A 75,000-Character Resignation Letter Took Down DingTalk's CEO in One Week

Alibaba replaced the founder and CEO of DingTalk, its enterprise communication platform, on June 11, 2026, roughly a week after an internal resignation letter from one of the product team's AI managers spread across the company and then leaked to the outside world. The speed is the story. Internal criticism at large Chinese tech companies usually surfaces, gets debated, and dissipates. This one ended a leadership tenure in seven days.

What happened

On June 4, Teng Yaxin, a core product manager on DingTalk's AI team (internal alias "Yousu"), posted a 75,000-character essay titled "Inside Ding" on Alibaba's internal network. For context, 75,000 Chinese characters is a substantial document, closer to a short book than a memo. The essay described a working culture built around outlasting the competition rather than shipping better products.

The specific allegations are concrete enough to be checkable, which is part of why they landed. She described the "Wangshu Operation," an internal directive instructing staff to leave the office later than employees at Feishu, the ByteDance-owned rival that has been taking enterprise market share. She described managers conducting midnight office patrols. She wrote that she collapsed twice during a project called ONE, the second time requiring an ambulance, and that she received a poor performance rating after taking a single day off.

Four days later, Ma Ruila, a recently departed DingTalk vice president, published a companion piece called "Outside Ding." His line about the situation was the one that got quoted: that what pained him was watching a talented young product manager need 75,000 characters "to rescue herself from the system."

On June 10, Alibaba's Partner Committee, the company's highest governance body, posted a public criticism on the internal network titled "Loyalty, Integrity, and Growth: That's the Real Alibaba Culture." It directly called DingTalk's management practices not what Alibaba culture should look like. The next day, founder Chen Hang ("Wuzhao") was out as CEO, replaced by Chen Yusen, who at 34 becomes the youngest business unit CEO in the company's history.

Why this is unusual

Chen Hang built DingTalk from nothing to 300 million users over six years. He had only returned to run the division in March 2025 after a four-year absence. The reporting frames that return as driven by a need to prove himself, which translated into aggressive internal targets and the kind of overwork enforcement the letter described. A founder coming back to a mature product and pushing it harder is a familiar pattern, and it rarely ends with the founder being removed inside fifteen months.

The deviation from precedent is what makes this worth paying attention to. Alibaba sat through a high-profile 2021 workplace incident and a 2025 critique from DingTalk's former head of product with internal discussion but no structural consequences. This time the governance body intervened in public and the CEO was gone the following day. That sequence, an individual complaint to a committee statement to a personnel change in under a week, is not how these episodes normally resolve.

The part worth being skeptical about

It is easy to read this as a company discovering its conscience. The more grounded reading is that DingTalk is losing ground to Feishu and WeChat Work in the enterprise market, and a viral letter documenting that the strategy amounts to "stay later than Feishu" is both a culture problem and an admission that the product competition is not going well. Removing the CEO addresses the public-relations damage and signals a strategy reset at the same time. The culture statement and the business pressure are not separable.

There is also the AI angle that the headline buries. Teng was on the AI product team, and DingTalk has been pushing AI features into its enterprise suite to keep pace with rivals doing the same. The ONE project she described collapsing during was an internal product effort. The detail that an AI product manager was the one to break is a reminder that the race to bolt large language model features onto every enterprise tool runs on people, and that "ship faster than the competitor" as a management philosophy produces the kind of failure mode this letter documents. The technology questions, whether the AI features are actually good, whether they retain users, are the ones that will decide DingTalk's position, and a leadership change does not answer them.

What changes

For Alibaba, the immediate effect is a younger CEO and a public commitment to back away from the management practices named in the letter. Whether that survives contact with the same competitive pressure that produced them is the open question. The 996 schedule and its variants have been formally discouraged at Chinese tech firms before without disappearing in practice.

For the broader industry, the case is a data point on whether internal documentation can force accountability when it is specific, verifiable, and widely circulated. Teng's letter worked partly because it named operations, gave dates, and described events with enough detail to be hard to dismiss. That is a different thing from a vague complaint, and the outcome here suggests the difference matters. Coverage of the episode and Alibaba's response is being tracked at Pandaily.

The restructuring is real and the removal is final, but the underlying tension is not resolved. DingTalk still has to compete on product against companies running similar playbooks, and the management approach that produced this letter existed because someone decided it was the way to win. Changing the person at the top is the easy part.