Programming Cat [UNK] Chen Wanqing: The Real Barrier of an Enterprise Is Its Organizational Capability

Originally created by Azaka. Mustard pile view of education.

Wanqing Chen, COO of Programming Cat, speaks at the GET2020 conference on March 23rd.

♪ By Mustard Pile Ataku

♪ Editorial｜Mustard Pile View Education

On November 23rd, at the GET2020 Education Technology Conference hosted by Mustard Pile, with the theme of “Or Leap in the Abyss: Confidence and Development in Education”, Wanqing Chen, COO of Programming Cat, gave a keynote speech on “Organizational Thinking in Education Enterprises”.

According to Wanqing Chen, no matter which industry or field, wind gusts will come and go. A product launched by a company may become a star product at some point, but the product may be copied soon, and the technology threshold may be surpassed soon. She believes that what drives a company from 0 to 1, from 1 to 50 and then to 100, is not which product it has made or how much money it has raised, but what is the organizational capacity behind it.

The following is a transcript of her speech.

The topic I’m going to share today is organizational thinking for educational companies. I am now in charge of the organization’s framework and human resources while running the operations of Programming Cat.

On November 20, when Programming Cat announced its 1.3 billion yuan Series D funding, I made a comment to my friends: No matter which industry or field, wind gusts will come and go. There will also be luck, we caught a good point, or we made a product that became a star product at a certain point in time. But luck doesn’t last long, we can also say we have made a very good product, the product experience is very good, users like it very much, we have had a large number of users, but the product may soon be copied, and the technology threshold may soon be surpassed.

To drive a company from 0 to 1, from 1 to 50 and then to 100, we don’t look at which product it has made or how much money it has raised, we look at what the organizational capabilities behind the company are.

I joined Programming Cat two years ago for two reasons: first, I am optimistic about the future of technology on the impact of the entire market; the other I attach great importance to youth, I think they represent the future in young organizations, young organizations will have the management style of young organizations, and the whole perception of people’s positioning.

There are now 5,000 programming cats, the average age of only 25 years old, we basically have no post-70s, all post-90s, there are a large number of 98, 00 years of employees. The person in charge of several of the familiar star products of Programming Cat is all after 90.

There are 4 mature businesses, 2 development businesses, and 5 incubation businesses in Programming Cat. 50% of the incubation businesses are managed by supervisors who are around 95 years old, and 50% are managed by high-potential employees who have just joined the company for about 1 year. The overall team is very young, and we value the struggle, learning ability, and understanding of things and the market.

What does corporate success mean? Business schools often talk about how business success equals strategy multiplied by organizational capacity, so strategy is the first thing to go. In fact, for our education companies, or education companies at this stage, strategy is not complicated at all, because our industry is still at a very early stage, so don’t overthink this matter of strategy.

I think every company has its own strategy, no matter if it is a start-up, a mature company, or a developing company. The strategy is very simple, every company has its own strategy. But why do so many strategies end up not being implemented, why do so many strategies die in the cradle? I think it’s the organizational skills behind it that aren’t keeping up. If you have a clear strategy, you must have the corresponding organizational capabilities.

Let’s look at organizational capabilities. In Programming Cat, for example, our strategy is very simple and clear: to sell more customers, to sell more products to customers, and to try to go international. I think the strategy of most educational institutions today is probably in this quadrant.

To address this strategy, we pick some core competencies that we need to have among the many competencies that education companies should have. We analyze which competencies are the most critical to support the current strategy in that market and at this stage. For example, learning ability and speed are especially important, and for today’s competition, speed is very important in some categories.

In the current AI recording lesson market, we see fierce competition, for example, Ape Tutoring and Good Future have entered the market. In the face of competition, how do we set up our team’s organizational capacity? Here are a few of the settings I made.

First of all, it has to be very sensitive and flexible, and there can’t be no communication between functional areas, and there can’t be so many layers. That’s why our team adopts a small, closed team approach, and the team has strong autonomy.

Secondly, the speed is very fast. Excellent enterprises in the market have a very fast new speed and a very fast change of playing methods.

Another important thing is the synergy efficiency, and the synergy between several departments should be very strong.

For example, if we want to do customer acquisition, when we do customer acquisition at the front end, we find that 0 yuan customer acquisition is not very useful anymore, so we hope to get customers with 9 yuan or 69 yuan products. After the materials in the front-end, the leads flow to the back-end to undertake, the whole link may span five to six departments, the sensitivity, speed and synergy between these departments to match the completion.

Once you know that an organization needs speed, how do you put it into practice in terms of people, management style, and cultural values? Again using the example of videotaped classes, we divide them into two groups: knowledge-based and intensive. For the former, we do genetic recruiting in terms of employee competency design, and retain them by motivating them with long-term equity. The other is the mentoring and consulting types, who are less demanding.

Management models also fall into these two categories. For intensive teams, I think it is very important to have strong empowerment, the most important thing is the middle office system, so the development of systems for teacher management, classroom teacher management, and data management is the first key. But for the knowledge-based ones, I think the most important thing is to have a very good organization to support the freedom of these talented young people, and we emphasize agile development of closed teams.

Our company values actually boil down to fun, we want to make the kids' program fun, we want to make it fun for young people. There are a lot of post-90s in this company, and I think the question that companies may face in the future is how we can attract and manage more post-00s and post-90s.

This article was written by A House.

Mustard Pile Overseas Editor

A bit nerdy.

Original title: “[GET2020] Chen Wanqing, COO of Programming Cat: The real barrier of an enterprise lies in “organizational capacity”.

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