The Billion-Dollar Product Manager: Li Xiang's Obsessive, Data-Driven Leadership Style

Prologue: The Weibo Warrior

In the buttoned-up world of automotive executives, Li Xiang is a radical outlier. He is a prolific and notoriously unfiltered user of the Chinese social media platform Weibo. He uses it to engage directly with customers, praise his own products, fiercely attack competitors, and share his unvarnished opinions on everything from supply chain management to corporate culture.

His posts are often blunt, data-heavy, and combative. He has publicly called out rivals for misleading marketing and has engaged in heated debates with journalists and industry critics. To traditionalists, his style is unseemly for the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar public company.

But his online persona is not just a personal quirk; it is a direct reflection of his leadership style and the culture he has built at Li Auto. It is a culture of radical transparency, extreme data-driven thinking, and an almost religious focus on efficiency.

Act I: The Gospel of Efficiency

Li Xiang's experience at his first two companies, PCPop and Autohome, taught him a critical lesson: in the internet business, the most efficient company wins. When he founded Li Auto, he was determined to apply this gospel of efficiency to the notoriously wasteful auto industry.

He became a ruthless cost-cutter. While competitors were spending lavishly on glitzy showrooms in expensive downtown locations, Li Auto opted for smaller, more efficient retail stores in suburban malls. While rivals were burning billions on marketing, Li Xiang relied on his own social media presence and the word-of-mouth of satisfied customers.

This discipline extended to the factory floor. Li Auto's manufacturing process, honed through the singular focus on the Li ONE, became one of the most efficient in the industry. He drilled into his team the importance of controlling every fen (the Chinese equivalent of a penny) of the bill of materials.

This relentless focus on efficiency had a clear goal: profitability. Li Xiang was horrified by the cash-burning culture of the EV industry. He was determined to build a sustainable business, not one that was perpetually dependent on the whims of the capital markets.

Act II: The CEO as Product Manager

At the heart of Li Xiang's leadership style is his identity as a product manager. He runs the entire company with the same logic he would use to design a piece of software.

He is famously data-driven. Every major decision at Li Auto, from product features to retail locations, is backed by exhaustive data analysis. He has built a "neural network" of data flows within the company that gives him a real-time, granular view of every aspect of the business, from production metrics to customer satisfaction scores.

He is also a master of clear, concise communication. His internal documents are famous for their simplicity and directness. He forces his teams to distill complex problems down to their essential elements, a discipline he learned as a young website editor.

This product manager's mindset is what allows him to maintain focus. He is a master of saying "no." He has rejected countless proposals for new car models, new features, and new business lines that he felt would distract the company from its core mission of building the best possible car for the Chinese family.

Epilogue: The Profitable Anomaly

The result of this unique leadership style is a company that is an anomaly in the EV world. In early 2023, while Tesla was the only other major EV maker in the world turning a consistent profit, Li Auto announced that it had achieved full-year profitability.

It was a stunning achievement that sent a shockwave through the industry. Li Xiang had proven that it was possible to build a fast-growing EV company without burning through billions of dollars in the process. His obsessive focus on efficiency, his data-driven decision-making, and his product manager's discipline had become Li Auto's most powerful competitive advantage.

His leadership style may be unconventional, but it is undeniably effective. He has scaled his personal obsessions into a corporate culture, creating a company that is not just a reflection of its founder's vision, but a testament to the power of his unique, product-centric way of thinking.