七万五千字辞职信背后：钉钉换帅，与阿里的自我拷问

Today we'll talk about something that has basically flooded the Chinese internet these past few days.

A resignation letter toppled a big company's CEO.

The protagonist of the story is DingTalk.

You're probably not unfamiliar with DingTalk.

In China, it's a tool that working people open almost every day.

Sending messages, video meetings, clocking in, approvals — it's all on there.

You can think of it as a 'corporate version of WeChat'.

And behind DingTalk is Alibaba.

That is, one of China's largest internet companies.

The starting point of this whole thing is one person.

His name is Teng Yaxin; his nickname is 'Yousu'.

He was the product manager of one of DingTalk's core AI products.

This AI product once reached three million daily active users.

It sounds successful.

But later, this project was step by step scaled back and cut.

On June 4, Teng Yaxin chose to leave.

On Alibaba's internal network, he posted a long resignation essay.

Titled 'Inside DingTalk'.

This letter ran a full seventy-five thousand characters.

At that length, it's no longer an ordinary resignation letter.

It's more like a complete retrospective report.

He wrote out that AI project — from inception, to explosion, to its final end —

completely and in full.

He used many oblique, somewhat literary turns of phrase,

but the core thrust was very clear.

First, the team was steeped in a culture of 'pleasing those above'.

When people did their work, the first priority wasn't the user,

but satisfying the leaders.

Second, vicious internal competition was severe; people wore each other down.

Third, many decisions were based on leaders' personal preferences,

rather than genuine strategic judgment.

Fourth, there was meaningless overtime, and the collective burnout that came with it.

After this letter came out, it spread rapidly inside Alibaba.

Many employees' reaction was:

'What he wrote is exactly our daily life.'

On June 8, another heavyweight figure stepped forward.

Ma Ruila, DingTalk's former vice president and head of AI products,

on his own public account,

posted an echoing article, titled 'Outside DingTalk'.

He confirmed the various conditions Teng Yaxin described.

He also said something piercing.

He said that during that period he could, at one point, no longer tell

whether he was actually creating a product,

or just, utterly exhausted,

chasing a pace that was forever receding.

These two articles — one inside, one outside — corroborated each other.

Public opinion was completely set ablaze.

On June 10, Alibaba's Partners Committee

specifically posted an internal response.

The title was meaningful,

roughly: 'Warmth, loyalty, and growth — that's the culture Alibaba should have.'

This amounted to Alibaba's highest level

publicly rejecting DingTalk's style of management.

And the real main event was on June 11.

Alibaba announced that DingTalk CEO Chen Hang was stepping down.

The name Chen Hang — people in the know all recognize it.

His nickname is 'Wuzhao'.

DingTalk, the product, was originally built single-handedly by him.

You could say he is DingTalk's soul.

Later, he left once.

In March 2025, he returned and took the helm of DingTalk again.

But this return lasted only a little over four hundred days.

Now, he departs once more.

Taking his place is a fairly young person, named Chen Yusen.

He was born in 1992, and is only thirty-four this year.

In one stroke he became Alibaba's youngest business-unit CEO.

Chen Yusen is no ordinary person.

At 22 he started a company, doing cybersecurity.

His company was later acquired by Alibaba Cloud.

In 2025, he made an AI Agent product,

with users in over forty countries abroad,

and reportedly found a working business model quickly.

So Alibaba choosing him sends a very clear signal:

to use a younger person — more fluent in AI, more like an entrepreneur —

to give DingTalk a transfusion of new blood.

Speaking of which, let's step back and look at the bigger picture.

DingTalk's leadership change is not an isolated event.

It's part of Alibaba's whole-year

major organizational restructuring around AI.

The old architecture, divided by department and function,

is being broken up and recombined.

So, what exactly does this leave us with?

I think there are at least two points worth remembering.

The first point is about the power of truth.

A product manager with no rank and no power,

simply, earnestly, and completely, wrote down the truth he saw.

And it moved the personnel of a trillion-dollar company.

In any era, that is rare.

It reminds us: the truth itself has weight.

It's just that, most of the time,

we all choose silence,

because telling the truth often comes at a cost.

The second point is about people and efficiency.

The most painful line in Teng Yaxin's letter

wasn't actually cursing anyone,

but that question:

We're this busy, this tired —

are we actually creating value,

or just performing effort?

This question isn't only for DingTalk.

It's for every single person today,

in their cubicle, at their desk,

still working overtime late at night.

So at the end of the show, I want to leave this question with you.

Think back on your recent work and life.

The things you do,

the things that keep you so busy you can't breathe —

how many of them are truly creating value?

And how many

are just chasing a pace

that is forever receding?

This question has no standard answer.

But it's worth you, for your own sake, thinking it through seriously.