Byte Beat Technology Fan Er 2021-03-12 22:06:03
From 2012 to 2021, today's Bytedance has passed its 9th anniversary, and the number of employees has exceeded 10W.
However, looking back at the early days of entrepreneurship nine years ago, the entire company had only a dozen people. During the exploration of the direction, the founding team made 12 apps including Toutiao in one go, but there was only one Android engineer who supported so many product developments.
His name is Li Qiuliang, and he impressed Zhang Yiming with an app he designed and developed throughout the process, and he became the only Android development by ByteDance in its first year of business. In addition to writing code at that time, he often directly contacted users, processed feedback, and continuously optimized the user experience from the user's perspective.
Li Qiuliang is also one of the few R&D that has accompanied the company's growth to today. Now, we found him again and chatted with him about the stories from nine years ago.
Self-taught Android, start the road to entrepreneurship
In 2007, after graduating from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Li Qiuliang did not enter the Internet industry. He first did EDA software research and development for chip design for two years, and then started an SNS social game with friends—— At that time, "stealing food" and "grabbing parking spaces" were still popular applications.
But the wave of mobile Internet is also affecting him.
After the game project was stopped, Li Qiuliang taught himself the new Android development at the time. After finishing school, I started looking for a job as an Android engineer. The expectation of finding a job is simple: it doesn’t have to be a big company, but the technical atmosphere must be good, and the place of work should be closer to your home.
Searching according to these two criteria, a recruitment post on the Shuimu forum brought him to the interviewer, Bytedance CEO Zhang Yiming.
After Li Qiuliang joined the company, he discovered that Zhang Yiming had been participating in the interview of every candidate for a long time to ensure the high standards of recruitment.
During the interview, because Android development was still an emerging technology at the time, not many people knew about it. In order to examine Li Qiuliang’s abstract expression ability, Zhang Yiming and Li Qiuliang talked about Linux, and found that Li Qiuliang could explain Linux clearly and simply. The relationship between X Server and X Client.
Li Qiuliang also took out an Android e-book reader App that he developed. This app supports a variety of text formats and character sets. "Except for the logo, the product design and development of the entire App is done by me. of".
Most of the research and development will not be like him to independently make products, but later this way of working without boundaries has also become a part of the Bytedance culture.
After passing the interview and successfully entering the job, Li Qiuliang became a member of the entrepreneurial team.
The company is not big, and even the office is in the home of Jinqiu Home, but he feels that the team’s technical atmosphere is very good. Everyone does business in a practical manner, communicates equally, and iterates quickly. "Although there was no concept of "China Taiwan" at the time, But also pay attention to efficiency and reusability. " He said proudly.
Research and development results must be reused, and experience and lessons must be reused. One afternoon, when everyone was writing code in Jinqiu Home, suddenly the computer went black and the room was powered off.
At that time, electricity meters in residential areas could not be connected to the Internet and needed to be powered by rechargeable electricity cards. If you charge 500 yuan to the electricity card, the balance in the electricity card will be transferred to the electricity meter after the card is inserted. The balance in the electricity meter is +500, and the balance of the electricity card is -500. When the balance of the electricity meter is almost exhausted, the user will be prompted to take the electricity card to buy electricity offline. When this power outage happened, the balance of the electricity meter was exhausted, and there was no balance in the electricity card, so everyone had to stop their work and waited for their colleagues to run out to buy electricity.
Although this is not a product or development problem, the administrative department with only one person at that time still issued an accident report and follow-up improvement measures: every time the electric card is inserted into the electric meter, it must be purchased once to prevent the sudden power failure. Go to buy electricity and delay work.
Regardless of making mistakes, clearly exposing the problem is the first step in improvement. This has also formed ByteDance's work style: honest and not pretending, courage to reflect, gain experience and lessons from mistakes, and continue to grow.
Agile trial and error: one engineer develops 12 apps for Android
When I started my business 9 years ago, there were only a dozen people in the Bytedance company, including technology, products, operations, and HR. Li Qiuliang, the new Android development engineer, is actually the only Android developer in the team. The product to be developed is content. Platform App.
At that time, the founding team saw the wave of the times:
Under the popularization of the mobile Internet, the information dissemination medium of the entire society will rapidly shift from paper media to mobile phones, and the information distribution method will usher in great changes. It will develop in a real-time, two-way, and diversified direction, and a content-based platform will appear. The window period.
Since it is a content platform, what content should it be?
Before starting to do it, the start-up team held a meeting, and Zhang Yiming talked about the preliminary strategy:
In the form of content, it can be short text, long text, picture, audio and video;
In terms of content category, it can be funny jokes, cars, home improvement, current affairs news...
By permuting and combining on this basis, you can get many kinds of product forms. In the various product forms, there is always trial and error, and there is always one that can succeed.
The first product format that the founding team will do is funny pictures.
There are two reasons for choosing pictures. One is that the team has accumulated some image processing technology, including image storage, recognition, and weight reduction, etc.; the other is that some image apps on the market are very popular at that time. I feel I can do better.
After the direction was set, the development of new products began immediately.
During that time, Li Qiuliang, the only Android developer and 3 iOS developers, sat in the same room. Everyone started working at 9 o'clock in the morning and didn't leave until 12 o'clock in the evening. After 5 weeks of closed development, the company's first app funny pictures was launched.
Funny 囧图 has gained 1 million users only one month after it went online, and its DAU has reached hundreds of thousands.
This form was initially recognized by the market, and the team quickly tried new products in different content areas such as automobiles and home furnishings.
Every time they finish an App, after iterating one or two versions, they move on to the next one. Because of the small size of the team, everyone in the company gathers at the beginning of each month to discuss user feedback and technical issues, discuss which app to iterate next, evaluate the development schedule, and determine the work plan for the month.
In this way, the founding team quickly completed the development of 12 apps, including Toutiao, with only a dozen people and only Li Qiuliang alone in the Android development.
"If I were a user, this experience would not be good"
In the early product development process, the founding team insisted on continuously polishing the product experience. Li Qiuliang said that because there are so many Android phone models, some models have various unsuitable situations, which makes the user experience very bad, and it takes a lot of time to continuously optimize.
The picture products are facing particularly obvious difficulties: "For example, there are some very long pictures, how to open on the phone and achieve a good display effect, it takes a lot of effort to optimize."
Among these experience optimization projects, Li Qiuliang was most impressed by the iteration of the comment section of the Toutiao client.
In many earlier article reading apps, after reading an article, you need to click the "comment" button to see what netizens have said. When developing Toutiao, the start-up team thought that "clicking a button specifically" gave users an extra step. Why not remove it to achieve the effect of adding comments directly to the bottom of the article?
"We found that no company did this. Other products either put comments on a separate page or put them directly on the web page. The experience was not good," said Li Qiuliang.
How to put the comments directly into the article page and smoothly splice the two modules of article and comment together? Li Qiuliang came up with the first way:
Draw to the bottom of the article, then draw again to enter the comment area.
This allows a certain optimization of the user experience, the process of reading articles and reviews is coherent, and the cost of technology development is also controllable.
A week later, Li Qiuliang realized this plan. But when he looked at it from the user's point of view, he found that this kind of interaction of swiping to the bottom and then swiping was not friendly enough, and it was necessary to make the article and comment area more coherent.
Therefore, he temporarily modified the plan and completed the new plan of smoothly dividing the article from the article to the comment area within a week, which is now the form on the Toutiao client.
Do-it-yourself practical operation, understanding is deep enough
In the development process of content products, a large amount of content needs to be labeled and graded. These tasks seem repetitive and boring.
Many companies have delegated these tasks to outsourcing companies. However, in addition to full-time content operations, including product managers, many team members of different sequences were doing content labeling when BYTE started its business in the early days. Li Qiuliang said: "Yiming is doing labeling himself, because I have done it myself, so I can better understand the standards of content classification and classification."
Similarly, as an Android engineer, Li Qiuliang did not limit himself to the scope of technical work, and often handled user feedback directly.
One night, when Li Qiuliang was just about to leave work, he suddenly received a user feedback email:
Suddenly, the Toutiao App cannot be refreshed.
At first, he thought it was a case; after a while, more and more users reported that the App could not be refreshed.
With the increase in the number of users, the network environment and mobile phone model settings of different users are very different. Li Qiuliang immediately contacted some users who gave feedback and called them directly, suggesting that users switch the network environment and mobile phone settings and try again and again. In the past, there were users who were answering the phone while cooking, and they could hear the obvious sound of cooking."
In order to solve this problem, Li Qiuliang pulled enthusiastic users who reported the problem into a QQ group. While discussing and analyzing the reasons with colleagues in the email, he made a new Toutiao App beta installation package and sent the test version installation package to The user group kept trying, iterated the third and fourth editions, and finally solved the problem.
The users who came to feedback the problem did not tire of cooperating with him for many tests. Li Qiuliang said: "A product that is really well done and can bring value to users, users are willing to help you solve these problems, and some users even raise questions. Can you send your mobile phone, please see what went wrong ."
"Don't let yourself become part of the assembly line"
Two months after the launch of Toutiao, Li Qiuliang felt that he had chosen the right direction: "It took more than a year for the startup company I worked to have 1 million users. Everyone is more confident in the new direction."
But this also means that the product will be more complex. The increase in engineering complexity requires a higher iteration speed for the developers behind it, as well as more detailed research on the user experience.
In the process of supporting the rapid development of a large number of products, Li Qiuliang also promoted the accumulation of technology, made technology reusable, built better infrastructure, and used a forward-looking perspective to prepare for the later operation of the product in advance.
"Large companies will have such mature mechanisms, but it is difficult to establish these technical mechanisms in early companies."
Until 2017, Li Qiuliang has been iterating the Android App of Toutiao: "I have participated in almost all products before 2016."
Now, ByteDance has been established for 9 years, and Li Qiuliang has also invested in the research and development of new features of Douyin. But in his opinion, many characteristics of the Bytedance technical team have not changed over the years:
For example, it emphasizes agility and efficiency . Although there is a division of labor, the sense of boundary is not very strong. "Many companies have too strong technology or too strong products, but byte bounce rarely has this phenomenon. Everyone has the same goal and diversified openness."
For example, from the perspective of users , "you want to be a To C product, and you must be its user." Before 2015, Bytedance had no full-time testing. The entire project team and even the entire company tried out new products together. An internal testing platform has been specially built to invite everyone to try the new App.
No boundaries, user perspective, this is also the development experience he summed up for himself.
"In fact, when everyone graduated, the school background and the level of intelligence were very similar, but what companies, projects, and challenges can be experienced have a great impact on people. After these trials, you will be different from the original." Li Qiuliang said, “These are external factors, but in the end, you have to return to yourself. You must exercise yourself. Don’t let yourself become a part of the assembly line. Do what PM asks you to do. You have to think about the product from What is the big direction to the small experience? These thoughts and explorations are what makes you grow. "
And this is also the true self-driving force of ByteDancer to promote business development in the past nine years.