The Wall Street Journal reports that internal competition is brutal at Chinese social media companies:
Former ByteDance engineers say ByteDance is one of the most aggressive in executing a strategy known within the industry as “horse racing,” where multiple teams are assigned to build the same product or feature with slight variations. Once it becomes clear which version is performing better, the winning team is given more resources while the other versions are scrapped, these people say.
Not brutal enough! Multiple teams should compete on a yearlong series of product features, with the lowest ranked team at the end of the year being relegated to a lesser product. Meanwhile, the highest ranked team gets—
I don't know. What do winning soccer teams get? Just the thrill of victory? Or big cash bonuses?
Well, cash bonuses should do it. Along with the top team on the lesser product getting a promotion to the show. Now that's product development.
This stupid management strategy was probably the biggest single reason why Nokia, which used almost to own the cellphone market, destroyed itself in a few short years.
It doesn't seem to be stupid for the Chinese firms in question. The WSJ article cited by Kevin states the top four downloaded apps in the US in March have been Chinese.
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A similar strategy has been used at Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), multiple teams with a similar mission that are not really coordinated, and many companies with former Oracle executives (Salesforce, Net Suite, Siebel, etc) for years.
China being China, they may get seriously Darwinian and just have the lowest ranked team shot, "pour encourager les autres".
This is likely one area where market size really does help. The Chinese are fans of big data analysis, and the utterly gigantic size of customer databases there probably doesn't hurt them in terms of optimizing customer engagement.
Doesn't seem very "communistic" or "socialistic". More "capitalistic".
The CCP is capitalistic?
Perhaps CCP = Chinese Capitalist Party.
However, Chinese Fascist Party would be more appropriate.
"Communist with Chinese characteristics".
I think the point is that it is difficult to know in advance which format is the winning one. There were a number of different photo sharing sites but Instagram won out. Same with FaceBook. Same with TikTok.
From what I’ve read about the software design each of these and the competitors were functional, but the winners somehow meshed with the masses better than the others.
I used to do some product design. I found it a little difficult because I focused so much on underlying functionality and features and more customers just wanted something really simple and easy. Simple and easy mean very different things to different people.
Plus, you can make engineering decisions early on that lock you into certain things. It is hard enough for the engineers to deal with this. Harder for upper management. No doubt there is some messiness with the Chinese approach, but I can see some of the advantages.
What do winning soccer teams get?
Social credit points. And hookers, blow and pizza.
It used to be said that software development was like pinball: the reward for success was getting to do it again.
Sounds like a Manchester United fan upset that they were relegated.
First prize is a Cadillac El Dorado.
Second prize is a set of steak knives.
Third prize is you're fired.
ABC
Works great if you can afford all the engineers. Of course, big companies are frequently working one problem in three different ways in different parts of the world in slightly different contexts.
They could require losing teams to send one person to the guillotine to have their employment terminated.
Isn't that how they did it in the old days?
/S
This is just crying out to be a season of Squid Game.
They used to call it A/B testing in the US. You'd have different teams pushing for different features and interfaces and they'd have them compete online. If you knew the players, it was like the March Madness brackets. This was really popular ten years ago. Surely, I am not the only person living who remembers this.