Yuri Zanoni

I used to think leadership was about managing large teams. TikTok handed me a European expansion and zero direct reports. We were launching TikTok Location Services into European markets from Shanghai. That meant regular trips to London and Amsterdam, while coordinating product, legal, operations, marketing, finance, and leadership teams spread across multiple time zones. And almost nobody in that room reported to me. That was the shift. I realised the hardest leadership work often happens without formal authority. Especially in cross-border environments. Nobody was waiting for alignment to happen automatically. It had to be built. The work became: – aligning incentives before friction escalated – translating priorities between HQ and local markets – keeping momentum when every function defined success differently – building enough trust that decisions still held weeks later That experience changed how I evaluate seniority. Headcount matters less to me now than the ability to coordinate complexity across systems, cultures, and stakeholders. Especially when the stakes are commercial and the structure is ambiguous. A surprising amount of senior leadership is simply the ability to keep complex systems moving without relying on hierarchy. At what point did leadership become more about alignment than authority for you?

Frankfurt. November. World of Trading. 5,100 attendees. I was based in Hong Kong. My company was Chinese-owned. The room was overwhelmingly German. I had a few weeks. It was not my first time navigating European scrutiny. At TikTok and Alibaba, I had already worked on campaigns and communications across Germany, the Netherlands, and wider EMEA markets. I knew what European financial and tech audiences expect: precision, credibility, and no overselling. They do their own due diligence. My job was to give them something worth examining. In a matter of weeks, I assembled a local team in Germany, briefed them remotely from Hong Kong, coordinated the booth build, media credentials, and speaking agenda across three time zones, and prepared the company narrative for an audience that had never heard of us and had no particular reason to care. I also spoke at the conference as part of the official programme. Over the three days, the team generated around 400 product registrations and opened conversations with prospective partners across Germany, Benelux, and Switzerland. When you are a regulated financial services platform entering a European market, communications is not a brochure. It is a person on stage who understands the product deeply enough to answer difficult questions in real time. The German financial press is exacting. The Dutch investor and tech community is the same. That is not a problem. It is the brief. We came prepared. It worked.

B2B content becomes weak when it starts with the product. Across Bloomberg, PicPay and TikTok, I learned that business audiences rarely need more technical information. They need help understanding what the technology changes for them. For payments and commerce, that normally means answering four questions: • What commercial problem does this solve? • What operational complexity does it remove? • What risk does it reduce? • What measurable outcome should change? The product still matters. But its features only become meaningful when they are translated into conversion, adoption, efficiency, trust or revenue. That translation, from technical capability to business consequence, is where content becomes commercially useful.