On June 18, just a week after stepping up as DingTalk’s CEO, 90s-born tech geek Chen Yusen sent out his first all-hands email. The message laid out a suite of structural shifts, and notably, he signed off as “Yusen, CEO of the Wukong Business Unit.”
Here’s the breakdown of the changes:A new Core Platform Business Department has been launched to steer DingTalk and other key services, with Zhu Hong leading the charge and reporting directly to Chen Yusen; the Wukong and MuleRun squads have been merged into a fresh Wukong team, headed by Shu Junliang, who will also report straight to Chen Yusen.
Meanwhile, direct sales, telemarketing, partners, pre-sales, delivery, and customer success teams have been rolled into a single Customer Development Division under Yang Meng’s lead, reporting to Chen Yusen; plus, a brand-new Marketing Department is up and running with Li Xinyu at the helm, also answering to Chen Yusen.
In addition, the company’s newly established IT Department will take charge of optimizing and iterating various internal business systems to ensure they’re all easily accessible by Agents. Headed by Deng Wu, it reports to Chen Yusen.
For context, “Wukong” is Alibaba’s globally recognized first enterprise-grade AI-native workspace, while MuleRun is a full-scenario, multimodal-native, enterprise-linked intelligent work environment built from the ground up for AI.
Born in 1992, Chen Yusen is a prodigy-turned-tech-geek and serial technical entrepreneur who made Forbes Asia’s “30 Under 30” list. He’s racked up championships at top-tier domestic and international coding competitions, and his cybersecurity startup, Chaitin Tech, was acquired by Alibaba Cloud when he was just 22. Blending deep technical chops with sharp business acumen, this young leader launched an internal venture within Alibaba Cloud back in 2025, spearheading the development of MuleRun.
The shakeup officially began on June 11, when Alibaba announced leadership changes at DingTalk: founder Chen Hang stepped down as CEO, handing the reins to Chen Yusen. With that transition, Chen Yusen instantly became Alibaba’s youngest business unit CEO.
Che Hang originally founded DingTalk, leading the incubation squad in 2014 before pushing the product to market in 2015. Back in July 2021, he parted ways with Alibaba over strategic differences regarding the “Cloud-DingTalk Integration” roadmap, eventually founding the startup Liangqing Yiyang. Fast forward to late March 2025, invited directly by Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming, Che Hang returned to steer DingTalk as CEO, championing AI-native pushes like the ONE project.
The catalyst for this latest leadership swap? A staggering 75,000-word resignation essay titled “Inside DingTalk,” penned by former ONE project product manager Teng Yaxin, known internally by her alias “Yousu.”
Writing from a front-line PM perspective, she broke down the entire lifecycle of DingTalk’s flagship AI push, ONE. She traced its journey from initial concept and closed-door development, through the hype phase of hitting 3 million daily active users, right down to the backlash, strategic pivots, feature spin-offs, and eventual shutdown.
Responding on June 8, vice president Ma Ruila—who actually left DingTalk in May—published a follow-up piece called “Outside DingTalk.” He admitted reading the original post left him “deeply unsettled,” repeatedly scribbling down just three words: “heartbroken.” He totally gets the grueling burnout culture mentioned, describing that exhausting loop of grinding hard for zero traction, drowning in status updates, and cycling through endless iterations without seeing any real progress. “What really breaks my heart,” he noted, “is watching a sharp, innovative product forced to write 75,000 words just to fish itself out of a broken system and find some breathing room.”
In response to the mounting public attention, on June 10, Alibaba’s Partner Committee dropped a stark internal memo titled “Empathy, Loyalty, and Growth: That’s the Real Alibaba Culture.” The post drew a hard line on the discourse sparked by “Inside DingTalk,” calling out DingTalk’s management practices in no uncertain terms and bluntly stating that this kind of pressure-cooker environment “is simply not what Alibaba culture stands for.”
Beyond the critique, the committee’s memo outlined what Alibaba should actually be aiming for. At its core, the company’s ethos has always been about mutual respect, treating people like actual humans, and operating with genuine care. “No matter how times shift or technology evolves,” the post emphasized, “that foundational spirit must never waver.”
This isn’t the first time DingTalk’s management style has sparked external chatter. After thorough deliberation, the partner group reached a solid consensus: under no circumstances, no matter how tight the deadlines, should teams endure this level of managerial strain. It’s a clear signal that this approach “runs completely counter to what Alibaba advocates.”
The post had barely hit the internal network for 24 hours when Alibaba Group officially rolled out the major leadership overhaul, installing Chen Yusen as the new DingTalk CEO to replace Chen Hang.
Following the leadership switch,Teng Yaxin took to her personal social channels again on June 12 to address the swirling debate. She clarified that posting her resignation essay was less about targeting anyone specifically and more about reflecting on the shared, systemic hurdles large orgs face when building AI from scratch—issues that don’t just apply to DingTalk, Alibaba, or even China. Her most grounded hope? Simply helping other teammates shipping AI products avoid the same potholes she stumbled into.
When it comes to why “Inside DingTalk” went completely viral overnight, she points to two massive industry pain points that really resonate. First, there’s the universal struggle of building AI right now. We’re smack in the middle of a chaotic, transitional phase where the final shape of next-gen tools isn’t even locked in yet. Teams are basically crossing the river by feeling the stones, which means trial, error, and inevitable detours are just part of the learning curve.
Then there’s the elephant in the room: AGI’s true promise is actually shrinking our working hours. Everyone keeps hyping AGI, but folks often miss the real point. From a scientific lens, we’re trying to scale human capability to tackle problems we currently can’t solve. But on a human level? It’s about freeing us from repetitive, dangerous, soul-crushing grind so we can actually reclaim time for personalized expression, emotional connection, curiosity, and genuine creativity.
“At scale, there won’t be nearly as many repetitive tasks waiting for human hands, and creative work rarely runs on sheer hour-counting anymore. That shift toward healthier work rhythms is definitely the long-term playbook. What used to pass for productivity in these organizations—the pointless, formalized tracking of man-hours—was just burning talent and going completely against the whole reason we built this tech in the first place,” she concluded.
