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| Evidence | Primary coding | Secondary coding | Aggregate dimensions |
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| B1 Douyin team members were thrown together from the Toutiao team. Zhang Yi had been responsible for the operation for three years; he has no experience of being a product manager. Jia Liang, a new intern, has little knowledge of the content operation work. Li Jian, a junior majoring in broadcasting and hosting, has never worked in the internet industry. | Organize nonprofessionals when developing Douyin | Labor bricolage | Entrepreneurial bricolage |
| B2 The startup team of Douyin was not strong. After the style of Douyin was determined, nearly 10 engineers were drawn from the Toutiao team in less than a week to develop this new product. Among them, the most senior had three years of work experience; the others were fresh graduates and intern students. |
| B3 At that time, similar domestic products generally had a music and image syncing problem. “Xue Laoshi,” an early user, had made comments about these products, but they were unable to be changed. Douyin decided to solve this problem and organized a video conference with Xue Laoshi, adjusting the product version by version. They are constantly thinking about how to solve new problems. | Douyin integrates the customers of Toutiao into the labor force |
| B4 To improve the rate of demand response of users, the Douyin operation department set up a technical Q&A group to enable employees in the technology department to communicate directly with users. If the problem was unclear online, users were invited to the office to chat face to face. |
| B5 “We treat users well and communicate with them every day. We listen to their feedback, and it will eventually be reflected in the products.” Early users contributed a lot to the product and grew together with Douyin. |
| B6 In May 2016, the user retention rate of the Toutiao short-video column went beyond the graphic content column; then, ByteDance began to develop the short-video product, Douyin. With Toutiao’s accumulation of customer data, Douyin adopted the same user tags as Toutiao and improved user traffic through Toutiao’s recommendation. | Develop Douyin to use resources previously accumulated by Toutiao | Physical bricolage |
| B7 The daily active user (DAU) of Toutiao has just gone beyond 50 million…our accumulation in multimedia technology is weak, everything is still in the initial state. When developing Douyin, we used Toutiao’s mature recommendation engine algorithm. The algorithm derived from Toutiao directly supported the incubation of Douyin. |
| B8 ByteDance adopted Toutiao’s middle platform organizational form to operate Douyin, including the departments of user growth, technology, and commercialization. Different members were selected from various departments to form Douyin teams. |
| B9 The early team members of Douyin were unfamiliar with video or photography skills. Everyone can quickly learn unfamiliar skills with patience. | Members of the Douyin development team try to learn unfamiliar things | Skills bricolage |
| B10 The Douyin team established a creator conference to encourage creation. The short-video format of Douyin has brought innovation to a wide range of industries, including gourmet foods, make-up, beauty, tourism, and others. | Douyin provides customers with products/markets that were previously unavailable | Markets bricolage |
| B11 Douyin’s live broadcast platform has helped more and more farmers out of poverty, enabling them to increase their income and get rich. |
| B12 The trend of mobile live broadcasting appeared in 2016. Short videos were not yet popular at that time. There were many short-video products in the market. Most of them were in the horizontal format; portrait format was rare. Douyin displays a video in full screen and automatically plays as soon as it is opened. | The positioning of Douyin has broken through the conventional cognition | Institutional bricolage |
| B13 A group of young people gathered in the Douyin community, where they can find freedom of self-expression and self-identification. Douyin broke the fixed mindset that the original application was only used to watch videos. It has become a popular cultural social community. |
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