Long before “engineering” became a formal career path, it was already part of Will Jiang’s daily life.
Growing up in China, Jiang was the student teacher whom a classmate turned to when a laptop froze minutes before class. By high school, he was maintaining his school’s network infrastructure by diagnosing connectivity issues, keeping systems online, and supporting hundreds of users. What stayed with him wasn’t just the technical challenge, but the idea that thoughtfully built systems could quietly make people’s lives easier.
When it became time to go to college, Jiang initially gravitated toward physics, drawn by its ambition to explain the universe from first principles. He soon realized, however, that computer science offered something physics did not: a much faster feedback loop between effort and real-world impact. He enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.
Beyond its strong programming curriculum, UC Berkeley's Computer Science program gave Will the foundational tools that later proved essential to his growth in engineering. Courses in statistics strengthened his skills in data analysis, experimentation, and interpreting metrics, which are core to identifying opportunities, running A/B tests, and quantifying impact. Exposure to Human-Computer Interaction principles sharpened his focus on user behavior, intuitive design, and empathetic interfaces.
Together, these subjects in statistics and HCI formed the foundation of Will's approach to growth hacking. They allowed him to pursue strategies centered on genuine usability and sustained engagement rather than short-term manipulation, aligning with his belief that products earn loyalty through respect rather than exploitation. Berkeley prepared him to understand why users adopt, retain, and champion better software.
From Hobbyist to Engineer
Jiang’s path into professional engineering began with a personal problem.
As an active member of the War Thunder Live gaming community, he built an Android client that allowed players to access live updates, posts, and statistics on their phones. The project forced him to confront real-world constraints such as device fragmentation, unreliable APIs, and the realities of mobile UI design. For the first time, he experienced the gap between understanding systems and building something people actually wanted to use.
That experience helped him land an internship at Expedia. During a company hackathon, Jiang prototyped a feature that reordered hotel and flight search results based on user behavior, something he personally wished existed as a traveler. Leadership immediately recognized its value, and the core logic remains in production to this day, nearly a decade later. This feature slightly increased the hotel conversion rate.
The lesson was clear: solving the right problem would grow the user base.
Do Better Experiences bring More Users?
Jiang joined Instagram (Meta) as a mobile engineer focused on user growth and UI/UX. Within three years, he was promoted to senior engineer and became responsible for shaping his team’s growth roadmap.
Growth engineering often incentivizes maximizing engagement at any cost. Jiang pushed in a different direction. He actively resisted dark patterns, which are design tricks that inflate metrics while leaving users feeling manipulated. His belief was simple: if an interface feels intuitive, users should not have to fight it. A well-designed product works even when users are distracted.
That philosophy shaped his most impactful work at Instagram: improving the multi-account experience. Many users juggle personal, professional, and creative accounts, yet switching between them once felt unnecessarily cumbersome. Jiang led a redesign that made the experience seamless.
The impact was immediate. Friction dropped, active account usage increased by tens of millions, and Instagram’s multi-account experience leapfrogged competitors like Twitter (now X) and Reddit. The feature earned
Beyond his work on the account switcher, Will shipped over 50 targeted improvements to Instagram's account creation, login, and recovery flows. These user-centric enhancements, ranging from smarter pre-fills and streamlined navigation to automatic signal matching and robust account linking, collectively helped tens of millions of users access the app more easily and reliably.
Inspired by his long-standing passion for intuitive mobile experiences, as an Android user since the HTC G1 and a keen observer of app evolution over more than a decade, Will made it his goal to build features that reduce friction and help users access and enjoy the app more easily. By prioritizing intuitive, frictionless experiences over manipulative tactics, he ensured these features empowered users rather than exploited them. This user-first approach also extended to his proactive participation in hackathons: from building a practical short-listing search result tool during an Expedia hackathon (a feature still live nearly a decade later, after receiving strong positive feedback) to consistently seeking opportunities to create tools people actually want to use.
Scaling Rednote for Global Reach
After Instagram, Jiang joined Xiaohongshu, internationally known as Rednote or Little Red Book, a platform that blends content, commerce, and community.
As a Tech Lead Manager, Jiang initially spearheaded Android efforts through a dedicated task force, experimenting with targeted, smaller markets such as Japan. These early tests helped refine product approaches, but Rednote remained overwhelmingly oriented toward its core Chinese user base. That changed dramatically in early 2025, when political uncertainty around TikTok in the U.S. sparked a massive wave of international "refugees" flocking to the platform, transforming global expansion from a strategic long-term goal into an immediate, high-stakes priority.
To capitalize on this sudden opportunity and drive sustainable user growth, Jiang focused on aggressive yet user-respecting growth hacking tactics centered on lowering barriers for non-Chinese speakers. A cornerstone of this push was leading a comprehensive overhaul of the internal i18n (internationalization) SDK and supporting platform infrastructure. This modernization streamlined the adoption of translated string resources across the engineering organization, making it far easier and faster for teams to localize the app without friction. By enabling a more efficient workflow for handling multilingual content and UI elements, the revamp directly accelerated the rollout of region-specific adaptations, boosting accessibility and retention among new global arrivals who might otherwise bounce because of language barriers.
Building on this foundation, Jiang's team experimented with and shipped innovative content translation capabilities powered by cutting-edge LLM-based approaches. Rather than relying on traditional, often clunky machine translation pipelines, this method delivered more natural, context-aware translations of posts, comments, and in-app elements, particularly bridging Mandarin and English in real time. The feature not only made the predominantly Chinese feed comprehensible to newcomers but also encouraged meaningful engagement, as users could read, react to, and respond across languages with minimal effort.
These technical leaps culminated in breaking down long-standing communication barriers between the Chinese and international communities on the platform. What began as a reactive scramble to accommodate influxes of TikTok migrants evolved into genuine cross-cultural growth: non-Chinese users discovered authentic lifestyle content, shared their own perspectives, and formed connections that fueled organic virality and active usage. Features emerging from this work even sparked memes and media headlines, amplifying Rednote's visibility in new markets. True to Jiang's philosophy, these initiatives prioritized intuitive, frictionless experiences over manipulative tricks, proving that building better, more inclusive products can drive meaningful, efficient growth without exploiting users. By modernizing infrastructure and leveraging smart translation innovation, the team turned a geopolitical moment into sustained momentum for Rednote's global ambitions.
Looking Ahead
Jiang remains deeply committed to Rednote’s global expansion, channeling his expertise in user growth to turn the platform's unexpected momentum into lasting international traction. Hands-on with production-scale implementations of KMP and CMP, he sees these technologies as game-changers for cross-platform development, delivering near-native performance and scalability while slashing duplicated engineering effort and enabling faster iteration on features that drive user acquisition and retention across diverse markets.
Yet for Jiang, technology serves growth only when it prioritizes the user. His approach to growth hacking emphasizes clever, ethical levers: overhauling internationalization infrastructure for seamless multilingual support, pioneering LLM-powered translations that make content accessible across languages, and shipping region-specific features that spark organic virality without relying on addictive dark patterns or attention manipulation. These moves lowered friction for millions of new users, especially those arriving amid the 2025 TikTok uncertainty, boosting activation, engagement, and cross-cultural sharing in ways that fueled genuine, efficient growth.
In an industry crowded with short-term tricks and noise, Jiang’s contributions stand apart: they don’t chase fleeting attention through exploitation; they earn sustained usage by building intuitive, trust-building experiences that empower users to connect, discover, and stay longer on their own terms.
Explore more about Jiang’s journey and contributions on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-jiang-0132a07a/.
This article is published under HackerNoon's Business Blogging program.