by When you think of Feishu, your first instinct is who is using it?
Not long ago, when Feishu announced an ARR (annual recurring revenue) of 100 million US dollars at an internal meeting, it represented that Feishu’s users had surpassed the initial batch of Internet and cultural and creative industries. More users who use Feishu now may be employees who are inspecting in hotels, waiters who are ordering food in restaurants, or workers on the factory floor. Because only such a result can answer why Feishu’s core business indicator of ARR in 2022 has a rapid growth of 2.7 times compared with 2021.
At Feishu’s spring conference on March 22, I saw that Feishu also released more tool systems. What impresses me deeply is the “business three-piece set” composed of “multidimensional form”, “feishu application engine” and “feishu integration platform”. It seems that the goal of Feishu at this stage is to provide enterprises with more complete digital business services.
In fact, if you look back, Feishu now has many suites for office collaboration, talent management, business management, etc., which are obviously different from the core of the early “collaboration” and “document-centric workflow”. different.
It is worth sorting out why Feishu made changes in such a direction.
I remember when I first started using Feishu, all the people talking about Feishu around me were start-up companies in the technology circle. At that time, in the Entrepreneur Community of Geek Park Frontier Society, Wang Xiaochuan, Fu Sheng and others initiated the discussion on Feishu first. They praised Feishu’s document-based workflow for its great help to collaboration, and even directly “bringing goods” “, like G7, insta 360 and other typical case customers of Feishu, were all quickly “infected” in the frontier agency. I once joked to Xie Xin and Zhang Nan that Geek Park should directly become an agent.
At the Frontier Thinking Forum 2021 jointly organized by Geek Park’s entrepreneurial community “Frontier Society” and OnePlus, Zhang Nan, President of Feishu, gave a keynote speech | Geek Park
But gradually, I found that many people who use Feishu are no longer from the tech circles in Frontier Society that I am familiar with, but from a wider industry. I will also gradually see Feishu being used in some “unexpected” industries, and it is quite “spiritual”. Later, my colleagues and I did some case studies with the Feishu team to see how the Feishu product broke the circle.
I found that the so-called aura is essentially two things: one is “problem-oriented process remodeling flexibility” and the other is “capability-oriented product function flexibility”.
Let me talk about the first “flexibility”.
In the past, we thought that Feishu was very suitable for companies with dozens or hundreds of employees. Later, we found that Haidilao, which is called S6 level internally by Feishu—that is, customers with more than 100,000 employees—can also be used.
In Haidilao’s “job”, there is a scenario where the Feishu application engine (aPaaS platform tool) is used to build a “product problem report” flexibly and quickly. In fact, if you are not engaged in catering, for most people, this scene does not sound “sexy”. .
But things are afraid of comparison. In the past, Haidilao employees had to report problems to the background system, wait for someone to download it, and then wait for someone to contact the supplier. Haidilao has such a huge system, it has been transferred several times, and by the time the problem was brought out to be solved, two or three days had passed.
Later on Feishu, because of the real-time automatic reminder sent by a robot, coupled with Feishu’s powerful collaborative connectivity, it can be directly “responsible to the person”. Such quality problems can be resolved within 2 hours at the fastest. For example, upon receiving a reminder, the supplier of Haidilao can immediately give feedback on the solution: “The quality is not good today, I won’t count the money with you, I will send you another batch of goods.”
In addition to this timely response to problems and efficient collaboration, Haidilao employees can even see real-time analysis on the management board of Feishu. For example, if this supplier has 5 problems, does it need to be re-evaluated? The qualifications of this house, even want to change? This has actually entered the scope of business management. It is conceivable that this simple tripe and tofu multiplied by the size of Haidilao is a matter of real money that cannot be ignored.
Let’s talk about “capability-oriented product flexibility”.
As an “old-generation IT media person” who reported on the financial industry in the information age, I have interviewed many IT practitioners. “The client is left with PTSD (traumatic stress syndrome).
If it weren’t for the strong payment ability of the financial industry as a whole, it is estimated that no one can meet these “necessary and necessary” demands, but in the end there can only be system suppliers in every link. As for PLG (Product Led Growth)? nonexistent.
However, a reporter from Geek Park chatted with Feishu’s customer success team and discovered an interesting phenomenon: students in the IT department of the financial industry like to use Feishu’s multi-dimensional forms. As an ordinary employee of a business department, he can build a zero-code tool for the process by himself, and the multi-dimensional form directly solves the needs of small project management systems with less than 30 people/day for major financial customers.
Demonstration of Feishu’s multi-dimensional table | Image source: Feishu
For project management related to circulation, such as debt, debt obligation, and asset management reporting, it is almost no longer necessary for IT students to schedule and customize one by one. The permission configuration is also very flexible and can be configured with one click.
Not only the IT department, but also the business departments of financial companies have been liberated from heavy business systems. For example, the underwriting system in the business system of a financial company generally has no way to “lightly” connect to the system. Even if you want to check data or write a form, you need a computer or even a server to do such things. But now even if you are walking on the road, it may be enough to open the dashboard of the multi-dimensional table with your mobile phone.
Feishu can actually see signs of PLG on financial customers. In fact, it mainly relies on the thinking of “liberating from large systems to small systems” to achieve very flexible changes and business flows.
I am not surprised that Feishu has gone from collaboration to business management.
Before the first press conference of Feishu in 2020, when I talked with Feishu CEO Xie Xin about the topic of “what is the fundamental driving force behind Feishu’s ability to help companies improve their work efficiency”, he said that we need to help Customers are looking for room for further improvement in terms of productivity, but they must first start with collaboration, and even put user experience in a relatively important position from the very beginning.
So I think Feishu starts from the general collaboration needs, starting from the chat documents, videos, and meetings that everyone can use every day, to the customizable workbench, and to the current business three-piece set. In this order, it is possible In order to make easy-to-use and effective ToB end products.
On the contrary, assuming that Feishu has built a business system from the first day, it can also build a powerful business system, even like SAP, which is irreplaceable in this field. But it may not be easy to use. For example, in use, there will be a very fragmented experience of the system. At the Feishu 2023 Spring Conference on March 22, Xie Xin also explained why Feishu is launching the business system now. “First do a good job of the previous basic products, and then make it very open, and then put the business-related systems on the shelf to open up and use them. Correspondingly, the ease of use is much better, and the ease of use is equivalent to Usefulness. Otherwise, although the product is very strong, but because people are not very good at using it, in fact, if it is not used, the value of the product will not be exerted. This is also the reason why Feishu made a multi-dimensional table to improve the usability A reason.”
To some extent, this is a way to define “spirit” first, and then consider “muscle”.
The reason why Feishu just came out that year attracted a considerable number of so-called “advanced teams”. Its meaningful “spirit” is “emphasis on the flow of information within the organization, emphasis on efficient collaboration, and then start distributed management and bottom-up efficiency progress.” The collaborative office products based on these ideas are derived from the bottom-level change of a management idea. Those “advanced teams” are the first to perceive the significance of stimulating the vitality of the organization, and resonate in thought, which is the reason for the formation of their early PLG.
And this “spirit” has actually continued to the talent management components released by Feishu later, and even the current tool system such as the three-piece business suite of Feishu.
For example, the ability to connect data and processes, Feishu also starts from general scenarios, and uses the same idea to enter more vertical scenarios.
I was first attracted to Feishu because it put together functions such as communication, document collaboration, and schedule recording that were originally scattered in different software, and allowed me to switch seamlessly, making the collaboration smoother. This perspective has also been extended to Feishu’s product upgrade this time – Feishu Integration Platform, which can now help to connect various business digital systems in enterprises. This is actually a pain point in the digitalization of many enterprises. Many systems have been bought, but they are not well used. For example, if you want to confirm a business data, you need to switch and log in among multiple systems, which is very cumbersome; the system is not connected, and the problem of “data chimney” arises, the data stays in their respective departments, and even “departmental walls” appear.
Now looking back at the 2020 press conference, the best practice carried by Feishu is actually only ByteDance. Because at that time it was born with ByteDance, a company with a different understanding and cognition of management. But after three years, I feel that Feishu has put these ideas at the bottom in the process of stepping out of the technology circle and entering the larger business world, and made the best practice of creating more industries the core goal of the future.
In the face of more and more complex needs, how to use a set of standardized solutions to meet the changing needs of different industries and different companies requires working with enough leading customers in the industry to achieve abstraction and productization. In terms of digital operation, it really brings efficiency and solves problems. This is a more meaningful and serious challenge that Feishu has to face after breaking the circle of “Aura”.
Feishu needs to do this “with a sense of boundaries” and make up its mind to make long-term efforts.
After yesterday’s press conference, Xie Xin also specifically elaborated on the boundaries of Feishu: focus on general business needs, and not be a tool system for vertical industries or fields. He said, “If your needs are simple, you can use Feishu multidimensional tables to build them. If your needs are more complicated, you can use Feishu Application Engine to build them. But if your needs are super complicated, you need special If you go deep into the vertical field or special personalization, then these should be handed over to more professional system companies, but we make this kind of connection, linking various professional tools with Feishu.”
It is indeed indispensable to have ideas, boundaries, and correct time expectations. Feishu has figured this out clearly and should give it a thumbs up. I personally look forward to Feishu turning the “source code” born under advanced management thinking into a more complete and sound system, and then through better scalability, it will play a role in promoting productivity in more industries .
Just kidding, when Feishu’s slogan can change from “advanced team, use Feishu first” to “use Feishu, become advanced”, it may achieve this expectation.
Image source: Visual China
This sentence is obviously more difficult to do, but it is also more meaningful.
