Today you can read a short interview with Xiaomi co-founder Hong Feng about MIUI, teamwork and more.
Hong Feng is the head of Xiaomi's MIUI division. He graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering. He continued his academic career at Purdue University, where he received a Master's degree in Computer Science. From 2001 to 2005, Hong worked at Siebel, and then joined Google in 2006 as a senior software engineer. At Google headquarters, Mr. Hong oversaw projects for Google Calendar, Google Maps and Google 3D Street View. From 2006 to 2010, he worked as a senior product manager at Google China and managed the development of a series of local products, such as Google Music and Google Pinjin Input. How do you manage the MIUI team? What do you think about MIUI?
Hong Feng and his robot
My teenage years were spent coding, I was very interested in computer programming mainly to solve most of the problems I encountered in everyday life. There are so many interesting and fun things to solve, and I love and enjoy doing it. I've never built a robot before and I don't have any experience or training in this field. I was already developing Xiaom when one of my family members fell ill. I had to return to Shanghai to take care of them, but at the same time I couldn't leave my job in Beijing. So I ended up building a robot to solve the problem. To be honest, I am not very familiar with hardware and have limited knowledge in this area.
So what could I do? I bought a floor-sweeping robot that became its "legs", made the body material out of trash cans and the head out of a webcam and monitor. How awful does it look? Yeah, but who cares, as long as it works and I can do my thing with it.
Thank you for your feedback MIUI-ists!
Big boss Hong Feng also spends a lot of time reading the feedback on the forum. Watching the video shows that if he thinks something is wrong or a request needs to be resolved immediately, he immediately forwards it to the product manager via wechat.
Problems can have many causes and they are closely linked to our everyday lives. This is the concept we are building MIUI around. How and what we can do to solve the problems indicated. There is a proper channel for this, which is the MIUI forum itself, where all MIUI users can share their thoughts and comments. And we regularly follow up on requests and bug reports. User feedback is extremely important to us. Sometimes internal testing doesn't reveal some bugs, so feedback from MIUI users helps us a lot. We then discuss how to solve or overcome the problems. Sometimes users can't tell us which changes are good, but they can clearly tell us which are bad.
My favourite feature in MIUI 8
One of the coolest features in MIUI 8 is the second desktop. This lets you access two different places after identifying your fingerprint or entering your password.
There are several features that contribute to its uniqueness that were not mentioned at the launch event. For example, if you're taking a photo, recording a video or playing a game... Then someone calls you and really annoys you to interrupt the application in progress. In MIUI, a call window pops up at the top of the notification bar without interrupting the current action. This is one of my favourite features. I love how all these little things change our daily lives.
My role in MIUI
My job is more than leading a team. With reliable and competent people in the right positions, your job will be a lot easier. First and foremost, good judgment. Good judgement means being able to weigh up options accurately and well. And then, when the time comes, you must choose the right solution without thinking. Once you have made a judgement or decision, you need good execution skills, closely linked to your communication and leadership skills, to ensure that the team can achieve the goal you have set.
What is the future of MIUI?
We've been developing MIUI for 6 years now, during which time we've done and improved a lot of things, because Android wasn't nearly as user-friendly as it is today. The whole ANdroid system has evolved a lot and the differences between ROMs are very minimal. A feature you use may already be present in another ROM, and the reverse is also true. What is the future of MIUI? We hope to create more features that users like to use and combine them in our ecosystem. The smart home concept could become a trend in the future and we need more ideas to make it big. We have a long way to go.
source: http://en.miui.com/thread-312622-1-1.html
