Product · Dec 2025 — Present
Zalo Business Platform — The Official Account and the assets that connect to it
- Role
- Product Lead, Core Products — Zalo Open Platforms
- Year
- Dec 2025 — Present
- Team
- Product managers, designers, mobile + server engineers, QC, research, data, partnerships, support
- Timeframe
- Ongoing
Summary
Leading Core Products inside Zalo Open Platforms — the Official Account and the Mini App + H5 platform — so a street shop, a national brand, and a public service can each serve customers inside the app most Vietnamese already open every day.
Problem
Vietnamese businesses run on chat, and most of them run it from a personal account with a third-party inbox tool bolted on. For a shop taking ten orders a day, that is cheaper and good enough. What decides the platform's case is what a business gets here that a phone number and a spreadsheet can't give it. A conversation on someone's personal account belongs to whoever holds the phone. A relationship built on the platform should belong to the business, follow it across every asset it owns, and be worth paying for.
Approach
Stop treating the Official Account and zBusiness as two answers to the same question. Cut the market by the job instead: a tiny shop needs a credible chat identity, a growing brand needs reach and automation it can trust. Each one owns a layer and neither is a downgrade of the other. Then make the layers add up — one business identity, assets that connect to it, and the data those assets generate flowing back to the business instead of stranding in whichever surface collected it.
Outcomes
2 surfaces
Official Account · Mini App + H5
One identity
Shared across a business's connected assets
Weekly
Ship, read, adjust
Process
- 01
Look before judging
Field visits, support tickets, and the third-party tools merchants already pay for say more about the gap than an internal roadmap debate does. I'd rather spend a week watching how a shop actually answers messages than a week arguing about a feature list.
- 02
Break it down, then choose
Big calls get decomposed until the branches don't overlap and nothing important is missing — segments, jobs, failure modes. Then the shortlist gets scored side by side against criteria we agreed on beforehand, so the decision survives the room it was made in.
- 03
Spec the uncertainty
Requirements start from the problem, the user, and what we still don't know. Every solution gets written as a hypothesis with the metric that would kill it, and a number nobody has validated gets labelled as one.
- 04
Ship a slice, read it honestly
A platform this wide is mostly other teams' surfaces, so much of the work is finding the trade the other team also wants. Roll out in phases with partnerships and support inside the loop, then let production data and the people using it pick the next slice.
"Businesses move when the platform gives them something a personal account can't — ownership of the relationship they build — and not one release sooner."