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Text丨 Dong Hui

Editor: Zhao Lei

In a small-scale meeting at the beginning of 2023, Xiaohongshu’s middle and senior management sat together to discuss the risks that may affect the e-commerce performance in the new year. Participants agreed that if Cai Lin (Shu Ming), the head of fashion and trend merchants, resigned, it would be the biggest risk to the e-commerce business. Since 2022, the fashion industry has contributed more and more to Xiaohongshu’s e-commerce GMV. By the beginning of last year, the proportion was close to 50%, surpassing the beauty industry and becoming the number one internally.

However, Xiaohongshu COO Conan (named after Shu), who is also the head of the transaction department, is not satisfied with the results of the fashion industry. Several former e-commerce business and middle office employees said that Conan had commented in many meetings that Cailin "did not understand Xiaohongshu" and believed that she had no strategy.

Such an evaluation is unreasonable. In other Internet companies, data is the most important and direct universal standard: the direction that brings growth is the right direction, and employees are also used to using data to prove themselves. The better the data, the more worthy of promotion.But on Xiaohongshu, this set of standards fails in some cases.

In a subsequent organizational restructuring, Mai Kun (Potato name), who had worked at Xiaohongshu for 9 years and was the head of home furnishing industry operations, was promoted to the general head of the e-commerce industry. Cai Lin, who had outstanding data performance, and other industry heads changed from reporting directly to Conan to reporting to Mai Kun. Cai Lin's resignation, which was regarded as the biggest risk factor affecting e-commerce performance, suddenly became the sword of Damocles hanging over the e-commerce department.

Finally, CEO Mao Wenchao showed up. At the bimonthly review meeting, Mao Wenchao began to let fashion director Cai Lin and Conan sit on either side of him, and praised the former's performance - this represented a new signal. As a result, the e-commerce department reached a delicate new balance: McQueen was still the nominal head of the industry, but Cai Lin's position in decision-making was improved and she was almost not interfered with by McQueen.

In the eyes of many employees, this twists and turns of management transfer is just a slice of Xiaohongshu's many management problems. They can also cite many cases of transfers, promotions and layoffs that they find difficult to understand. They often don't understand what Xiaohongshu's standards are, and therefore fall into a long-term sense of insecurity and walk on thin ice at work.

Even Mao Wenchao himself realized that Xiaohongshu had encountered the "big company disease" - in an internal letter released on its 11th anniversary, he and co-founder Qu Fang mentioned,Many front-line employees have already sensed the bloat and entropy brought about by the complexity of the business and the growth of the organization. They feel that they have “energy but cannot use it” and that “the difficulty lies not in the challenge but in the meaningless consumption”.

Looking back, perhaps 2022 will be a turning point.

This year, Xiaohongshu, with its rapidly growing user base, began to focus on commercial monetization, and its e-commerce, advertising and international businesses underwent drastic changes: in January, the head of e-commerce, Jess (Shu Ming), resigned, and the e-commerce department, which was originally a first-level department, was transferred to the community department and began to be managed by Conan; in March, the head of strategy, Erya (Shu Ming), was transferred to be the head of international business, and Xiaohongshu began to test the Southeast Asian overseas business; in September, CMO Zhiheng (Shu Ming) led the business department to carry out industry division, and initiated several splits and mergers of the organizational structure.

With the growth of business comes the expansion of staff. Xiaohongshu offers higher salaries and a wider scope of authority to attract executives with 3 to 5 years of front-line experience and middle and senior management who have worked in other large companies, hoping that they can bring reusable successful experience. At the beginning of last year, when the total number of employees could still be viewed internally, the system showed that the number of Xiaohongshu employees, including interns, had reached 12,000.

These new employees have rich experience recognized by Xiaohongshu and are well aware of the survival rules of large companies. They join Xiaohongshu with the hope of making a big splash in this one of the few Internet companies that is still on an upward trend. However, they find that the time they stay there is much shorter than expected, and it is even difficult for them to land, and they cannot even survive the probation period. A former middle office employee said that he observed that "a large proportion" of people left voluntarily or involuntarily before the end of their probation period.

An employee of the business department said that in the past year, more than 10 people at or above the R6 level left the business department alone. In Xiaohongshu's job level system, if the company founder and CEO is the first level, R6 is equivalent to CEO minus 3, usually the team leader of the business line. He once attended a training meeting organized by HR, who asked the employees present who had been employed for more than half a year and who had been employed for more than a year, and asked everyone to raise their hands. "There are actually very few people who have been employed for more than half a year, and basically all of them are new."

With high-frequency personnel turnover and frequent business shifts, Xiaohongshu's organizational communication mechanism often fails, decisions are not timely, and implementation is difficult. However, this is not only the "big company disease" shared by large companies, but also some of Xiaohongshu's unique "Xiaohongshu diseases", which are hidden deeper and constantly affect the fate of thousands of employees and this popular Internet company.

Not data-driven

Gao Ning, a middle-level manager, still remembers the shock he felt when he attended his first bimonthly summary meeting after joining Xiaohongshu.

There was not a single piece of data in the entire report. The summary of the operations manager was like an essay, 90% of which was about his own experience in doing business. Mao Wenchao even circled and dotted in the document, and commented, "I laughed to death." Another product manager did not mention any data about the product.

This is completely different from her work experience at another large company. She once needed to prove her direction was right through various facts and data, "but Xiaohongshu seemed to ignore facts, data and real information."

This is the first lesson that people like Gao Ning, who work for big companies, must learn when they come to Xiaohongshu - accept that they are not data-driven.

Lai Ke (Potato name), the person in charge of Xiaohongshu's Spring Festival Gala project, once mentioned in the internal podcast program "Someone Plants Potatoes" that when interviewing or landing new people, he would be very vigilant about whether the newcomers believe in something. "If he believes in his own judgment and true insight, he will throw away all those stereotyped execution methods, instead of only focusing on data, ROI, or so-called benchmarks to compare whether it is good or bad. These are two different kinds of thinking, not to say that the other one is wrong. Xiaohongshu has developed to this day, and it may also need some more scientific management methods for evaluation and management, but in this process, creation is actually put first."

Chen Si, a former e-commerce employee, used to look down on this argument. She was used to using data as an evaluation criterion. She participated in the planning of an e-commerce event. Although the transaction was good, Conan only praised one product design in the entire event - when users clicked on the note, they would see two butterflies flying out. "At that time, I didn't really understand what the evaluation criteria were? What was so good about it? What did this have to do with e-commerce?"

It was not until he left Xiaohongshu and joined another large company that Chen Si gradually understood the rationality of this logic.When creating content, other large companies are solving a math problem with a fixed formula. For example, using red envelopes to exchange for new creators will naturally create more content, and the number of new users and retention rate that the content can bring is the answer. However, the process of Xiaohongshu incubating the community is like solving a Chinese language problem. There is no formula or standard answer for what kind of content will make users like it. It can only rely on the employees' feelings.But she still feels that this logic is only reasonable when building a community, and that "e-commerce is a math problem."

The swing dance band performed at the 2023 Xiaohongshu Road Life Festival. Image source: Visual China

The monthly operations meeting of the trading department is often the time when the collision between the logic of feeling and data is most obvious and intense.

When the heads of various industries gave their reports, Conan paid more attention to the "smart" examples they mentioned, such as the niche designer brand branch Red Label. In the fashion industry, which mainly deals in apparel e-commerce, Red Label accounts for less than 20% of GMV.

Conan only asked about Red Label’s strategy, and never asked about other apparel areas that accounted for the remaining 80% of GMV. Gradually, industry leaders also learned to highlight the key points in their reports. The pictures posted in the documents were all beautiful and unique products, and the not-so-high transaction volume figures were reduced to a very small size and placed at the bottom, without mentioning how 80% of GMV was achieved. Although in actual operations, the clothing operation team structure of Xiaohongshu is not much different from that of Douyin and Tmall, and it still operates according to categories such as men's clothing, women's clothing, children's clothing, and shoes, when resource support is needed, 20% of individual cases are given priority, and 80% of the work "can only be done by yourself."

Some cases with excellent data performance will even be suppressed. The head of an industry supported an external anchor to open a live broadcast room on Xiaohongshu, and the GMV of a live broadcast can reach 20 million - although it is not as high as the 50 million per broadcast of Dong Jie and Zhang Xiaohui at their peak, it is already the top anchor in Xiaohongshu. However, Conan does not allow this anchor to be promoted internally or externally as a case.

"Conan said this is not good enough for Xiaohongshu and is not the right path," said an insider close to e-commerce.Conan gave two reasons: first, the anchor was not cultivated and grown by Xiaohongshu, and second, the products sold in the live broadcast room did not have the characteristics of Xiaohongshu.

Some employees feel that Xiaohongshu’s adherence to this methodology sometimes goes against industry rules.

At the beginning of 2022, senior management refused to imitate ByteDance’s early approach to content e-commerce, using cash incentives such as coupons or red envelopes to grow domestic e-commerce, believing that such an approach would destroy the user experience and attract some gray market users, and would not generate long-term value. However, a team leader in charge of e-commerce growth spent half a year without bringing much growth to e-commerce users, and was eventually fired. The new team leader who was later promoted returned to the method of subsidizing interest points.

In the same year, when doing international business in Southeast Asia, the senior management explicitly refused to buy traffic because Mao Wenchao believed that the users bought were not the ones who really liked the community. A former employee of the middle office recalled that before everyone left for Singapore, Mao Wenchao said that this was a project with "no budget and no upper limit", but when the international business really started, the senior management changed their mind and refused to give the budget for the launch.

Finally, the employees of the operations team attracted new users offline "like selling insurance", or sent private message links to users on Instagram, inviting them to download and use Xiaohongshu. An insider said that in the second half of 2022, the product's DAU in a certain country was very low.

These awkward things, which are completely contrary to the logic of past work, make many new employees not know what to do. When data goals lose their guiding role, they urgently need to find a recognized direction.

Say no and Xiaohongshu flavor

In August 2022, Xiaohongshu’s local life business was suddenly put on hold.

Product and operation staff started a four-month co-creation meeting. They came to the office to clock in, but did nothing but discuss how Xiaohongshu's local life business should be developed in the future. Every time a plan was discussed, Conan would come to comment for more than ten or twenty minutes, but would not give a clear direction. The next job for the local life department employees was to figure out what Conan's comments meant and what she wanted, and then spend three days to a week to come up with a new version of the plan - four months passed in a repetitive cycle of reporting and commenting.

"Conan's logic is to say no." A former middle-level manager of e-commerce business said, "She won't give specific directions, but she will have a standard in her heart - what she doesn't want."

From the front line to the top management, everyone can feel that Mao Wenchao and Conan, who are at the business decision-making level, have a sense of anxiety and fear - Xiaohongshu achieved success after returning to the community from e-commerce. They are afraid that outsiders will come to Xiaohongshu, and in addition to bringing market experience, they will also change Xiaohongshu again, making it lose its uniqueness that distinguishes it from other products such as Douyin.If Xiaohongshu is no longer Xiaohongshu, there will be no e-commerce, advertising sales, or even future listing plans built on the community.

Xiaohongshu e-commerce bonded warehouse in Zhengzhou in 2015. Xiaohongshu started out as a cross-border e-commerce company, but became successful because of its community. Image source: Visual China

To some extent, not being data-oriented does allow Xiaohongshu to maintain its endless creativity and drive the rapid growth of its user base. During the epidemic, a wave of new trends emerged from Xiaohongshu, such as camping. "It gives you such space to do something interesting, but there is no requirement for a certain number of DAU or notes in the short term. If you put it in ByteDance or Alibaba, if you need three months or a year to verify whether this thing can succeed, it will not succeed at all and will be directly rejected."

It is precisely because the community experience is too successful, which has created Xiaohongshu's characteristics and become Xiaohongshu's moat that this fear has become stronger. Therefore, the management requires that the Xiaohongshu-style e-commerce and advertising sales path must be built. Once someone makes the alarm bells in their hearts ring, saying no will take effect.

Many employees in the e-commerce business believe that the resignation of Jess, the head of e-commerce, in early 2022 is an example of the outbreak of fear among decision-makers.

Jess joined Xiaohongshu in 2019. That summer, Xiaohongshu started internal testing of live streaming. Five months later, Xiaohongshu started internal testing of e-commerce live streaming, and Jess became the person in charge of the e-commerce live streaming business. At a creator open day a few months later, Jess said that GMV is not the core goal of Xiaohongshu's live streaming business, because "the core of the community is people, and what we care most about is people's feelings."

At that time, the community had not yet opened up its traffic to e-commerce, but Xiaohongshu's live streaming sales had made good progress, and it had brought out the first batch of anchors represented by "The Pretentious Gou Tian'er", who had set a record for Xiaohongshu's sales.

"But Conan thinks that Jess's live streaming is not what Xiaohongshu wants." A former e-commerce employee said that under Jess's leadership, the GMV of the e-commerce business grew rapidly throughout the year, but Conan still believed that the goods sold by Jess did not fit Xiaohongshu's positioning, and that Xiaohongshu's basic layout was still double-column pictures and texts, not live streaming. And a series of live streaming strategies formulated by Jess, such as connecting community and e-commerce traffic, and guiding users to jump into the live streaming room in the form of notes, were not recognized. In large meetings such as brainstorming meetings in the later period, this person in charge was frequently challenged by senior management.

In January 2022, Jess resigned, and the official statement said it was due to family reasons. At the same time, Xiaohongshu announced that it would merge the e-commerce department and the community department into a new community department, led by Conan. The live broadcast business began to be ignored, and "no one cared about it at all." At the monthly meeting, the team responsible for the operation of the anchors was often assigned to report last, and never took the initiative to mention who to incubate.

Employees realize that whether they can be recognized on Xiaohongshu does not depend on whether the data is good or not, but on whether they "understand Xiaohongshu" and whether what they do has the flavor of Xiaohongshu. ——Whether it is promotional materials or event design, employees are required to make it Xiaohongshu-style. It is the opposite of Alibaba and ByteDance, but no one can give a definition of what it is, and there is no universal standard for everyone to learn from.

Lai Ke, the person in charge of the Xiaohongshu Spring Festival Gala project, once explained the flavor of Xiaohongshu in this way: "At first glance, it feels very simple and pure. It is something that makes people feel a little bit nervous, and it gives people a feeling of working together." "There is a very small connection and energy that makes people who see it smile knowingly."

Following this mysterious feeling, more words with Xiaohongshu characteristics were created. For example, "personal feeling" is used very frequently in Xiaohongshu. In the discussion among senior executives, some people said that they should go to Jingdezhen to conduct in-depth research with merchants to increase personal feeling; a senior executive reflected in the monthly report that the personal feeling rate was not high enough.

When the body feels good, the things produced are "soulful". Internally, "soulful" can be used to praise a document or a person. Toto (Potato name), the person in charge of Spring Festival marketing and communication at Xiaohongshu, said that he was confused when he first heard the word, but after two years, his understanding of "soulful" is: "Return to common sense, return to yourself, what you observe and consider, then you have concerns, and then you dispel your concerns, and how you dispel your concerns, and finally you make a decision, be honest, don't whitewash it, and let the process go."

This is not a methodology. At a co-creation meeting, several middle and senior executives discussed whether Xiaohongshu had a core methodology to date. Mao Wenchao said that Xiaohongshu did not need a methodology.

The lack of methodology may be the way for Xiaohongshu to maintain its creativity. However, for newcomers, it is more difficult to understand Chinese questions than to learn mathematical formulas. They also have difficulty in learning what is the flavor of Xiaohongshu and what is soul.

Gate of Life and Death

When employees come together to solve Chinese language questions, and the examiners are Mao Wenchao and Conan, who have the highest decision-making power, the boss's preferences become the basis for doing things.

Compared to data which is objective and non-hierarchical, feeling tied to people and doing things based on the intentions of senior management, rather than blindly pursuing data results, has become the safest and most effective way to get through the probation period or even stay there. "The best way is to find the middle office, or someone close to the boss, ask the boss what he thinks, and then do what he thinks," said Xu Ze, a former middle office employee.

Working in the middle-end team of Xiaohongshu, Xu Ze’s biggest feeling is that compared to ByteDance, which is led by the business team, Xiaohongshu’s business team is “very timid and dare not have their own ideas and opinions.”

He once encountered a situation where the business team even had to ask the middle office staff how to write the OKRs in the strategy report. When making any decision, the business team often does not go directly to Conan to discuss, but will ask the middle office in advance what Conan is concerned about recently, such as GMV, DAB (daily average number of users placing orders), or other indicators, so that the middle office can "spread the topic" in advance. They will also take the strategy report to the middle office for confirmation one by one to increase the success rate of Conan's agreement.“This is the rule of survival in this small world.”。

It’s hard to blame the business team for being cautious, because on Xiaohongshu, if you fail to guess the boss’s ideas and get no approval, the consequences can often be serious.

Cheng Hao, a middle-level manager, is very afraid of meetings. Everyone has witnessed the high pressure from the decision-makers when they criticize people. At a co-creation meeting for international business, a core executive was scolded to tears by Mao Wenchao. At another monthly management meeting of the e-commerce department, a senior executive was scolded by Conan so much that the online meeting was directly shut down, and the offline people quietly left on their own to save face for the senior executives. Even CMO Zhiheng, the person in charge of advertising sales in the commercial department, was questioned by Mao Wenchao.

In the business department, middle managers call the monthly business meeting a life-or-death situation. A person close to the business department said that business leaders are worried that they will not be able to answer questions raised by Mao Wenchao and Conan well at the monthly business meeting, or that they will have conflicts of opinion with them, which may affect their scope of authority.

They have witnessed similar cases. The former head of the life service industry group discussed with Conan for 10 minutes at a monthly meeting last summer whether it was possible to increase the commercial advertising business by tilting search traffic. Conan disagreed with the head's point of view and thought he was taking shortcuts. "But this is just a discussion of opinions, there is no right or wrong," said the above person.

One month later, the person in charge was given a new leadership position, and one month after that, he resigned—he failed to make it through the probation period. However, according to the insider, judging from the performance in the weekly meetings, the person in charge’s business performance, as well as his insights into product demand, merchants, industries, and competitors, “are actually all OK.”

When business is not going well and everyone observes that they may be transferred if they disagree with the boss, they are afraid to speak their true thoughts for fear of disagreeing with their superiors.

A person familiar with the matter said that at a co-creation meeting in 2022, middle-level and senior executives discussed the direction that the overseas version of Xiaohongshu should take. After Mao Wenchao briefly expressed his opinion on one of the directions, he initiated a vote in the WeChat group, asking everyone to choose the direction that Xiaohongshu should develop from four options.

The vast majority of people present chose the direction that Mao Wenchao had previously expressed his opinion on. Mao Wenchao named the employees who chose different options and asked them to explain their reasons. One of the executives immediately changed his mind and said that he originally thought that both directions were OK, but now he thinks the majority's choice is better. "In fact, no one said that choosing other directions is not OK, but by naming you and asking you very seriously, it already says a lot."

Xiaohongshu's office in Wuhan at the end of 2021. Image source: Visual China

High-pressure, poorly communicated meetings create another problem—inefficiency.

After nearly two years of employment, Cheng Hao has attended dozens of monthly meetings. These monthly meetings are long enough, starting at nine in the morning and ending at five or six in the afternoon, with only a 30-minute break in between. This alone makes Cheng Hao feel unbearable - when working in other large companies, meetings with the CEO are only held to report important progress or when the entire company needs to make major decisions. PPT has clear page requirements, no more than 10 pages, and at least one page requires the CEO to make a decision. Meetings cannot last 7 hours.

On Xiaohongshu, although there are process arrangements before each meeting, such as financial data analysis and business reports, and everyone will write down the difficulties encountered in the actual business and the support needed in shared documents in advance, when the meeting actually starts, it becomes very divergent, "because (Mao Wenchao) often goes off topic." Cheng Hao said, "His thinking is very jumpy, and he often extends and abstracts from one topic to values ​​and route issues, but ultimately does not make a decision." He even finds it difficult to remember what Mao Wenchao said.

What on earth will be discussed in a meeting that lasts more than seven hours and is difficult to remember if no decisions are made?

The answer is to talk about everything. In a monthly management meeting of the e-commerce department, the middle and senior management even spent one or two hours talking about MBTI. COO Conan asked his subordinates to take their MBTI test before the meeting. During the meeting, everyone analyzed the characteristics of different attributes for a long time and discussed what each person's attributes were. A business manager was told that he could recruit some F people in the future because he was a T person.

In the view of many employees, Xiaohongshu's business is not created based on the boss's top-level design like ByteDance and Pinduoduo, but has grown spontaneously on the basis of the community. Management will follow up or satisfy any valuable content or demands made by users, and rarely take the initiative to predict and make decisions. This approach is also used in commercial initiatives such as e-commerce and advertising. There is no experience in the market that can be directly copied by Xiaohongshu, and management can only wait for people below to try it before judging whether it is OK.

However, it is difficult for employees to get positive feedback during repeated attempts. Instead, they will feel confused and exhausted due to the lack of goals and consensus, and do a lot of useless work. Finally, they may resign voluntarily due to their patience limit, or be laid off because frequent changes in direction make it difficult to get clear results and there is no output.

Moving forward in a repetitive swing

The person in charge of the food industry of Xiaohongshu e-commerce has changed three times in a short period of time.

The first person in charge was from Tmall Fresh, but Conan felt that he was "not high-end enough" and only knew how to scale, so he was transferred to work on a project in another industry. The second person in charge was from Hema, and according to Conan's idea, he set the target on high-end users, focusing on organic food, high-quality products with a short shelf life, etc. But when he made a performance report, Conan's mind changed again - she felt that she still had to make popular food. So the second person in charge did not pass the probation period, and the third person in charge took over again.

In Internet giants, swings of varying sizes are normal, and not even a problem. The pursuit of growth and fear of competitors increase a company's anxiety. They must constantly try new things and adjust their strategies based on the results.

However, in the eyes of employees, many adjustments made by Xiaohongshu are often not based on sufficient plan calculations and discussions, and only change based on the intuition and opinions of the decision-makers. "And they can't figure out what is suitable for Xiaohongshu and what is not, and they only hope to solve the problem by recruiting and replacing people, but in fact recruitment does not explain everything."

In addition to adjusting the business direction by replacing personnel, everything from the setting of a data indicator, such as whether the e-commerce growth goal is GMV, profit, orders, or the number of users, to whether a certain product should continue, are being changed at a speed that employees find difficult to adapt to.

After Conan took over Xiaohongshu's commercial products in 2022, several commercial products were shut down and restarted, including commercial advertising external links Taobao and mini programs (shut down in February 2023 and restarted in October of the same year), and Xiaohongshu's underlying data interoperability tool Xiaohongxing (shut down in September 2023 and restarted in January this year). The latter was a project that CMO Zhiheng had vigorously built and promoted when he was managing commercial products. "When it was shut down, it was said that it was in order to develop Xiaohongshu's on-site e-commerce or maintain the health of the community ecology, and when commercial income was needed, it was released again."

A former employee of the business department said that when Little Red Star was discontinued in 2023, it was difficult for him to explain to customers. Although the business department immediately launched a data tool "Little Red Alliance" in cooperation with JD.com, it was difficult for merchants to buy it - in the past, the promotion was always "Little Red Book planting grass, Tmall harvesting", and the inconsistent rhetoric was contrary to the merchants' cognition and market judgment. This also made it difficult to continue the business.

At the 2021 ROI Awards, Xiaohongshu Chief Marketing Officer Zhiheng shared his marketing experience. Image source: Visual China

Behind the swings in the business is the slow iteration of Xiaohongshu’s management’s cognition.

In early 2022, after the former e-commerce head Jess left, Xiaohongshu merged the e-commerce department and the community department into a new community department, led by Conan.

In a meeting in June, Conan set a DAB target to be achieved by the end of the year. "Mao Wenchao said directly that he was very happy that the No. 1 salesperson dared to say what target to achieve by the end of the year, but based on my understanding of Xiaohongshu's execution, I knew we would not be able to achieve it by the end of the year. If we achieve it, I, Mao Wenchao, will jump off the Xiaohongshu building," recalled a former e-commerce employee who was present.

Then, at a review meeting a month later, Conan immediately denied his goal, saying that anyone who does e-commerce on Xiaohongshu who is oriented towards digital results should leave Xiaohongshu, and "no one has ever mentioned the DAB goal since then." However, at the beginning of 2023, when reviewing the past year, Conan once again denied himself, saying that his previous perspective on scale was not enough and that he needed to iterate.

The business was moving forward slowly in the process of repeated changes. It was not until 2023 that Dong Jie appeared without official incubation, and Conan finally affirmed the role of live broadcasting and e-commerce. In March 2023, Xiaohongshu officially promoted the live broadcasting business to an independent department. In August, the live broadcasting business department and the e-commerce business department were integrated into a new transaction department, becoming a first-level department parallel to the community department and the business department.

Despite this, Conan and Mao Wenchao have not really let go of their fear, and the status of the community remains unshakable.

They only gave the middle management and executive levels a fixed indicator - non-community content accounts for 8% of the total traffic, but did not establish more coordination mechanisms to allow these parties to reach a balance and achieve a win-win situation.As a result, different departments built a wall to isolate each other, putting the completion of their own KPIs first and refusing horizontal coordination and cooperation.

Often, business managers of the e-commerce department will approach the algorithm technology team with traffic strategies. The algorithm team will ask the e-commerce department to first reach a consensus with the community, but the community will directly refuse to cooperate on the grounds that it will affect users. In the end, the strategy cannot be implemented and performance will be affected. One front-line employee was unable to implement the traffic strategy he had formulated and was laid off as he was considered to have "failed to achieve outstanding results."

Those "adventurers" who promised to destroy part of the community experience in exchange for specific benefits also ended up in a situation where "you'll die if you do it, and you'll die if you don't do it" because of the lack of cooperation between different departments and their low success rate.

People with high turnover

More than a year after leaving Xiaohongshu, Gao Ning, a middle-level manager, is still doing psychological counseling.

She didn’t make it through the six-month probation period, even though she had worked in two large companies before and thought she had good stress tolerance, work ability, and stability. Now, when she talks about her experience during that six-month period, she still can’t help crying, “her body has a traumatic memory” - when she walks on the street, her mind still flashes back to the scenes of her former boss criticizing and personally attacking her. One day, she saw a video of her former boss, “after watching it for a few seconds, my body started to feel uncomfortable.”

Gao Ning was recommended by a headhunter. In the third month after joining the company, the organizational structure of her department was adjusted, the leader was demoted, and she was replaced as the business manager. Gao Ning was also forced to be demoted from a middle-level manager to a front-line employee, with the same work content as an intern in the department. She described it as a position that "does not match my ability at all."

In the following days, the business direction began to change frequently on a weekly basis. After the meeting with the senior management every Monday, the leader would tell Gao Ning that the direction had changed again. The frequent attacks from the leader also made her breathless. One colleague was already taking anti-depressant and anti-anxiety drugs.

In the fifth month after joining the company, Gao Ning received her first internal evaluation and performance review, and the result was 3.25. However, she did not understand this result: the product she was responsible for had reached the same level of performance as her colleagues who had been online for three months after the product was launched one month ago.

She wanted to apply for a leave. The frequent changes in business and the high-pressure leadership made her feel that she had reached her limit. She wanted to take a breath and then think about changing jobs. But the day after she submitted her leave application, her boss and HR told Gao Ning that she was fired. There was no communication or handover, and she was quickly kicked out of all work groups. Gao Ning's days at Xiaohongshu ended just like that.

She doesn’t even have a work number on Xiaohongshu——Employees are given work numbers only after they have been employed for a full year. This is not random, but the serial number of Xiaohongshu employees with more than one year of service. In April this year, this number just exceeded 6,000. This means that in the 11 years since Xiaohongshu was founded, including resigned employees, there are just over 6,000 people who have worked in the company for a full year.

Xiaohongshu headquarters in Huangpu District, Shanghai. Image source: Visual China

Zheng Wei, a former middle-level manager in the business department, stayed longer, but no more than two years - two years is considered the second threshold after joining Xiaohongshu. According to the vesting principle of 0-50%-25%-25%, only employees who have been employed for two years can get the first option.

Zheng Wei joined Xiaohongshu in 2022 and became the head of a certain industry in the business department. Immediately afterwards, the organizational structure was adjusted and departments were merged. The new leader from the department transferred Zheng Wei and many colleagues at the same level to do front-line sales. Zheng Wei found it hard to accept, "I led the team and the business was up to standard. When I came in, I had a title like (business head). You asked me to do the front-line work. How is that possible?"

He failed to appeal and had to transfer to another department to do front-line sales. The leader of the new department was also new and promised Zheng Wei that the sales job was only temporary and there might be room for adjustment later. However, the leader was quickly transferred a month later.

After the job transfer, Zheng Wei's performance target completion rate exceeded the target for many bimonthly periods, and only one bimonthly period was lower - he explained that this was because his boss multiplied the target many times and told him to "help other brothers with their tasks". During this period, the original department leader who demoted him failed to land and left during the probation period. "But I always felt that the risk was very high." Zheng Wei said that after becoming a front-line salesperson, he still received a salary far higher than that of the business manager of sales, and he was worried that once the talent inventory was taken, the company would embarrass him because of the labor-efficiency ratio. He was more worried that the demotion would affect his future career.

Sure enough, at the end of the year, Zheng Wei was told by his boss and HR that he would be laid off because his performance did not meet the standards. He took out his bimonthly completion rate and annual income to talk to HR, but to no avail. A few minutes after the last call with HR, his office system was unusable, and then he received a termination notice in his mailbox, stating that he did not meet the job requirements. He decided to apply for labor arbitration and refused to settle, just to get an explanation for himself.

Finally, these employees who leave earlier than expected constitute part of Xiaohongshu’s high turnover rate.

At the end of the 11th anniversary internal letter, Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang wrote that they needed to start over and remain an agile and focused entrepreneurial team.

Agility means that the team is self-driven, flat, and flexible, rather than being consumed in a bloated and complex environment. Therefore, the first treatment method adopted was to operate on the organization.On August 16, Xiaohongshu announced that it would no longer set up the R level; simplify the management hierarchy and no longer set up L0; and adopt an appointment system for leaders at all levels.

However, Xiaohongshu’s problem cannot be completely cured by simply abolishing job levels and simplifying management. This is a systemic problem caused by a series of factors such as organizational culture, business development planning, and internal management.

For Cheng Hao, a middle-level manager, he cares more about how long he can stay at Xiaohongshu than the company's recovery.

He said he was lucky that he had not experienced any major adjustments in almost two years, but he also felt that the business he was responsible for was becoming more and more challenging. When he joined the company, HR told him that Xiaohongshu would most likely go public in 2024. He didn't know which would come first, his departure or the successful vesting of his options or the listing of Xiaohongshu.

But he has already planned that after leaving Xiaohongshu, he will never stay in a big Internet company again. After working for so many years, he has saved enough money to FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), and he wants to take a complete break.

(All interviewees in this article are pseudonyms. Tu Shuyun also contributed to this article)