Improving Organizational Efficiency: Practices and Reflections from Youzan's Efficiency Improvement Team

Background – In any organization, various roles and teams exist to solve specific problems. Teams such as Efficiency Improvement and PMO focus on enhancing R&D efficiency, organizational collaboration, and process management. The Youzan Efficiency Improvement team has explored product‑research collaboration models, project management, engineering practices, ticket systems, and efficiency‑product design, and now shares these experiences as a series of articles.

Challenges of Organizational Capability – A commercial organization has two core capabilities: commercial capability (business model, market) and organizational capability (the means to achieve business goals). As Youzan expanded from a SaaS micro‑mall to retail, beauty, education, and cloud services, the number of specialized roles grew, lengthening collaboration chains and increasing coordination difficulty. The key questions become how to allocate limited resources across multiple businesses and how to respond quickly and with high quality to merchant demands.

Our Practices and Reflections

1. Establish and continuously optimize goal‑oriented value streams and workflows – From a systems‑thinking perspective, the core logic of any organization is its value stream. Continuous improvement of this stream follows the "Why‑How‑What" golden‑circle model.

2. Product demand lifecycle – Includes definition, design, development, and operation. Youzan’s technical team evolved from a small “pizza‑team” to a large “stadium‑team”, establishing end‑to‑end demand‑lifecycle management, multi‑level backlog, demand layering, value‑closed‑loop, and supporting tools.

3. Engineering fundamentals – Clean code, unit testing, CI/CD are basic skills for a SaaS product. Youzan’s continuous delivery and engineering‑efficiency practices are documented in articles such as “Youzan CI/CD Construction Practice” and “Youzan Unit‑Testing Practice”.

4. Metrics for efficiency – Like measuring the time from a customer’s request to delivery, similar to a restaurant’s order‑to‑service time. This metric involves multiple roles and is used to assess demand‑lifecycle efficiency.

5. Project management empowerment – Large‑scale projects (e.g., pyramids, moon landing) illustrate the need for project‑management knowledge (PMP, PgMP). Youzan applies project management to align resources with strategic goals while fostering a project‑management culture across the organization.

6. Productizing, online‑izing, and data‑driving process management – The team built an internal collaboration system called the “Efficiency Platform”, integrating Jira, Enterprise WeChat, and other tools to visualize goals, workflows, and resource distribution, turning management practices into observable products.

Postscript

Key mindsets include:

System thinking – avoiding isolated optimizations and considering feedback loops.

Start with the end – define clear objectives before designing value streams or projects.

Return to real scenarios – apply lean principles like “Go See” to ensure solutions fit actual work contexts.

The team continuously solves real problems, trains colleagues in project‑management skills, and iterates the efficiency platform to embed organizational capability.

Further Reading

Using OKR for Project Process Management

Why Choose OKR for Project Process Management

Efficiency Improvement Project Meeting Practices

Four Stages of Enterprise‑Level Agile Transformation

Applying System Thinking in Project Management

Improving Meeting Efficiency

The Six Disciplines of Efficiency Improvement