Erik on product management and such
How Chinese firms work and how they perform in the market is a matter of perspective that gives entirely opposite outcomes. If you are outside of China and see the brands emerging on the global market - BYD, DJI, Insta360, OnePlus before the merger with OPPO, etc. - you may be of the view that their companies are unstoppable because they manage to combine high-performing products, a good user- and ownership experience, quality, competitive pricing, with high speed of execution. They simply design an launch new products faster than anyone else can. You may therefore have formed that “China Speed’ is the key to competing with China’s global brands.
If you are inside China, however, you will instead view these firms as unicorns, and your view will instead be filled with the hundreds or thousands of firms that fail to move past push-selling and price competition, brands that are unknown or have negative connotations because of shoddy product quality and after-sales service. You are more likely to see chuhai, or growing into the global market, as something almost unachievable.
Speed is a significant strategic advantage provided that you are moving in the right direction, meaning you have a strategy, and you do so without sacrificing quality.
China Speed is now one of the concepts that are going to be taken at face level and bragged about by the same people who have recently started talking about how they work 996 (they don’t).
Like with 996, China Speed is fundamentally misunderstood and therefore can never be applied outside of China. There are in fact two types of China Speed. The productive type does not come from doing things quickly at all. It comes from structural advantages that have been built over decades, like having your office next to the factory, which itself is next to all of its relevant suppliers.
In the example of BYD, their advantage is not only that they own their factories and that 70% of their components are made by suppliers owned by the BYD group, or that they can get better margins by controlling prices. What really creates and advantage is that they can design and prototype a new model, together with the parts that go into it that will be manufactured by its suppliers, instead of having to go through long contract negotiations to get the parts that enable a new model to be launched.
BYD employees undoubtedly work longer hours and perhaps at a higher pace than automotive employees in Europe, but it is not what makes up BYD’s formula for success, because the structural advantage is in place after decades of methodical construction. Unlike employees at TikTok Shop, which I below reference as an example of destructive speed, BYD employees are not pushing on a string.
The destructive type is focusing on doing everything, doing anything no matter what it is, just as long as you do it quickly. In organizations that favor this type of speed, China Speed is a form of procrastination at the leadership level, so that they will not have to do the hard work of forming a vision and making decisions that can prove to either be good or bad. They fear the latter outcome, so they tell their teams to do things quickly, just A/B test something, actually a lot of things, and show me the results of the things that happen to work out, so I can put it in my report and show leadership.
This is speed, no chaos, as a value above everything. It sacrifices quality, it sacrifices relationships with business partners as well as customers and it destroys the brand. In another essay I’m currently working on, I will outline how Chinese firms grow in the global markets, what stages they go through and what organizational capabilities they must build up. The firms that try to just be faster will never get past the second stage, which is price leadership, and many don’t even get past stage one.
These leaders say they really care about data, but they don’t because they don’t make any decisions. They want experiment results, and they want to show them as achievements to their managers. But they never use data to inform strategy.
For Chinese firms going global, focusing on speed above all else means that failure is a given. Lets look at ByteDance and their TikTok Shop as an example. You would probably say that ByteDance, through TikTok, is an example of a Chinese organization that is adept at launching global products. But ByteDance did not build TikTok, they acquired musical.ly and its 240 million userbase and re-branded it. It is only through this foundation they have been successful.
When ByteDance try to build global products from 0, they have a much lower rate of success, and TikTok Shop is a monumental failure in every region it has been launched - in UK and Europe, in the US and in Southeast Asia.
This is the story from Indonesia:
Last year, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDancei, acquired a majority stake in its Indonesian online retail rival, Tokopedia, to abide by local laws that restrict social media companies from running e-commerce businesses. Following the acquisition, TikTok tucked its app interface into Tokopedia, and rebranded the platform as TikTok Shop by Tokopedia.
The merger has disrupted Indonesia’s $65 billion e-commerce market, Simon Torring, co-founder of market research firm Cube Asia told Rest of World. Since the acquisition, TikTok has laid off at least 2,500 employees across the merged entity, while sellers say they have lost agency over the platform.
“Tokopedia’s sales volume has continued to decline steadily after ByteDance’s acquisition,” Torring told Rest of World. “For the first couple of quarters, we gave them the benefit of the doubt of being a new owner carrying out messy integration work. At this point, it’s clear that they are not investing strategically in Tokopedia.”
“I’m not planning to make videos or to do livestream [to promote my products],” Helmin, a seller from Jakarta, told Rest of World. Helmin, who asked to be identified by her first name only, said she directed buyers to her Shopee store instead, where she continues to sell snacks and beverages imported from Korea, Vietnam, and Turkey.
So messy has TikTok’s merger been that it’s driven thousands of sellers to Toco, a little-known platform promising zero fees for life. Shopee and TikTok take a 2.5% cut from each sale.
“In Southeast Asia, Chinese companies usually invest [in other companies], instead of managing [them] directly, like how Shopee is backed by Tencent and Lazada by Alibaba,” Ming Yii Lai, research manager at Shanghai-based Daxue Consulting, told Rest of World. “[Now], they localize their operations, with independent CEOs making very fast decisions.”
That strategy isn’t paying off in Indonesia, where many sellers say Tokopedia has “lost its soul” and been “reduced to just another generic Chinese marketplace,” a Jakarta-based seller wrote in a LinkedIn post. “There’s nothing wrong with that on paper, but the truth is, Indonesians shop differently. We look for connection, for trust, for the sense that we’re part of something local and meaningful.”
— restofworld.org, July 2025
In the UK, TikTok Shop has had massive organizational and leadership problems and had to rebuild the organization several times since 2021:
A culture clash between TikTok’s Chinese owners and some of its London employees has triggered a staff exodus and complaints about an aggressive corporate ethos that runs counter to typical working practices in the UK.
The friction has centred on the social media company’s ecommerce initiative, TikTok Shop, which launched in the UK in October. Joshua Ma, a senior executive at China’s ByteDance — owner of the viral video app — and the head of ecommerce at TikTok Europe, outraged London-based staff at a dinner this year when he said that, as a “capitalist”, he “didn’t believe” companies should offer maternity leave.
The episode is emblematic of a broader clash within the ecommerce division. At least 20 members of the London ecommerce team — around half of all its original staff — have left since TikTok Shop’s launch, while others say they are on the brink of quitting. Two employees have been paid settlements over working conditions.
“There are people leaving every week, it is like a game — every Monday we ask who has been fired, who has quit,” one current employee said.
— FT, June 2022
This is essentially four lost years and billions in investment burned because ByteDance wanted to move fast. In 2025, TikTok Shop has been re-launched in beta in the UK:
Although the launch of TikTok Shop bodes well for business on paper, in practice its launch could be significantly more complicated.
This isn’t TikTok’s first ride in the rodeo of social commerce, after all. Culture clashes between TikTok’s Chinese owners and London staff tainted TikTok Shop’s UK launch in 2021.
Reports of burnout and tension between staff and former TikTok head of ecommerce Europe, Joshua Ma, led to an exodus of more than 20 members from the London team.
This rocky start was followed by a lack of traction, with the Shop operating at a loss and many live streams generating zero sales.
— startups.co.uk, June 2025
An overall review of TikTok Shop’s on-going struggles in various markets can be found at Toutiao:
A TikTok employee told Caijing Tianxia Weekly that Chinese nationals working overseas are mostly in technical roles, which typically involve a relatively stable and flexible pace. Given their familiarity with ByteDance’s work model, they generally adapt well to TikTok’s environment. However, TikTok Shop—a fledgling e-commerce division under significant revenue pressure—demands much higher work intensity. Since this department relies heavily on local operational talent, clashes inevitably arose.
This incident is merely one facet of the broader cultural conflicts TikTok faces overseas. Many perceive TikTok’s e-commerce expansion as aggressively “wild-growing,” yet it continually struggles with localization—a challenge common to all Chinese tech companies going global.
…
As ByteDance’s primary vehicle for global expansion, TikTok has made significant inroads in numerous markets. However, managing dispersed teams across the US, UK, Japan, Brazil, Germany, Singapore, and elsewhere inevitably presents complex challenges.
AJ (a pseudonym), a research and development engineer at TikTok’s US office, told Caijing Tianxia Weekly that in his R&D team, 70% of employees are of Chinese descent. Since TikTok evolved from Musical.ly—a Shanghai-based company—much of the inherited code documentation remains in Chinese, creating language barriers for foreign staff.
…
AJ believes this is nearly impossible at TikTok. In his R&D team, managers (mostly of Chinese descent) oversee 30–40 people each—a ratio “unimaginable in the US,” where frontline managers typically supervise only 5–6 individuals (only senior managers handle 30–40).
Further problems caused by the single-minded focus on speed at TikTok Shop US can be read about in Special Submission | My Two and a Half Years at ByteDance E-Commerce in the U.S.: From Hope to Disillusionment which was written by a Chinese engineer.
Let’s list all the numerous problems it has created:
- Strategy — ByteDance assumes that live commerce, which shows promising signs in China but is by far not proven as a new model of e-commerce instead of a niche, will work in other locales. They have not done the work to prove the model, but simply chose the path of replicating exactly what they did in China, and doing so quickly.
In reality, live commerce has existed since at least the 1990s, most notably with QVC, and has only ever been a minor share of retail. It suits only a minor segment of customers, and only fits promotion-driven companies and most often low-cost products. - Organization - Most employees, even Chinese transplants, leave after a year or two, and foreign employees rarely last a year. They have had to rebuild the organization multiple times in each locale.
- Partner relationships - Sellers that have worked with TikTok Shop swear to never do so again, due to how hard they were pushed, how poorly they were treated, and how much money they lost.
- Revenue - Every year, in each locale, TikTok Shop significantly underperforms its set goals. You may say that maybe they just set aggressive goals — but if you set goals that everyone knows cannot be met, then there are no goals, and without goals there can be no strategy. And that is exactly right: TikTok Shop is a flailing operation without strategy, for which a singular focus on doing things quickly has been replaced.
This is why Chinese teams have 30-40 team members, why leaders are too overwhelmed to think strategically, why people leave quickly, why people have to work 996 but accomplish less than 965, why being “data-driven” is nonsense when you are only looking at A/B tests of random, guess-work features and traffic that may go up due to promotion-driven campaigns, while the house is on fire.
What did DJI and Insta360 do differently to become the first Chinese, global category leaders in drones, gimbals and cameras?
They built separate organizations for China and International markets, they hired people with experience and knowledge of the markets inside China HQ and outside of China in the regional offices, and based on these capabilities they created strategies for their respective markets. They never brought leaders from the China market to copy paste tactics that worked in China, and they never sent people who couldn’t speak English to lead their international offices. As a result, they have the strongest brands and the best products on the market.
So, as a summary, the productive type of speed is not a strategy and it is not an organizational value. Speed is an outcome from building an organization and an environment to operate in that makes resources accessible. Whenever speed itself is used as a strategy, it is the destructive type of speed that is being used. And whenever speed is used instead of strategy and proper organizational design, it is because leadership has abdicated its responsibility to do exactly these things.