2026-07-08
The 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · No. 2 | Allen Zhang: Insight and Taste Both 99 — Yet He Chose to Leave Business at 92
No. 2 on the list is Allen Zhang, OVR 97, second only to Steve Jobs. What's fascinating is that across his six dimensions, insight is 99 and taste is 99 — the ceiling of the entire list, shoulder to shoulder with Jobs and even higher — yet business is only 92, the lowest of his six. It's not that he can't make money; the opposite. He deliberately pushes away money handed to him on a plate. The one thing this year that best explains this operating system: Tencent's own AI, Yuanbao, can't catch Doubao on monthly actives — and a rarely-stated reason is that Allen Zhang's WeChat locked even Tencent's own AI outside the social graph. This piece unpacks Zhang across the six dimensions, and unpacks a bet that is being re-validated in the second half of the AI era.
