Bringing innovation

In 2012, there was a Weibo on the Internet: Youku Tudou merged. Apple glanced at Android, Mengniu glanced at Yili, McDonald's glanced at KFC... Welcome to Solitaire...

There is a divine reply under Weibo: MSN took a look at Tencent, IE took a look at Tencent, 360 took a look at Tencent, Xunlei took a look at Tencent, Sogou took a look Taking a look at Tencent, Baofengyingyin took a look at Tencent, Sanguosha took a look at Tencent, CS took a look at Tencent...

People in the world looked at Tencent, and began to shift from "the king of plagiarism" and "the natural enemy of SME innovation" to "the benchmark for innovation" ". Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan.com, who was once on pins and needles because of Tencent’s launch of the QQ group-purchase network, admitted: “Innovation does not necessarily mean creating an unprecedented product, innovation can also be improving an existing product so that it has better users. Experience, etc. I think many of Tencent's products have undergone such innovations, and they have used the advantages of having a huge number of users to create today's Tencent."

In September 2012, Tencent launched a voice social network modeled after the foreign application kik The app "WeChat" has exceeded 200 million users, with an average monthly growth of 10 million users. The success of this product was appraised by its competitor, Qihoo 360 founder Zhou Hong, as Tencent became the only company to win the 2012 mobile Internet "ship ticket" with its innovative product WeChat.

At Tencent, this kind of copycat innovation continues, and it's still something the company loves to do. Ma Huateng said: Imitation is the safest innovation.

Progressive improvement after bringing it in

Perhaps it was Tencent's subtle and thoughtful innovation after it was brought in, which made Internet people talk about "micro-innovation" in recent years. However, Tang Muning, general manager of Tencent User Research and Experience Design Center, would like to call it "incremental innovation": "Although the word 'micro-innovation' expresses the 'shape' of innovation, it does not express the 'potential'. I like to use 'incremental innovation' to describe the step-by-step innovation and improvement we make on our products."

Take WeChat as an example. WeChat 1.0, voice is the foundation; WeChat 2.0, joined group chat; WeChat 3.0 added strangers to make friends; WeChat 4.0, an open platform; WeChat 4.3, introduced a public account platform, completely transformed from a simple communication tool to a mobile platform. This platform includes a variety of product forms, from social networking to shopping. More often, WeChat assumes the role of a channel.

Tencent hopes to maximize the details of every innovation and improvement. When the new WeChat function "Shake" was launched, no one thought that such a childish-looking app could generate hundreds of millions of shakes every day. When designing the sound of shaking, Zhang Xiaolong, the product manager of WeChat, was the first to think of the sound of qiang's reloading, which is "the most sensitive to men". They found a lot of voices to try, and they were reluctant to put them down when they picked them up.

"Always be ahead of the competition for 1~2 months, which is the most effective threshold for latecomers."

Tang Mu believes that the threshold for imitation of product experience is low. When everyone is not poor in money and technology, a good experience innovation point is always quickly imitated by competitors. But imitating a point is easy, imitating the whole idea is difficult. Clear the direction of your own products, innovate rhythmically according to your ideas, and always lead your opponents for 1-2 months. This is the most effective threshold for latecomers.

"Find friends" is one of the core functions of WeChat. Each version innovates new ways of "finding friends" and "adding friends", allowing WeChat to always lead the race against competitors.

In Tencent, there are many examples of incremental innovation. In Tang Mu's view, maintaining rapid iterative and incremental innovation is one of the important factors for the continued success of Tencent's products.

Ma Huateng explained Tencent's incremental innovation as "small steps and fast iterations". In his opinion, every product update may not be perfect, but if you insist on finding and correcting one or two small problems every day, you will basically polish the work in less than a year, and you will feel like a product.

Based on user value

Although Tencent has carried out various innovations on the "brought" products, these innovations all follow a theme: relying on user value.

Open Tencent's official website, next to the company's LOGO in the upper left corner to the left, is a particularly eye-catching sentence "based on user value". This is Tencent's business philosophy, which includes three specific contents: focus on long-term development and do not harm user value due to commercial interests; pay attention to and deeply understand user needs, and continuously meet user needs with excellent products and services; pay attention to emotional communication with users , respect users' feelings, and grow together with users.

Ma Huateng attaches great importance to this business philosophy and often repeatedly emphasizes the importance of user needs on different occasions. He believes that user demand is the core of the product, and the degree to which the product reflects the demand is the degree to which the enterprise is needed by the ecology.

In his opinion, one of the easiest mistakes to make in product development is that developers tend to cherish and care for the products they have created with their own brains like they do for children, thinking that it is his brainchild. Sometimes when developers design products, they always think that the more powerful the better, but a good product does not need so-called particularly powerful design or anything, because people who think they are very powerful will deliberately do something that reflects their power but users don’t need. , that is, chasing the bottom line.

At Tencent, the process of "user feedback-improvement-re-feedback-re-improvement" is often repeated in various product lines. As soon as a new product or function is applied, if the user does not like it, he will immediately "scolding you to the bone". Through user clicks, complaints on blogs, Weibo, WeChat and other platforms, user feedback can be quickly captured.

In the process of researching user needs and innovating products, Tencent has formed the "10/100/1,000 rule", that is, product managers must conduct 10 user surveys, follow 100 user blogs, and collect feedback from 1,000 users every month. user experience. Ma Huateng thinks this method is "a bit stupid, but it works."

In order to explore what kind of product innovation can better meet user needs and achieve greater user value, Tencent even allows moderate waste in innovation. Ma Huateng explained: This is under the premise of resource permission, even if there are one or two teams developing a product at the same time, it is acceptable, as long as you think this project is something you must do strategically.

Before WeChat was born, several teams within Tencent were developing mobile phone-based communication software at the same time. Each team had different design concepts and implementation methods. In the end, WeChat was favored by more users. In Ma Huateng's view, this is not a waste of resources.

He explained that the absence of competition means the death of innovation. Even if some teams fail in the competition in the end, it is still a source of inspiration for the winners, which can be understood as "internal trial and error". Not all system redundancy is waste, there is no success without trying to fail, and reality is difficult to achieve without creating possibilities.