A must-read for product managers: Zhang Xiaolong’s book list, the father of WeChat!
| There is a strange man in the Guangzhou R&D department, hundreds of kilometers away from Tencent’s Shenzhen headquarters. He is dressed simply, has thin cheeks, and speaks slowly. It is generally difficult for media reporters to meet him, but if a topic touches his heart, the conversation sometimes goes unusually smoothly. This person is Zhang Xiaolong, senior vice president of Tencent and the “Father of WeChat.” Zhang Xiaolong requires his product managers to have a copy of "Steve Jobs". Someone has also said that if a job applicant says that he has read Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control", the interview can be over. As a "Mr. WeChat", what books does Zhang Xiaolong read on a daily basis? How do these books influence his conception of "WeChat"? Book list by Zhang Xiaolong, the "Father of WeChat": 1. "Out of Control" Kevin Kelly is an American who has been wandering in Asia for nearly 10 years. The East inspired his thinking about technology, which eventually led to the ultimate proposition of philosophy. In his writings, loss of control often means uncertainty, which can easily make people feel uneasy, but it is precisely uncertainty and uncontrollability that are the source of innovation and the driving force of evolution. At Guangyan, every product manager has a copy of Out of Control, because Zhang Xiaolong once said: A product manager who has not read Out of Control will have an incomplete knowledge structure. In his speeches within Tencent, Zhang Xiaolong repeatedly mentioned that this book inspired his product philosophy: a product that does not interact with users is a failed product. The simpler the product rules, the more likely it is that the group will interact spontaneously. After a product is launched, it has its own life and will interact with a large number of users. The final result of this interaction cannot be controlled by the product designer. Zhang Xiaolong: I have recommended Kevin Kelly’s “Out of Control” to many people. This book is very thick, so many people don’t have the patience to finish reading it, including myself. But if we interview a college student and he tells me that he has finished reading this book, I will definitely hire him - but they don’t know this secret. If you are working on Internet products and don't read this book, I think your knowledge will be incomplete. He described a group effect from the perspectives of biology and sociology. In general, the conclusion was that the IQ of a group is lower than that of an individual. This view is not in that book, but in another book, the title of which I cannot remember. When a person is in an organization, the average IQ of the organization is lower than the individual IQ. If the individual IQ is higher, the group will level out this IQ. For example, if you post more on Weibo, your IQ will decrease. Do you agree? You haven’t noticed this change because it decreases a little bit every day. It’s very simple. You will find that what you say on Weibo every day is becoming more and more consistent with the public. You will say what others are saying. You won’t say something that others cannot understand, because you will feel that it is abrupt and will make others uncomfortable. That’s why the number of reposts on Weibo is so high, while the ones I write are so low. This is because everyone is trying their best to be harmonious and praise each other. Groups tend to be similar. 2. In "What Technology Wants", Kevin Kelly introduces us to a completely new view of technology. He believes that technology as a whole is not a tangled mess of wires and metals, but a living, naturally formed system whose origins can be traced back to the beginning of life. Zhang Xiaolong is very interested in the lifestyle of primitive people. He spent time studying the origin of mankind and why humans walk upright. He also asked a question on Zhihu: What did primitive people use to cut their nails? Guangyan has a special name for the shake function: 撸一撸. This is the most primitive posture of human beings, and the most original, the experience is often the best. Why? Zhang Xiaolong said that he usually pays close attention to children aged three or four. He found that they like to use iPhones and iPads because these two electronic products are easy to learn. For example, when turning on the phone, although they don’t understand the “slide to unlock” button, because touch is human nature, they will subconsciously slide their fingers in the direction of the arrow. "The simpler, the more primitive, the more humane." 3. "Steve Jobs" Within Tencent, Zhang Xiaolong is known as the second super product manager after Ma Huateng, and the Chinese Steve Jobs. When WeChat 4.0 was launched, Zhang Xiaolong updated his Weibo signature: the simpler, the better. This is the design concept advocated by German industrial design master Dieter Ram, and it is also the spirit of "reducing complexity to simplicity" of Steve Jobs. In the early days of 4.0, there were not even any filters in the Moments, because he believed that photos should reflect life truthfully and without modification. In the early days of WeChat's development, some of its ideas were often imitated by competitors and evolved into new features. Ma Huateng once asked Zhang Xiaolong: Should we make refinements to prevent others from developing features that we haven't thought of? Zhang firmly denied it and said: Only by achieving extreme simplicity can one be unsurpassed. A former member of the WeChat team revealed that in the design of each version of WeChat, Zhang Xiaolong would encourage everyone to add first and then subtract. "A function you are using now may be the one that was left after we cut more than 300 functions," he said. There were many options for WeChat's startup screen at first. Everyone preferred two people standing in front of the earth, but Zhang Xiaolong insisted on having only one person, otherwise the purpose of the app could not be conveyed: people are lonely, so they need to communicate. Moments is also a minimalist product. Its main color is blue-gray, which is also the color of the T-shirts Zhang Xiaolong usually wears and the color of Guangyan’s office. To take a photo, press the camera button in the upper right corner; to write plain text, long press the camera button in the upper right corner. Many users are not aware of this function at first. The "press and hold to speak" function also allows you to press the button for three seconds and then release it when speaking. But Zhang Xiaolong never said it, nor did he worry that users wouldn’t know how to use it. “You’ll find it naturally if you look for it.” 4. The male-centered biologists in "The Origin of Woman" use the theory that humans originated from the jungle and evolved into carnivores that lived by hunting to prove that women are in a subordinate position both physically and intellectually. In this regard, "The Origin of Woman" for the first time argued for the equal status of women in the history of human evolution. It pioneered a new era, attempting to unravel the mystery of human evolution and origin, especially that of women; and the answers it provided were a speculative reconstruction of human prehistory from a female perspective, which was extremely revolutionary and destructive. In Zhang Xiaolong's speech, he recommended this book to the audience, saying: "If you don't have a thorough understanding of women's psychology, you will lose half of your users." 5. "Hackers" The 25th anniversary edition of Steven Levy's classic masterpiece spans from the early 1950s to the late 1980s, tracing the great achievements of the early hackers in the computer revolution, who were the smartest and most unique elites. They took risks, challenged the rules, and pushed the world in a whole new direction. This book provides updated profiles of famous hackers, including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, and tells some fascinating stories from the early computer research labs to the first home computers. Levy portrays them as smart and hard-working people with wildly imaginative minds who found unconventional solutions to computer engineering problems. They all share a common set of values, which is the "hacker ethic" that remains popular today. 6. "Outliers" In the book "Outliers", the author Gladwell's analysis of successful people in society allows readers to see a series of surprising statistical results: most players in the Premier League were born between September and November; Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both born in 1955; the founders of many famous law firms in New York are actually descendants of Jews, and most of their ancestors made a living in the clothing industry in New York. Those geniuses and eccentrics are so amazing because they are blessed by opportunities. However, in addition to opportunities, their success also requires the cultural influence of their predecessors. Therefore, from the book "Outliers", you can understand that opportunity is so important to success. Gladwell points out the direction of the road to success for readers, but everyone needs to think carefully about how to seize this opportunity. After all, different people have different opportunities. In this book, what Zhang Xiaolong appreciates most is the "10,000-hour rule", which means that a person must undergo more than 10,000 hours of training to reach a certain level of professionalism. 7. "A Brief History of Information" Nowadays, information is flooding us like a torrent, making us deeply troubled by information anxiety, information overload, and information fatigue. But looking back at history, this is nothing new, and people have always come up with ways to deal with it. Wikipedia and Google are one of our responses. Whatever your attitude toward the future of information, one thing is certain: we humans are creatures of information. As the author of best-selling books such as "Chaos", "The Life of Feynman", "Faster and Faster", and "The Life of Newton", Gleick not only meticulously restores historical details in his books and explains various theories in a popular way, but also vividly portrays several figures that are unknown to the public: Charles Babbage, a pioneer of programmable computers who was ahead of his time, Ada Byron, the first programmer and daughter of the poet Byron, Alan Turing, the father of computer science and a genius who was envied by God, and the protagonist of the book, Claude Shannon, the father of information theory. 8. "Digital Utopia" In the early 1960s, in the eyes of the American public, computers were just cold machines in the Cold War. However, when the Internet arrived in the 1990s, computers presented a completely different world - they simulated a digital utopian collaborative entity, which was the common vision of the hippies who were once the most opposed to the Cold War. This is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. The author unearths the little-known story of those pioneers in the San Francisco Bay Area - Stewart Brand and his "global network." From 1968 to 1998, through the "Whole Earth Catalog", "The World Electronic Link (WELL)" and the ultimately hugely successful "Wired" magazine, Brand and his partners played the role of middlemen between the San Francisco hippie movement and the emerging technology cluster Silicon Valley. Thanks to their visionary efforts, countercultural elements and technologists redefined the image of computers: computers are weapons for self-liberation, computers build refreshing virtual communities, and computers allow people to more boldly expand new boundaries of society. |
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