A lengthy essay titled "Inside the Group," authored by a self-identified grassroots product employee from Meituan's restaurant delivery division, has been published on social media, discussing the company's current predicaments.
The article states that within the restaurant delivery chain the author experienced, the organization explicitly conveys that employees do not need their own judgment; they only need to guess the intentions of their immediate superior and break them down into actions. If a company consistently trains its employees only to be obedient and relay messages, what they ultimately acquire is not product capability but a set of survival skills within the organization. Unless one is absolutely certain of spending their entire career at Meituan, the market value of such a skill set externally is virtually zero.
The content further points out that Meituan's vast trove of local lifestyle data has not been truly assetized in many specific business processes. In the restaurant delivery scenarios observed by the author, numerous issues remain in a very primitive state. Despite sitting on the most scarce local lifestyle transaction data, the solutions to many frontline problems do not resemble those of a tech company with over a decade of data accumulation, but rather a manual workshop reliant on human effort, experience, and ad-hoc coordination.
The article also notes that while the AI era has arrived, the organization's understanding of AI remains at the level of a "wishing well." Overnight, AI within Meituan transformed from a toy into a panacea. Any problem can be linked to AI, any project can be packaged as intelligent. However, the truly crucial question is: into which engine should AI be integrated? If the organization does not redefine the problems and merely treats AI as a more advanced outsourcing tool, then AI will only amplify the existing organizational issues.
Finally, the article mentions that the author's understanding of Meituan's dilemma is not a lack of execution capability, but rather the formation of a path dependency after execution became too strong. The Meituan of the past excelled at pushing a confirmed direction to its extreme. Today's issue is that the direction itself has become uncertain. At this juncture, what the organization needs is not more message relays, more review meetings, more AI-packaged projects, or longer working hours. Instead, it needs to rebuild the capacity to see and define problems.
As of the time of writing, Meituan has not responded to the aforementioned statements.
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