform and search platform should be the best things to do. of.
However, the result is that Baidu, which has not only lost its product innovation ability, has not kept up, and even Tencent, which has always had the best product manager team in China (and even the world), has not kept up.
Strategic mistakes are certainly one aspect. But the mountains are always a key factor. Tencent has 17 models for short video products.
(Source: “How many short video products are Tencent, we counted: about 17”)
It is said that when the internal short video struggle is fierce, the floor where a well-known product is located, in order to prevent information leakage, prohibits any outsiders from entering, yes, even the colleagues within the company are all prohibited.
Not only short video products, Tencent’s other categories of products, but also direct competition.
For example, WeChat reading and QQ reading are divided into two business groups and operate independently. At the beginning, there will be a distinction between content types. After a large number of web posts on WeChat reading, there is no clear boundary. Some netizens commented that there are more than a dozen hills in the reading.
The information flow products that competed directly with today’s headlines, Pan Chao mentioned in Tencent’s No Dream, including Tencent News, Tencent Video, Daily Express, etc., at least nine. Still can’t beat the headlines.
2
When I wrote “I See the Middle Taiwan”, I talked with friends of various companies. Tencent’s middle office is also trying to push it, but still can’t see the shadow of “business in the middle”, more In the partial support technology of the platform level.
What impressed me even more is that several friends of Tencent did not understand the situation of other departments at all, and did not understand the progress of the construction of the platform. They could only care about the affairs of their own departments and even the things they were doing. And I talked to Ali’s friends, friends who are hungry in Shanghai, can also comment on the strategy and development of rookie and box horse.
From the perspective of liquidity, Tencent’s friends, as long as they don’t leave, will find that they are still in the original department after a few years. Ali’s friends usually change to a new department and do new business after a few years. This liquidity also provides some potential collaborative value: old colleagues are scattered across departments and are easily promoted across departmental projects.
The liquidity is not only within the Tencent cycle, but also the outer loop. Tencent is the most sensitive giant company to dig people. Tencent even signed an agreement to dig people with Internet companies with investment relations, and strictly refused to move their own high P. If you are an investment company of Tencent, if you happen to dig a Tencent 4-1, then Ma Huateng may even call you personally.
This mechanism has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is stability in the short term, but the downside is that some of Tencent’s business leaders are not necessarily open because they have only grown up in the Tencent environment.
The notion of so-called “classical product manager” and user experience is to pursue the maximization of user value, which is the truth without refutation. But how to verify is a harder thing. Tencent’s product managers are often doing “subjective verification,” which is their own judgment.
This is a great test for the personal qualities and personal experience of product managers. Everyone can be a product manager, but not everyone is Yu Jun Zhang Xiaolong. It is also very easy for a product manager who is almost a child. It is caught in “self-defeating.” In contrast, byte hopping and spelling are all quickly tested with real data. Although it will weaken the subjective initiative of the product manager, at least the knife is in the flesh.
From the contact of some friends of Tencent, they already have the shadow of Baidu. In the dark light of the black cloud, they will also say: “The market is still in our hands. We have a deeper understanding of the value of users, and we will not know what to win in the future.”
3
After the organization has grown, it is necessary to be a middle-class. The difficulty is not to be in the middle of the stage, but to find a balance between the middle of Taiwan and the independent rapid iteration. No matter which side is out of balance, there will be problems.
Tencent’s horse racing mechanism is obviously out of balance in the direction of “discretion and guerrilla”. But this is in line with a concept mentioned by Wang Hua: “VC is highly dependent on the old Chinese medicine-style personal judgment, which makes it difficult to build the organization structure or the capacity of the entire fund.
So VC adopts cooperative system for this reason. It is not large-scale, and the hand-workshop system and cooperation system are essentially the best. Especially in the past eight years, in the case of a lot of opportunities, VCs went to be gunners instead of playing positions – becoming the best way to seize the opportunity of the past eight years.
Just, Tencent is not a VC, and Tencent’s business team is not an entrepreneur.
The essence of the horse racing mechanism is actually to turn the business within the company into an investment relationship, rather than a close organizational relationship. However, internal new projects, employees have no survival pressure, everyone is eating wages, enjoying potential company resources, the core goal is whether the PPT reported at the end of the year can bring year-end awards, such organizational efficiency is hard to say.
This mechanism is also closely related to another status quo: the leader of Tencent’s businesses is actually the financial leader.
The concept is top-down. From the management’s point of view, they are more about managing the “financial model” than the business.
I chatted with a friend who had resigned from Tencent. His biggest concern was the general manager who was with him. He was an investment bank and knew the numbers very well, but he didn’t really understand the business. I can’t learn anything with him.
As a result, each business can only let the following teams rob resources and get results because they cannot design and do business planning from top to bottom. In the financial model, of course, the ROI and KPI are supreme, coupled with the lack of business control, the result is the above mentioned, the hills are standing, but they are not competing.
4
In this internal consumption, Tencent missed short video and information flow, and freed up enough space for a new giant; Tencent missed the enterprise application (enterprise WeChat and Tencent document experience, than nailing and flying The book is too much). Tencent may have to miss music if it is not a monopoly of copyright.
Without the strategic direction and organizational culture, the basic experience of Tencent’s products is very disappointing, and it is not much better than Alipay.
Read here, youIt may be said that some words, like Pan Chao, have already been mentioned in “Tencent has no dreams.”
Yes, when time passes, Pan’s teacher’s “Tencent has no dreams” has been written for a year and a half, and Tencent is still grabbing cakes.
And my intern friend, my resume is still not written.