The Ultimate Product Manager: Lessons from Li Xiang's Three-Act Entrepreneurial Epic
Key Takeaways
- The core skills of a great product manager—user empathy, data-driven thinking, and a focus on solving pain points—are transferable across any industry.
- Building a sustainable, profitable business is a powerful and often underrated competitive advantage.
- True serial entrepreneurship is driven by a relentless desire to learn, solve new problems, and build, not just by a desire for financial success.
- A founder's unique, authentic voice can be a powerful tool for building a brand and a community.
Prologue: The Three Acts
The career of an entrepreneur is often a one-act play. A precious few manage a second act. Li Xiang's career has been a three-act epic, a story that has spanned the entire modern history of China's technology industry.
Act I was PCPop, the quintessential dot-com story of a teenage founder who turned his passion into a successful business, a story of raw talent and youthful ambition.
Act II was Autohome, the story of a maturing entrepreneur applying a proven formula to a new industry, a story of disciplined execution and the creation of a media empire.
Act III is Li Auto, the founder's magnum opus, the story of a seasoned leader tackling his most audacious challenge yet, a story of contrarian thinking, industrial grit, and the dream of building an enduring physical product.
Looking back on these three acts, a clear and consistent set of principles emerges, a "Li Xiang Way" that explains his remarkable and repeated success.
Act I: The User's Advocate
At the absolute core of the Li Xiang Way is a deep, almost obsessive empathy for the user. He is not a technologist who falls in love with technology for its own sake. He is a product manager who sees technology only as a tool to solve a human problem.
At PCPop, the problem was the lack of honest hardware reviews. At Autohome, it was the lack of transparent car-buying information. At Li Auto, it was the range anxiety and space constraints faced by Chinese families. In every case, he started with a clear, well-defined user pain point and worked backward.
Lesson 1: Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. His controversial bet on EREV technology is the ultimate example of this. While his competitors were in love with the idea of a pure-electric future, Li Xiang was in love with the problem of range anxiety. He chose the solution that best solved that problem for his user, even if it wasn't the most fashionable one.
Act II: The Pragmatic Contrarian
Li Xiang has a natural distrust of hype and a gift for seeing through conventional wisdom. He is a classic contrarian, but his contrarianism is not driven by a desire to be different, but by a deep-seated pragmatism.
He dropped out of high school when everyone said a degree was essential. He built a content business based on objective data when everyone else was chasing clicks. He built a car company focused on profitability when the rest of the industry was focused on growth at all costs.
Lesson 2: Build a sustainable business from day one. His relentless focus on operational efficiency and cost control is not just good management; it's a core part of his strategy. He understood that in a capital-intensive industry, the company that manages its cash most effectively will be the one that survives in the long run. The fact that Li Auto is one of the only profitable EV startups in the world is a direct result of this pragmatic, and deeply contrarian, mindset.
Act III: The Authentic Founder
In an era of carefully managed corporate communications, Li Xiang's raw, unfiltered presence on social media is a radical act. His voice—direct, data-driven, and sometimes arrogant—is inseparable from the Li Auto brand.
This authenticity, while risky, has become a powerful asset. It has built a deep and loyal community of users who feel a direct connection to the founder and his vision. They trust him because he speaks to them without a filter, admitting his mistakes and passionately defending his decisions.
Lesson 3: Your unique voice is a competitive advantage. Li Xiang has proven that a founder's personality can be a powerful tool to cut through the noise of a crowded market. He has built not just a car company, but a narrative and a community, with himself at the center of the story.
Epilogue: The Final Act?
Li Xiang has said that Li Auto will be his final entrepreneurial venture. He is channeling all of the lessons learned over a 25-year career into this one, grand project.
His legacy is already secure. He is a role model for a generation of Chinese entrepreneurs, a living example of how far raw talent, obsessive focus, and a deep understanding of the user can take you.
His three acts have not just been three successful businesses. They have been a relentless, evolving, and incredibly successful quest to solve problems. He is the ultimate product manager, and his product has been the future of how we consume information and how we move.