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

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.”

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

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 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.

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.”

Allen asks developers and PMs to put themselves in the shoes of their least sophisticated users – people who might be technologically illiterate, or trying WeChat for the first time.

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”.

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.

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