Stepping up in China
Posted on Tuesday, October 07, 2008 by Thijs Jacobs
This post may fall in the category “rants & raves”, but it’s my personal attempt at identifying things, that may be holding up the development of China’s tech landscape or within your company. China is a wonderful country to work and live, so this is NOT a rant against China; we’ve all heard enough complaints already. It’s far more interesting to look at the opportunities at hand.
Both Japan and Korea have managed to nestle itself at the top of the world by driving high-end technological innovation, one example is the domination of giants like Samsung and Sony. Many believe China is well on its way of becoming the next technology kingdom, but when looking at Japan and Korea, it’s obvious, that these countries did not have to deal with a huge legacy of massively outdated rules, regulations, mentality and an infrastructure that’s aimed at controlling content.
So, what do you need to know? Some notes, based on my personal experiences.
A change of mentality
Chinese universities are training engineers to operate within their comfort zone, there’s few incentive to push innovation. Often corporate culture and a stringent management structure manage to kill the last bit of creativity. As a result of this, adoption of new technologies is far behind. If China is serious about competing with Japan and others, it will have to create a breading ground for creativity, a culture, where fresh ideas are encouraged. Changing a culture or the education system, is not something, that can be done overnight.
On a more practical level, let’s explore, what you can do today. If you work at a tech firm or digital agency in China, try to flatten your corporate layers as much as possible; get out of your office and talk to every single engineer on a daily basis. Share your vision, with your engineers and make them part of that vision. Explain to them, why their work is important and encourage them to help shape that vision. Once you set the goals, reward them based on their achievements (a pat on the back, may already be enough).
Exercise this, by asking yourself the question, if you know, what your engineers are working on and what problems they are facing; maybe you already know the answer. Don’t have a clue? Get out there now! Remember though, a company is not a democracy; companies that do great work, got there because of their unique vision and often stubbornness to not abandon that same vision. Same applies to leadership within a company.
It doesn’t work!
It “works”, is just not enough! The term, we’re looking for is ubiquitous. How often I’ve seen engineers in China develop a solution that fits the need, but breaks as soon as functionality needs to be added. Encourage your engineers to implement standards, document their changes and build applications, that can be extended into entirely different applications all together. This will save you time and money in the future.
Stop with the unreadable timelines, but provide clear task lists and dedicate an entire (maybe virtual?) office wall just to that. This may also be a great place to showcase engineers, that achieved their goals. Best recommendation, that I can give you, is to find someone anal in your organization and put him or her in charge of quality control.
Be even more ubiquitous and demand from your engineers, that they build applications, that can scale far beyond expectations. One thing that may help you to bootstrap costs in this aspect is going with a SaaS model in terms of infrastructure. Concentrate on the stuff you’re good at!
Keeping things simple
Engineers and Chinese engineers in particular, feel the need to overdo in the feature department. Keep your product streamlined, which will help you in the future. By building opinionated applications, devoid of unnecessary bells and whistles, you will be able to remain agile in a fast paced market. Implementing a new feature? Ask yourself if more than 10% of your target audience would ever use it.
This may be a tough message to get across to your engineers in China, as there is a (digital) cultural tendency towards quantity, rather than quality. Have a look at Sina and you’ll catch my drift. Often, people will reference Sina as an example of what Chinese netizens like. It’s not what they like, it’s just what they’re used to.
There’s more of course
There are always factors out of your direct control, such as the infamous Copy to China image, the country’s uptight way of dealing with user created content or the VC’s that are blindly dumping money into startups based on the prospect of the huge consumer market. Just remember to take the responsible approach.