What it’s really like working at TikTok: The Opportunities (Part 2)
An insider’s view from within TikTok’s monetization product organization
If you read my Part 1 post, you may be wondering why anyone would want to take a job at TikTok. Although my time at TikTok was one of the toughest stretches in my existence, I did get a lot out of my time there, too. It’s extremely important for me to be fair in my evaluation of my experience because that’s my truth.
This article, Part 2, will go into the reasons that kept me at the company for nearly a year and a half. To my more invested readers — I know I initially said there would only be 2 parts to my TikTok series. I lied, sorry! If you’re wringing your hands in frustration, thinking, “But I want the tea on TikTok now!” — feel free to skip this article and stay tuned for Part 3. (I’ll only judge you a little bit.) For everyone else, thanks for indulging me!
So why did I stay at TikTok for as long as I did?
Answer: The Career Opportunity & the Cross Cultural Learning
TikTok is a relatively young company in the hyper-growth stage backed by the seemingly endless resources of Bytedance. Bytedance’s 2021 revenue reached a whopping $58 BN, and you may have heard that TikTok recently surpassed 1 billion users besting competitors like Instagram and Youtube in reaching this milestone. With this type of growth comes some huge career opportunities, as well as eye-opening exposure into how Chinese companies operate and succeed.
At TikTok, if you can think it, you can (usually) build it.
When I first joined the company, I was stunned by the laundry list of products that the team wanted to build by the end of the year (I joined in July.) Keep in mind that list didn’t even include the products that I potentially wanted to build. Immediately, I thought about how to prioritize. My tenure at other Silicon Valley companies — even famously well-staffed companies like Facebook — hammered into me that we’re always people constrained. As a Facebook exec once said, “it’s not prioritization unless it hurts.”
I quickly found out that that prioritization is not a core pillar of planning at Bytedance. And the key lay in the fact that we were rarely ever people constrained. Sure, engineering, design, and product talent was more challenging and expensive to recruit in the US, but recruiting in China appeared to be a non-issue. Oftentimes, if our teams couldn’t hire talent quickly enough in the US, the leaders would turn to filling those roles in China so there weren’t any significant, extended gaps in staffing. Not to mention, people in China work a lot more than people in the US, and that culture permeated to us in the US as well. To Bytedance, more people, more hours per person = more productivity.
This dynamic obviously comes with heavy costs, which I’ll go into further in Part 3. The upside, however, is if you have a good idea as a PM, chances are you can build it and ship it with your team in a relatively short period of time. The product review processes at Bytedance are optimized for approval throughput and speed, and product & engineering teams will do whatever it takes to ship fast. In fact, Bytedance was the first place I’d ever worked where I had engineers ping me and my PM team for more work. Shocking, I know! At many big Silicon Valley companies, the opposite is usually true — you have a good idea, then you have to make sure it fits into your prioritized roadmap; you sell it to your team, then to your leads, to execs, and horizontally with other product teams to make sure that you’re not stepping on any other team’s toes or duplicating efforts. Unfortunately, you’ll likely be overlapping with other teams in one way or another, and the probability that you’ll get clearance to build and ship your product gets reduced after all the red tape. As a PM at Bytedance, I found out that I do work twice as hard, but I had 2x-3x the product output that I may have had at larger Silicon Valley companies. Which brings me to my next point:
PMs get big scope regardless of tenure or years of experience.
There’s a running joke in the PM community about working at big, established tech companies. “You’ll be the PM that owns a button,” they say. “Your full-time job will be to argue with other PMs about the color of the button.” Classic, Silicon Valley “nightmare.” At TikTok, no PM just owns a button, at least as far as I know. Instead, the issue — and opportunity — is that PMs are often given scope that can feel too big to handle.
Even with years of PM experience under my belt, I’ve been struck by the size of the problem space to tackle. I remember myself thinking — “Where do I even begin?” when tasked with leading our marketplace demand generation pillar. I’ve seen PMs only a few years out of school, or folks in their *first* PM job who are leading big, strategic, initiatives. (Side note: Yes, TikTok takes chances on first-time PMs. For those of us who managed to survive the Silicon Valley PM gauntlet, this is pretty mind-blowing.) I’ve seen new PMs put together multi-year product vision docs that they present to leadership. I’ve seen more junior PMs own and launch large swaths of our developer platform like our Login Kit, or revamp our entire creator onboarding flow to enable more monetization opportunities for creators. Despite the constant discomfort of being thrown into the deep end, we learned to swim, and got an experience and product portfolio that we likely could not have gotten elsewhere.
TikTok has insane product market fit.
The app has massive business potential for a reason. Ever feel the urge to buy something because you saw your favorite creator promote it on TikTok, only to realize you can’t purchase it directly within TikTok? And then you find a way to buy it anyway because you’re so convinced that this is going to change your life? I certainly have, and many others have, too. That’s the power of TikTok — it succeeds and sells despite its shortcomings.
As a PM in the monetization org, I felt empowered and excited knowing that there was overwhelming demand from advertisers and creators for our ads and creator collaboration tools. I heard the evidence in every advertiser call, every creator interview. Top tier advertisers still spent on our ads platform and pinged creators for branded collaborations despite not having all the proper tools and analytics. Creators clamored to cut more brand deals and coordinated with advertisers through Instagram DM (big facepalm.) Trust me when I say that it’s an amazing feeling to see the demand for our products — I’ve worked at companies where the product market fit was not there, and we had to bend over backwards and go off roadmap for a tiny handful of brands’ leftover, experimental budget. It’s not fun. For my team at TikTok, it came down to figuring out the right product strategies to “turn on the faucet all the way,” by facilitating the types of interactions we wanted by building better tools, and capitalizing on that market opportunity with solid execution.
Of course, not all of my team’s products were resounding successes. But we were fortunate to have a handful that really hit the mark. The reception from brands, creators, partners, and the press felt explosive. The excitement, infectious. It was in those rare moments that the fleeting thought would cross my mind: “Maybe, this was worth it.”
Finally, I got a rare glimpse into how Bytedance succeeds in China and beyond.
I learned that Bytedance takes some wildly different approaches from what social media behemoths like Facebook take in the US & Western markets. One of the biggest ideological differences I witnessed between these two tech styles is the adherence to what we call the “closed loop” vs. “open loop” strategy.
Broadly speaking, a “closed loop” strategy entails that the company is not willing to share data with 3rd parties, and cannot be dis-intermediated from the transactions on their platform. Closed loop strategies usually optimize for centralized control, and high data visibility since everything is done on-platform. Bytedance’s strategies tend to be more closed-loop in nature.
An “open loop” strategy means that the company is willing to share data with 3rd parties (usually via APIs) without a heavy hand on how the data is used, so long as the data usage doesn’t violate developer terms of service. Open loop strategies optimize for quickly scaling up the company’s footprint through its 3rd party ecosystem, while trading off centralized control and some data visibility. As you probably guessed, open-loop tends to be Facebook’s mode of operation.
A Closed Loop vs. Open Loop Example
(A deeper dive for my fellow PMs & creator economy nerds out there!)
Let’s take creator data sharing as an example. Firstly, what do I mean by “creator data sharing?” Let’s say Nike wants to work with creators and influencers on Tiktok and Instagram (IG) to promote their new sneaker line. How would Nike figure out which creators to work with? They would need access to TikTok and IG creator data, so they can figure out which creators to choose based on who’s a sneaker-head or athlete, how many followers they have, how engaged their following is, and what demographic profiles their followers are.
When it comes to Instagram, Nike has several different ways to discover and work with the right creators. (For the sake of simplicity, I highlighted 3 ways though there are more avenues that exist!)
- Nike can source interesting sneaker-head creators from their IG feed, and DM or email creators to coordinate
- Nike can use Instagram’s Brand Collabs Manager to do faster filtering and sorting.
- Nike can use a 3rd party software platform like Captiv8 which pulls in creator data from Instagram’s APIs to find the creators who are the best fit, and work with creators directly through those platforms.
Because Instagram has APIs that share basic creator data with 3rd parties, we designate Instagram as taking the “open loop strategy” because access to this data is relatively open, and there’s no “right” way to work with creators. Overall, the open loop, laissez faire approach has benefited IG creators and the 3rd parties that support them — it’s estimated that global spend on IG creators reached $8 billion in 2020, and nearly 90% of all influencer campaigns include Instagram creators. But if you ask anyone at Instagram how many brand deals are done through the platform as a whole, or how much brands are paying IG creators, you’ll probably get a hand wavy estimate at best, or a “I don’t know…a lot?”, at worst.
Now, let’s talk about Douyin, Tiktok’s sister app (also owned by Bytedance), which serves the China market. Douyin operates in a “closed loop” fashion. If Nike were trying to source and work with Douyin creators, there’s only 2 options available: using Douyin’s first party, creator collaboration tool called Starmap, or using an agency that uses Starmap. Starmap has no APIs for 3rd party integrations to my knowledge. In fact, every step of Nike’s collaboration with creators must take place on Starmap, from the outreach all the way to the payments. Sounds like the opposite approach of Instagram, right? Here’s the thing: in China, Starmap’s business grew at a dizzying speed, fueled by Douyin’s dominant position in the market. It didn’t matter that Starmap had no 3rd party developer ecosystem. They facilitated brand deals for tens of millions of creators per year within 3 years. Every deal is tracked, GMV logged down to the cent. You can probably imagine how scarily sophisticated and effective the Starmap platform is with that level of data fidelity coupled with its sheer volume of deals.
Negotiating between the Bytedance way and the Facebook way of developing products in my attempt to fuse the best of both worlds was one of the most challenging, but also eye opening and rewarding experiences I’ve had in my career. As my team and I were trying to push through the TikTok Creator Marketplace API for the ex-China market, I couldn’t help but think — “Facebook’s way is the best way. Bytedance is too controlling. Just let the market do it’s thing!”
But I learned that we couldn’t get company leadership behind our proposal if we didn’t address their concerns on the open loop approach and make certain concessions. The pushback from some execs during product review was telling. “Why should we entertain an open looped approach?” they’d ask. “Bytedance succeeded in doing things in the closed loop way. Just look at how well Starmap is doing!” Another chimed in. “If we release these APIs, then what will happen to our first party platform?” It was interesting seeing my bias reflected back at me in the opposite direction. To these execs, the Bytedance way was the best way. And we were not wrong for our respective markets. In China, tech companies are famously hyper competitive against one another, and it’s often strategic to hold your most valuable data and assets close to your chest. Bytedance was rife with anecdotes of competitors and startups copying the company’s products and scraping and selling its data as their own. At US companies like Facebook, there’s more trust and an understood give-and-take between itself and 3rd parties (though the relationships can still be tenuous at best.)
These cross-market negotiations definitely felt as though they took a few years off my life. In the end, I’m thrilled we launched the APIs, and I feel proud that my team and I were able to find a compromise between building an open loop solution that mostly aligned with industry standards in the Western markets while retaining certain closed loop elements that could help improve the product in the long run.
Some of my bigger learnings:
- Industry standards for product development can vary drastically between US & Chinese companies. This may seem obvious, but it was tough and humbling for me to confront my biases on what I considered to be the true, gold standard approaches for social media monetization from what I saw at Facebook. I had gotten accustomed to somewhat lazier, regional assumptions for adoption across our highest monetizing markets, such as “Western Europe typically just follows the US.” Market realities such as competition, industry first movers, and government policies play too key of a role in shaping what works and what doesn’t work, and the US and China are completely different beasts. Succeeding in both markets requires a willingness to take some seemingly contradictory approaches. I’m curious to see if the hybrid approaches that my team and I have taken will continue to live on, or if these products will evolve in the image of either the Bytedance or Facebook models.
- It’s essential for global companies to learn what features are globally resonant vs. those that must be more market specific: TikTok has globally successful and exportable technologies such as its world class content recommendations algorithm — basically what makes people addicted to their Tiktok feeds around the world. However, we also learned that features like advertising and creator marketing cannot be copy-pasted from China to the US, and require considerably more market specificity (more closed loop in China, more open loop in US/Western markets.) Bytedance learns these nuances and the balancing act of these strategies by having a willingness to experiment and fail fast, supported by a large, competitive workforce.
- Bytedance is an unbelievably impressive company. While I do not agree with the way they approach many aspects of their operations, from some of their product strategies to working culture, it’s hard to not be amazed by how much the company has achieved in such a short period of time. I’m blown away by the creativity and sophistication behind their tools in China, like Starmap. I’m in awe of how quickly they’ve moved to get their monetization and creator tools up to par with Western competitors. And of course, the smash success of TikTok across the world is proof of their dominance, in and of itself.
Working at TikTok stretched me in more ways than I could count, and taught me more about product strategy, execution, and cross cultural nuances than I could have initially imagined. But as you’ve now come to expect, these learnings came at an enormous price. The cross-cultural perspective I gained working through US & China tech company differences became the sharpest, double edged sword I’d ever wielded. Almost no aspects of my life were left unscathed by the intensity and sheer difficulty of the job, from my closest relationships to my physical and mental health. Ultimately, the amazing learning opportunities at the company could only keep me there for so long. More on this, in Part 3.
Thanks for reading ❤