Xiaomi used to be the money behind someone else's lending product on Baidu. I led the design and launch of the model where Xiaomi became the product itself — and it grew into one of the company's largest businesses.
In the original partnership, the product was Baidu's. Baidu acquired the users, screened the borrowers and passed only the borrowing demand to Xiaomi. Xiaomi supplied the capital and earned a fixed return — with no say in who the customers were, how they were selected or how risk was managed.
The new model flipped that. The customer still met the product inside Baidu's ecosystem, but the financial product underneath was Xiaomi's: our terms, our underwriting decision, our money, our economics.
The hard part wasn't the lending terms. It was deciding who owns each step of a journey that crosses two companies' systems — then defining the transaction, fund and data flows that make it run.
I led the product and business definition from concept through launch, working with our Product team and Baidu on the core structure:
Xiaomi Risk owned detailed credit policy; I integrated its inputs into product and launch decisions.
The shift wasn't "launching with Baidu." It was taking ownership of a product that runs across someone else's platform — and designing the ownership lines so it could actually operate at scale.