How Wandoujia Drives Efficient R&D: 5 Key Steps & Essential Tools

Recently a sharing on Wandoujia’s R&D management was organized, summarizing the practices for collective learning.

The overall R&D management scope includes project initiation, defining product goals, controlling schedule, iterating products, and motivating the team.

Five Key Steps for Efficient R&D

Step 1: Initiation – Define Direction

At Wandoujia, initiation is called a Product Brief or Project Brief. The product manager writes a 1‑2 page document reviewed by the execution team. The brief typically contains:

Vision: a one‑sentence statement of what to build.

Market opportunity analysis and current strategy.

Target user characteristics and core needs.

Existing solutions and their pros/cons.

Project benefits for Wandoujia and risks if competitors launch.

Required technical support and Wandoujia’s technical weaknesses.

Manpower requirements.

Urgency and need for rapid progress.

Release strategy.

Core metrics to measure success.

Step 2: OKR System – Set Goals

Wandoujia adopts Google’s OKR (Objectives & Key Results) instead of traditional KPI. Key points:

OKR as a communication tool: all 300+ employees write OKRs, visible to everyone.

OKR defines direction and measurable outcomes.

Objectives must be quantifiable.

Alignment across company, team, and individual levels.

Monthly review meetings track progress.

Quarterly reviews adjust key results while keeping objectives unchanged.

Example:

Objective: Launch an influential new feature that makes product X a daily‑use tool.

Key Results:

Daily active users reach XX.

Increase core metric Y by using method Z.

Step 3: Project Management – Control Progress

After setting goals, execution focuses on schedule control:

Synchronize tasks and timelines across the company calendar.

Daily stand‑up meetings (10 minutes) to share plans and request help.

Multi‑channel communication via Google Docs, Gmail, Hangouts for non‑urgent discussions.

Weekly reports by product managers on work, releases, outcomes, and data.

Data system MUCE provides company‑wide product and operation metrics for hypothesis validation.

Step 4: Personnel Management – Lead the Team

Three basic principles:

Re‑Organization & Team Switching: Employees are encouraged to change teams each quarter if performance is satisfactory, fostering growth and challenging tasks.

One‑on‑One: Managers hold weekly one‑on‑one meetings to coach, understand issues, discuss career plans, and support personal growth.

Personal OKR & Performance Review: Each quarter employees set personal OKRs, score them after completion, and undergo a semi‑annual performance review that influences job ladder and compensation. All review results are publicly shared within the company.

Step 5: Interest Management – Eliminate Interference

HackDay: A 48‑hour internal hackathon held after the Spring Festival, where 3‑5 engineers and designers form teams to create innovative, fun projects. Past prizes included a MacBook Retina, Google Glass, and high‑end Herman Miller chairs. Successful hacks have become products such as MUCE, Wandoujia Whitewash, and IAS.

PolishWeek: Every fourth week the company pauses new feature development to refine existing products, fix bugs (about 200 per week), and improve details such as UI consistency.

Process and Tools for Efficient R&D

Wandoujia’s release cadence follows a two‑week cycle: two weeks for development, branch cut, then two weeks for testing while the next development iteration starts. Server releases are frequent with extensive regression and automated testing; client releases (Windows, Android) include beta testing with staged rollouts (1%, 5%, 10%).

Early adoption faced many bugs and iteration delays. Solutions included starting with a one‑month sprint to let teams adapt, enforcing a stable master branch, and strengthening unit and regression testing. After stabilizing, the cycle shortened to two weeks and then one week.

To support these processes, Wandoujia built an internal project‑management tool called Wandoulabs. It centralizes cross‑team communication, road‑maps, resource allocation, and status tracking.

For critical releases, three mandatory reviews are required:

Product/Design Review – approval from product managers and designers.

EngineeringTech Review – technical design assessment by the engineering team.

Marketing Review – coordination with marketing for launch strategy and PR.

Smaller beta tests have fewer constraints. These reviews help the whole organization stay aligned on priorities and maintain high standards.