How ByteDance Became the World’s Most Valuable Startup

ByteDance has searched broadly for new product opportunities and does not hesitate to send multiple teams into the same segment.

Rapid iteration

It is renowned for its speed of development and getting products to market, much of which is enabled by its SSP.

Selective focus

ByteDance allocates key resources to a few select priorities for a few years at a time. Its first 3 years were dominated by text- and photo-content experiments relating to the success of Toutiao, its news app, while 2016 marked a pivot to a short video.

After experimentation, it made growing its education business a priority.

ByteDance’s SSP allows for new product teams to easily integrate best-in-class technologies and features, saving precious time and resources

Productizing platform services

Shared services often begin as new functions but are elevated to the SSP level if use, actual or projected, increases across multiple products

Organizational Enablers

ByteDance's SSP strategy - accelerate new projects by providing instant access to best-in-class technology and operations - has been so successful that one would expect many other companies to have embraced it.

ByteDance's strategy and operations are driven by a transparent, bi-monthly Objectives and Key Results (OKR) system that flows from the very top, aligning the priorities and actions of SSP and product teams.

Explicitly flattened hierarchy

ByteDance eliminates the use of titles and deliberately flattened its hierarchy to just a few layers so that employees can focus on their responsibilities instead of worrying about status.

ByteDance's SSP-based innovation strategy has allowed the company to incubate rapidly and broadly and to scale efficiently, by using centralized but flexibly deployed technical and operational stacks.

This strategy has served the company well in part because of the similarity among its various algorithm-driven products.