Only with a high-quality system can we consistently create products filled with warmth.
In a rapidly changing market, how can a fast-growing consumer goods company maintain its "Genki speed"? The secret of Genki Forest lies not only in finding a useful system, but more importantly, in undergoing a philosophical transformation—from "system first" to "management first."
At the 2025 Feishu Projects product launch event, Gao Jia, Marketing Process Lead at Genki Forest, revealed how the company leveraged Feishu Projects to build an integrated "innovation engine" for decision-making, R&D, and marketing—using the launch of "Hao Zai Zai" as a real-world example. This is not merely about tool usage; it’s a profound reflection on how organizations can transform advanced management philosophies into replicable, accumulative, and sustainable growth systems.
Below is the full transcript of her speech.
Hello everyone, I’m Gao Jia.
I'm honored to be here today representing Genki Forest to share our insights and experiences in using Feishu Projects for management.
The organizers kindly placed one of Genki Forest's products—Hao Zai Zai Red Bean and Job's Tears Water—into your tote bags. This souvenir perfectly embodies our internal efficient collaboration and the "Genki speed." What powers this "Genki speed" is exactly what I want to share today—a "project management innovation engine" built on Feishu Projects.
Before sharing this engine, let me first introduce Genki Forest. We are a young company: we established our R&D center in 2015 and officially registered the company in 2016. From day one, we’ve firmly believed that great companies win consumer favor by putting users first and meticulously crafting high-standard, high-reputation quality products. At Genki Forest, our definition of a good product is simple: A good product is something we’d happily recommend to our family and friends.
Mindset Transformation:
From “Craft Workshop” to “Management-First Thinking”
However, as the company grew rapidly, we encountered challenges common to all growing enterprises.
In traditional workflows, a project from initiation to closure might involve multiple tools such as documents, spreadsheets, Feishu messages, and OA systems. This lack of unified processes leads to duplicated data entry and high operational costs. Worse, critical project information is scattered across chat logs and documents, making retrieval cumbersome. For example, during reviews, finding the original decision rationale often takes half a day of digging through chat histories.
To address these shortcomings, our leadership clearly stated: "We must eliminate fragmented files and redundant data tables as much as possible." This statement reflects our introspection on past management practices: our efficiency was being severely hindered by these fragmented, "craft workshop–style" tools.
To solve these issues, we took some detours—even attempting to build our own system—only to have it halted immediately. The key point was made bluntly: "Without a clear project management mechanism, even a built system would be castles in the air."
This experience taught us a crucial lesson: any system or tool is merely auxiliary. Before seeking tools, we must first clarify our methodology. Digital transformation, at its core, is a transformation of management philosophy. The fundamental approach should be: establish standardized processes first, then configure efficient systems.
Thus, we returned to basics and initiated an internal optimization of project management. Starting with the most complex online marketing projects, we began by mapping out process flows, carefully refining the value of each node: Who is responsible? What are the inputs? What are the deliverables? Where are the decision points? After streamlining the workflow, we piloted the entire process offline using our previous document-based methods.
Through this round of optimization, we gradually developed two key methodologies: First, contextualization—identifying various application scenarios to drive automation; second, hierarchical classification—designing systems with clear ownership for every field and node upfront to avoid duplication and redundancy.
Feishu Projects:
The “Compiler” and “Executor” of Our Management Philosophy
Ultimately, Feishu Projects became our top choice.
Feishu Projects’ underlying logic—layering, classification, custom fields—aligns closely with our methodology. For example, product development and brand marketing projects differ greatly in workflow and context. With Feishu Projects’ "task management" capability, we can configure distinct fields, workflows, views, and automations for different project types, allowing our philosophy to be fully realized—something rigid, fixed-process systems cannot achieve.
Thus, Feishu Projects became the "compiler" and "executor" of our management thinking. When deeply integrated with our management philosophy and applied throughout a product’s journey from 0 to 1, it evolved beyond a mere project management tool into a powerful "project management innovation engine."
The Birth of “Hao Zai Zai”:
How Three Engines Work Together
Next, I’ll use the "Hao Zai Zai" in your hands as an example to break down this engine and show how it transforms a vague product concept into a truly great product through the coordinated operation of three sub-engines: decision-making, R&D, and marketing.
1. Decision Engine: From a Good Idea to a Structured, Actionable Plan
Turning a good idea into a solid plan requires solving three challenges: ensuring input quality, maintaining objective and fair decision-making, and guaranteeing execution efficiency.
In the past, product initiation required writing lengthy documents. Even with templates, outputs varied widely, lacking standardization and structure—undoubtedly reducing review efficiency and accuracy. Now, we’ve transformed initiation from "writing documents" to "filling forms." We’ve refined and created all necessary proposal fields within Feishu Projects, building standardized detail pages. Product managers simply fill out new forms, and their submissions appear in a uniform format, greatly reducing reviewers’ cognitive load.
As a result, once "Hao Zai Zai" passed through the decision engine, we no longer received a vague "meeting summary," but a structured "battle command" containing all key information, shared goals, and risk alerts.
To ensure decision quality, we introduced Feishu Projects’ voting widget. Now, after a project manager submits a proposal, reviewers vote individually first; after votes are revealed, they discuss based on results. This small change reveals each reviewer’s authentic, undisturbed opinion, ensuring objectivity and fairness.
After approval, we connect Feishu Projects with Feishu Approval. The responsible person simply clicks "Complete" on the initiation node, automatically generating and routing a customized approval form with all data pre-filled—no re-entry needed—truly bridging the "last mile" from decision to execution.
2. R&D Engine: From a Solid Plan to an Authentic, Uncompromised Taste
Now, "Hao Zai Zai" has earned its "entry ticket," but turning a concept into a real beverage presents even greater R&D challenges. In the beverage industry, consumer tastes evolve quickly, while traditional R&D cycles are long, collaboration is complex, and information easily degrades or distorts during transmission.
Now, using Feishu Projects, we manage the entire product lifecycle—concept, R&D, design, testing, to launch—in layered stages. All stakeholders work in one place, with real-time information synchronization and clear progress visibility. The "flavor card" in Feishu Projects has become our single source of truth—the digital blueprint—locking in all key information transferred from the decision engine, fundamentally solving alignment issues.
During R&D, we activated our mature internal "Flavor Five-Ring Road" process. This is an internally developed methodology that, at its core, seamlessly connects key stages—initiation,立项, decision-making, review, and approval—into a closed loop.
In the previously inefficient user taste testing phase, we introduced AI-powered taste testing. The R&D manager publishes a test task in Feishu Projects, and recruitment messages are automatically pushed to large groups. After colleagues reply with feedback in the group, AI automatically captures these scattered responses, processes them, and sends them back to the Feishu Projects instance—even rating feedback and generating standardized tags like "want to drink daily" or "never want to try again." This process truly achieves our goal of "system automation."
3. Marketing Engine: From Great Taste to Market-Defining Buzz
We now have a drink that we and our families enjoy—but the challenge has just begun. Today’s media landscape is extremely complex. Launching a new product may require managing diverse resources simultaneously—outdoor ads, Douyin KOLs, celebrity livestreams, pop-up stores—making execution far more complex than before.
Previously, project managers relied on massive scheduling spreadsheets to coordinate people, products, and venues. Any delay or error could cause frontline chaos. Now, we’ve condensed the entire marketing campaign—from initiation, resource planning, to execution and post-mortem—into a single task view within Feishu Projects. Progress for each channel and resource is clearly visible. When the Xiaohongshu channel lead updates a note’s publication time, the Douyin lead instantly sees it and adjusts accordingly. Information sync has shifted from manual notifications to automated system pushes.
Meanwhile, we’ve built dedicated "dashboards" for different roles in the campaign. The CMO sees budgets and outcomes, project leads focus on progress and risks, while frontline executors see only their assigned tasks. Through segmented views, each person sees only what they need, ensuring clarity of instructions and efficiency of action.
From “Managing Projects” to “Running a System”
Looking back at the birth of "Hao Zai Zai," we gained far more than just a hit product. We achieved measurable business value: scientific decisions reduced ineffective SKUs, precise execution improved marketing accuracy, and efficient collaboration accelerated time-to-market.
With Feishu Projects, we are no longer managing isolated projects—we are running a system capable of continuously producing great projects. And this system is our most vital moat for future growth.
Another gain is organizational capability accumulation. All data and decisions are preserved within Feishu Projects. As one colleague put it: "When we look back, we can finally understand why certain decisions were right—or wrong." This traceability and summarizability is our organization’s most valuable asset. Looking ahead, these precious datasets will serve as clean, solid foundations for deeper business analytics and AI applications.
Today, we have "Hao Zai Zai Red Bean and Job's Tears Water"; in the future, we hope to use this system to incubate countless more "Hao Zai Zai" variants that meet diverse user needs. At Genki Forest, our mission is "a group of caring people creating loving products within a caring organization." Today, I’d add: we also need excellent systems to continuously bring loving products to life.
What we've built with Feishu Projects is more than just a project management system—it's an incubator for great ideas and an amplifier for great products. It gives us confidence to move faster and farther on our journey of creating meaningful, heartfelt products.
Thank you all.