Seven lessons from Tencent’s Pony Ma
This article discusses how Pony Ma (founder, chairman and chief executive of Tencent) uses ‘Seven Principles’ to guide product creation.
- Publication Date: 01/05/2018
- Language: English
- Pages: 4
Tencent is one of the biggest companies worldwide by market capitalisation, but it’s still relatively unknown in the West. In 2006 Ma planned to reach revenues of 10 billion renminbi but in 2017 the company reached almost 238 billion renminbi. With this massive growth, Ma feared that the company might lose its nimbleness, and created 7 principles to guide product creation. This article discusses them.
Pony Ma created 7 guiding principles for product creation:
- Agility: keeping bureaucracy at bay and empowering younger employees to take the lead in changes
- Openness: giving freedom to act (invent, solve problems, wow)
- User first: ensuring product managers ran frequent end-user surveys, read users’ blogs and collected user-experience feedback
- Speed: maintaining speed of product releases
- Resilience: expecting people to bounce back from losses.
- Evolution: maintaining the capability to improve, self-correct and improve
- Innovation: bringing new features either from imitation or development. This principle comes last as it’s a consequence of the other 6
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