Scale WeChat to 1B users with Stephen Wang, User Growth & Engagement Director

What has contributed to WeChat’s massive growth all over the world? What features make WeChat so instrumental for people’s life?  

Our guest today is Stephen Wang, who co-founded Rotten Tomatoes, a leading entertainment website focused on movie reviews and news, and most recently led the user growth and engagement at WeChat in the past 6 years until 2019. At WeChat, he managed a team of product managers and engineers to help scale WeChat from 300M to 1B users in China and around the world.  

In todays’s episode, Stephen will give us a deep dive into WeChat as a product and the mobile-only mentality behind it. As a product head in a product-centric company, Stephen shares the metric he cares the most. We will also take a look at the major shift of product management philosophy in China by using Bytedance as an example.

Show Notes:

2:15 Welcome Stephen Wang

2:50 How different WeChat is as a product from the western perspective

5:37 What makes WeChat instrumental for people’s life

12:42 Innovation inspired by Tencent team culture

16:10 Product design in China (Examples: Douban, Weibo and Xiaomi)

21:50 What makes China a special ecosystem for digital product development

25:30 WeChat’s killer features: WeChat payment, Red Packets, Mini program

32:35 Balance privacy protection and user growth

39:20 Skills needed for talents in Tencent

43:35 Are Chinese companies hiring more international talents

49:10 The major shift of product management philosophy in China

Many thanks to our guest Stephen Wang; host Oscar Ramos; producers Eva Shi and Sagar Chaudhary; editor David; organizer Chinaccelerator; and sponsor People Squared. Be sure to check out our website www.chinaccelerator.com

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