The Essence of Product

The Essence of Product

As a coder, I’ve long reminded myself to ponder two questions: What is the essence of programming? What is the essence of technology? While working on Yuque, a new question emerged: What is the essence of product? By studying the growth histories of famous products and product‑manager methodologies, I found several possible answers:

• A product is a vehicle for realizing its creator’s dreams and ideas
• A product is a way for people to change the world
• A product is a bridge between the physical world and the digital world
• …

But these answers always felt incomplete; something more fundamental seemed to be missing. I haven’t found a fully satisfying answer—until I stumbled upon the short story below, which gave me a fresh insight.

Socrates’ father was a renowned stone carver. When Socrates was very young, his father was carving a stone lion. Little Socrates watched for a while, then asked, “How can I become a good sculptor?”
“Look!” his father replied, “Take this lion as an example. I’m not carving the lion; I’m awakening it!”
“Awakening?”
“The lion was already sleeping inside the stone. I’m merely freeing it from its stone prison.” — A thousand lectures can’t compare to a single true awakening

“Awakening,” two ordinary characters, captures the truth of education and echoes philosophers’ discussions of nature. Indeed, every child is a natural crystal, brimming with innate talent and energy, and education is the process of discovering, awakening, and activating those gifts.

In the past two years at Yuque I’ve come to see that products, like works of art, are extensions of human life. They are not just tools; they are warm, living entities through which we sense fresh lives and souls. The essence of a product is the same as the essence of life—there is no single correct answer, only continual evolution and refinement. From this I’ve gathered:

• A product, like a person, is not born out of thin air; it has its own talents and mission.
• Building a product is a continual quest to uncover its essence, awaken its nature, and restore its true form.
• A product with vitality forms a deep bond with users, sharing beauty with the world together.

Products as People

In traditional Chinese philosophy, the I‑Ching concept of “unity of heaven and humanity” (天人合一) has profoundly shaped the view that everything in the universe is alive. This idea is not unique to Chinese thought; similar notions appear throughout Eastern and Western philosophies. An interesting example is sci‑fi master Isaac Asimov’s depiction of the ultimate galactic civilization Gaia (盖娅) in Foundation (https://book.douban.com/subject/26389895/), a life‑form composed of both organic and inorganic parts—an idea echoed in movies such as Avatar (https://movie.douban.com/subject/1652587/) and its Pandora world (https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%BD%98%E5%A4%9A%E6%8B%89%E6%98%9F%E7%90%83/6699017).

Inspired by this perspective, I’ve been asking myself: What if a product were a person? Looking at products through that lens naturally reveals:

• Humans experience birth, growth, decline, and death; products have life cycles too, from inception to expansion to eventual obsolescence.
• Human life is marked by rituals; products need milestone releases to signal new phases.
• Humans must adapt to their environment; products must evolve continuously to keep pace with technology and society.
• “Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?”—the three ultimate human questions are also the questions every product must answer.
• …

This shift in viewpoint opened my eyes:

• Ancient sages’ teachings about life and humanity can be applied to product work; timeless wisdom gives us boundless power.
• Making products and being a person may seem unrelated, but they are tightly linked—product work itself is a form of practice.
• When a product fails, we must not only critique the product; we must also reflect on whether our own character and cultivation are worthy of a great product.

Fortunately, while building Yuque we accidentally walked onto the “product‑as‑person” path. From the start we treated the product as a living, breathing being, even though our practice is still shallow. Regarding personal mastery, my favorite advice comes from Eric S. Raymond in How To Become A Hacker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond, http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#attitude):

To follow the path:
look to the master,
follow the master,
walk with the master,
see through the master,
become the master.

That is the secret of product work: follow the masters, learn, imitate, and become a master‑level product. Sharp‑eyed users have already noticed many GitHub (https://github.com/) influences in Yuque—this is our homage to the masters. “Take the best of all” is a core design principle: when we design a feature for a specific user scenario, we study existing solutions, dissect their logic, generate multiple alternatives, and then select the one that best fits Yuque’s positioning and user base.

Restoring the Product’s True Form

Everyone harbors a desire to avoid mediocrity and achieve greatness, to be admired. Likewise, every product designer dreams of changing the world with a widely loved product. Yet we must accept a fact: limited talent, environment, and chance mean most people will lead ordinary lives. As ordinary people, the best we can do is return to our true selves, find our rightful place, and make small but beautiful contributions in our everyday roles. Products are no different. The myriad products that exist form an ecosystem akin to nature’s: not every product can be a massive platform with millions of users; many will remain small‑scale, like trees and grasses, elephants and ants on a savanna.

The key to a great product is not obsessing over rapid user or traffic growth, but returning to the product’s essence, locating its proper niche in the industry, and seeing whether it is a towering tree or a modest grass in the ecosystem. Then, like Socrates’ father awakening the stone lion, we must awaken the product, discover its true shape, and present that shape honestly to users. Reasonable operations can then bring the product to its target audience, allowing user growth to happen naturally.

Looking back on Yuque’s journey, three practices have been vital in restoring the product’s true form:

• Unclog the product’s meridians
• Walk the path of self‑lessness
• Polish the product with heart

Unclog the Product’s Meridians

In the human body, meridians (https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%8F%E8%84%89/7481220) carry qi and blood; when blocked, illness follows. Products have analogous “meridians”: functional points linked together to satisfy user needs in specific scenarios, allowing users to flow smoothly through tasks. When a product’s meridians are blocked, users feel awkward, leading to abundant feedback—more feedback signals more severe blockages. If these issues aren’t addressed promptly, the product “gets sick.” Adding more features while the product is ill creates a vicious cycle, eventually eroding user confidence.

For a time we adopted a “blocking” strategy toward feedback, forcing users to adapt to the product, e.g.:

• To share a private doc with someone else, you had to add them to a team first.
• In a public knowledge base, you could only delete or move docs you wanted only teammates or yourself to see.
• To write a Markdown doc you first had to create a doc, then click “New Markdown” at the top.
• Want to quickly start a doc? You had to create a knowledge base first.
• Users asked for real‑time collaborative editing like in Google Docs or Shimo—when will Yuque support it?
• …

“Blocking” didn’t solve anything; it forced us to repeatedly explain to users why a task required a certain workflow. Users didn’t want explanations; they felt “this product is anti‑human.” They wanted to work efficiently in Yuque. We then borrowed the Great Yu the Great‑Flood‑Controller (大禹治水, https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%A4%A7%E7%A6%B9%E6%B2%BB%E6%B0%B4/121970) approach: let the product adapt to users, “channel” feedback into requirements, and pause new feature additions while polishing existing ones. Concretely we:

• Sorted feedback each week, extracting quick‑win improvements for the regular release.
• For feedback that was hard to satisfy or unsuitable for Yuque, we proactively recommended alternative tools.
• Mapped key product flows, created a dedicated optimization project, and ensured users could complete typical tasks without consulting help docs.
• Adopted a “minimum viable functionality” design, inspired by OS file‑operation principles, letting basic actions accomplish most needs.

After months of work, many meridians were cleared; despite a growing user base, feedback volume actually decreased. Still, many pathways remain to be opened—road‑building takes time, and we hope one day to retire help docs altogether. As core functionality improves, product reputation rises, allowing us to refocus on core capabilities: developing a new editor to eliminate lingering bugs, and crafting specialized features for different knowledge‑base scenarios.

Walk the Path of Self‑lessness

When I view things through “self,” everything bears my color. When I view things without “self,” I cannot tell what is me and what is the thing. — Wang Guowei, Human Poetry Talk

Born human, we absorb countless “spirit‑of‑all‑things” influences; self‑awareness becomes ingrained in our bones and shows up in language and behavior. Products, created by humans, inevitably inherit their creators’ ego. Designers inevitably inject personal will into their work. That does not preclude excellence—just as many great poems are “self‑centered,” they can still be masterpieces. However, to create a product with vitality and timeless impact, staying in the self‑centered realm is insufficient; we must transcend ego, adopt a self‑less stance, and re‑examine industry, product, and users to gradually restore the product’s true form.

Before Yuque, I saw many “born‑but‑not‑nurtured” products—useful for a phase but never cared for. Their existence is understandable, yet I prefer a different approach: if you choose to build a product, you must commit to its entire life cycle. Choosing Yuque meant accepting responsibility. To avoid “born‑but‑not‑nurtured,” we treat the product as our child. This perspective boosts responsibility but also brings a common parental mistake: imposing our own wishes on the child, trying to shape it into what we expect. The problem intensifies with a large team—each member wants the product to follow their own vision, leading to heated debates over UI details and strategic direction. These conflicting wills resemble the eight “true qi” in The Smiling, Proud Wanderer (令狐冲), turning Yuque into a training ground for many masters. Under this “parental love,” we explored countless possibilities, adding many features and making the system complex. Fortunately, Yuque’s core architecture has remained stable and users tolerant, preventing collapse.

In June of this year we switched perspective: we now see Yuque as a natural person, and we, the product builders, as its close friends, growing together. This shift let us drop personal imposition, treat Yuque as an equal, and seek the best ways to cooperate. We slowed our pace, paused to ask: What are this friend’s traits? Which direction suits them? What problems do they face now? How can I help? How can we improve together? Discussions turned from argumentative persuasion to collaborative exploration of the problem’s essence and the best current solution. Strategically we narrowed focus to the “text‑based knowledge creation and sharing tool” niche, thoroughly polishing four typical scenarios: knowledge accumulation, project documentation, blog columns, and personal notes.

Creating products with self‑lessness requires us to:

• Approach the industry with a Zen beginner’s mind (https://book.douban.com/subject/4898627/), empty‑cup ready to learn true knowledge and see through illusion to the product’s essence.
• Think like a philosopher, probing the product’s inner nature and finding a place and direction even in seemingly barren markets.
• Be curious like a scientist, spotting optimization points in everyday user details and abstracting a coherent internal logic from diverse demands.
• Act like an artist, discovering beauty in nature, culture, and technology, and weaving it into the product so it can be as beautiful as a work of art.

Polish the Product with Heart

“Nothing in the world is difficult for a determined heart.”

This familiar saying actually captures the single most important principle of product work: heart. Knowing is easy; doing is hard. Becoming a person of heart requires unity of knowledge and action, honed through life experience. Doing product work with heart is even tougher because a product is a collective effort; it’s not enough for one person to be earnest— the whole team must share that dedication.

A story that stays with me is about a Japanese elder, Aki‑suke Kimura, who tended apple trees with extraordinary devotion (https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1578308937534910055). I used to think, “What’s special? Rural Chinese elders have been doing the same for centuries.” Yet in highly industrialized, land‑scarce Japan, such hands‑on farming is rare. Kimura’s life was filmed in Miracle Apples (https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%A5%87%E8%BF%B9%E7%9A%84%E8%8B%B9%E6%9E%9C/8191029), chronicled in two books—What Apples Taught Me (https://book.douban.com/subject/4953482/) and At Least Be a Fool Once in This Life (https://book.douban.com/subject/4025257/)—and he gave a TED talk titled Miracle Apples (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEAp9m8ukUw).

Kimura is just one example; many across history have worked with heart. In the internet industry, teams that persistently work with heart for decades are rare, and this scarcity partly explains why internet products often have short lifespans. Influenced by Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, “Growth Hacking” (https://www.baidu.com/s?wd=Growth%20Hacking) has been touted as the ultimate product secret. Yet nature has a hard law: everything has a life cycle and growth limits; only mathematical “infinity” (https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%97%A0%E7%A9%B7/8284883) can grow without bound. Growth Hacking is not the core; data is merely a tool to understand users and product health. The real driver behind Silicon Valley’s rise is culture and social environment, traceable to America’s Puritan ethic (https://book.douban.com/subject/25755771/). Product designers who chase only high‑growth metrics risk losing a product’s soul, leading to decline or death—examples abound: the data‑fabrication scandal at Mafengwo (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/zwmEczuHrNa0ery_IY8rZA), Facebook’s data‑leak crisis (http://www.geekpark.net/news/233516), Reddit’s unchecked growth (http://www.geekpark.net/news/233827), and the fall of Theranos, the $9 billion unicorn (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzU3ODM1NDg2Ng==&mid=2247484059&idx=1&sn=d2cde2f8282e9b81824d3c60f0559495).

So, what does “working with heart” really look like? Honestly, Yuque is still far from “heart‑crafted” excellence. We continue learning from meticulous products and from humble people like Kimura, and we can only share the practices we are currently trying:

• Every team member is a stakeholder; product features and direction are decided together.
• Avoid flashy tech; use simple, solid technology. Avoid flashy design; use straightforward visuals and interactions.
• Use our own product, “eat our own dog food,” and feel genuine pride.
• Treat users like friends, doing everything possible to help them.

Defining “working with heart” is difficult, but when you truly act from the heart you no longer wait for assignments, you’re not shackled by KPIs, and you don’t work merely for promotion or salary. You become the master of your work, spending most of your energy on thinking about and building the product, sharing its joys and sorrows, and patiently, bravely, confidently shaping it into its rightful form. Gradually you’ll emit a flow state (https://book.douban.com/subject/27186106/) that merges you with the product; teammates and users can feel it. It permeates every corner, becomes part of the product’s reputation, and forms the core reason users voluntarily recommend it.

Co‑Creating Beauty with Users

Life is a practice of knowing oneself and the world; finding and honoring one’s destiny, and within one’s ability, making the world more beautiful, is the most moving chapter of that practice. A product, like a child, does not belong to its parents. A product does not belong to its creators or the company that built it; it belongs to all its users, forming part of the product ecosystem and of society. Every product exists to solve a problem; the product maker’s role is to perceive and awaken the product’s true form, and together with users, bring that form to life, allowing it to serve…

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Originally written by Ping Xia (平侠) and published in Chinese on 研习录 (Study Notes). Translated and adapted for DriftSeas with permission.