there's something controversial about this idea that you know everyone can see what you're doing right or that you know multiple designers can be in the file at the same time like we like to say that one of the first responses we saw away on stigma was if this is a feature of
design I'm quitting right I'm changing careers and there's that kind of like tension of that narrative attention but like that is signal that you're kind of part of this revolution but you're trying to change something and when did you make quips you know your customers or user base with that
and I think that's something that they can really get behind in Champion so it's not just that they're tempting for a tool they're also championing for like a new way of working obviously that's a tall order or someone to kind of come up with that but hopefully you know if you're a founder and you're working on
something you're missing is so big that like you you have those kind of ideas and it's like how do you actually equip your customers to want to talk about that welcome to Lenny's podcast I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing
products interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies today my guest is Yuki yamashida Yuki is Chief product officer at figma where he's been for almost four
years prior to figma he was at Uber both as a product leader and also interestingly as head of design for one of their bigger product teams before Uber Yuki spend time at Google and Microsoft even taught in introductory computer science course at Harvard in our conversation we explore big must
product development philosophy how they build such a consistently great products how they hire what habit Yuki has found to be the most instrumental in his success in his career and also what Yuki and his product team have learned by building a product-led growth business
this episode Builds on a newsletter post where I interview Yuki about how figma builds product so if you enjoyed this episode or even while you're listening to it highly recommend you check it out it's currently my fourth most popular newsletter post of all time you can find it at lennysnewsletter.com
with that I bring you Yuki Yamashita after a short word from our wonderful sponsors this episode is brought to you by notion if you haven't heard of notion where have you been I use notion to coordinate this very podcast including my content calendar my sponsors and prepping guests
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takes for a limited time Lenny's podcast listeners get one thousand dollars off Banta just go to vanted.com Lenny that's v-a-n-t-a.com Lenny to learn more and to claim your discount get started today Yuki welcome to the podcast thank you for having me Lenny I am quite honored to have you on this podcast for folks
who don't know we actually collaborated already on a newsletter post that has quickly become my fourth most popular post of all time which you can find if you search for how figma builds product and so I am really excited to dig into a lot of the stuff that we maybe didn't
cover in that newsletter also just like how product works at figma in more depth how the PM Team Works how you think about product and things like that so again thank you for joining me my team is a huge fan of this podcast so I'm really honored to be here wow that means a lot I really appreciate that
so you are currently Chief product officer at figma which is such an epic role it's such an epic company could you take just maybe a minute or two to high level share your career Arc how you got to where you are today as CPO at figma my first job out of college is actually at Microsoft and I was the
product manager on Hotmail if anyone any listener remembers this Hotmail and you know I didn't really know what product management was at the time and I kind of viewed it as a kind of interdisciplinary function that will give me exposure to all the other functions so that I can actually decide
what's most of interesting to me and so I've spent a couple years at Microsoft through that also moved on to pop out to Windows and at the time they were working Windows 8 and Windows 8 was really interesting because it was like a very like touch forward uh version of of
Windows and so there's just a lot of conversation about UI and ux and that was really fun for me and you know as as I was thinking about what's next I really don't the draw of Silicon Valley and I ended up at YouTube and I believe sincere has been on on this podcast before yes this year was leading YouTube
at the time and he continues to be a great mentor of mine but you know had the opportunity to lead the YouTube app on iOS over there but it was really funny because I had never touched an iPhone before my first day so my manager on my first day just sent me to the
Apple store to buy an iPhone but you know that was kind of like my next job and that was kind of like I really uh interesting change for me too of like and we can talk about this later as well as different companies and different styles of product management and really kind of figuring out you know
I think it was a place that taught me a lot about some of my product velocities today and this is also around a time where there are a lot of interesting companies that were working in the physical and digital space um and so you know Airbnb was one of them uh Uber was another so I kind of
felt this draw just because you know it seemed just like a really interesting space to be in So eventually kind of ended up at Uber and Uber was another ton of company where I feel like a lot of My Philosophy that hopefully we can get into today around how to build products how to build products in the
kind of environment that's really fast moving and so that you know I learned a lot from there and you know today like all those companies has really been like focusing on the core experiences on consumer products and that's really been most of my career and it's part of that
worked with a lot of amazing designers but at Uber I kind of realized that I wanted to dip my toes into Divine directly so the tail end I actually switched from pm to design uh and managed a few design teams working on our bikes and scooters efforts just to understand what that's like
um and it was around this time around my Uber career where we encountered this so-called stigma you know I happen to be working on a project that experimentally brought figma into the company uh it was a time in the company where we're trying to transform our culture to be much more
transparent and inclusive and think about what's the perfect fit for that so you know I got to watch how pigma changed the way it worked how it spread within the company we got to know the figma team a little bit as well and yeah it's really drawn to that mission and as
the top as a product manager who's been straddling that boundary between design and product for all my career I really loved how figma proactively blurred that boundary and you know opened up that kind of process of participating in design so I really got behind that mission and that's how I ended up here
at figma it's so fascinating that you moved into design from product and then back into product uh at Uber you were what was the role you were ahead of design for the mobility team yeah it's called Noob ability focused on our micro Mobility efforts basically yeah do you
recommend this path for PMS to like switch into design I know it's not like something anyone can do but do you feel like that is an important skill role to experience as a PM you encourage people to try that well you know I decided not for everyone but I I think that it's first of all a
really great empathy building exercise of you know understanding that point of view and also kind of pushing yourself to push on the products on a different angle because I think it's a PM you're kind of in the center facilitating all these different trade-offs and when you
go into design you kind of have to ignore some of those other aspects to really be insistent on posting on the best experience possible like just kind of suspend everyone's you know disbelief in business usability or engineering people's ability to push on a vision and that's just kind of like an interesting
exercise to do and then I think the the last thing is like I actually think it's an opportunity for in design npm to learn from each of it right like when I became a manager of design teams one of the things like coach designers on or like how to win over PMS you know and like
how to speak npn's language and uh you know likewise it's important for them to understand that as slow so those are some of the things that I thought were helpful but again you know it has come from a place to pass in that you know you really want to do this which job
would you say is harder design or product management they're hard for different reasons I would say managing designers is harder than managing product managers interesting and I think part of it is that diviners are uh it's really important to focus on growing their craft right and helping
them develop as designers so you know it might not be that the company's biggest problem is one where you can actually learn this new kind of thing you're trying to learn as a designer and this probably happened for engineers too right like you could be working on the
onboarding funnel and that might not be the best place to be learning you know micro interactions or maybe it is but like you know those aren't always aligned uh whereas so TMS it's a little bit more like PMS are just hungry for impact and so you can point them to the biggest problems a company has and while
you also do want to understand different kinds of problems or have the experience working in different kinds of problems at the end of the day I feel you know they want to be working on the thing that matters most in the company so from that perspective it's easy and you know
as you know and the reason this podcast exists is because PM isn't easy and so the discipline I think is is harder in a sense that like it's sometimes hard on a day-to-day case to know your day the best thing you could possibly be doing and so I think that makes it a little bit harder as a PM as well
I had a designer friend who moved into a PM role I had a product role at a startup and she's like holy I had no idea how hard being a product manager was and a product leader I have so much more empathy for the PM role and so yeah interesting it works in both ways similarly I was I was actually a manager
of Engineers at one point and I felt the same way where managing PMS was a lot easier to manage the engineers so yeah kind of translates to a lot of different roles did you see that folks listening to your career Arc and just all the places you've been all the wonderful
things you've done imagine many people are like wow how do I have a career like that Microsoft Google figma Uber if you had to think back and identify maybe one habit or one skill or behavior that you think is most contributed to your success as a leader as a product leader what do you
think that would be you know people who work with me know that I often talk about storytelling and in fact if you've ever reported to me a storytelling has showed up in some kind of performance through the I feel and that's how much I care about it and you know I actually
think that a lot of being a great product manager is being a great Storyteller and I know like a lot of us have already talked about it out there I think it's the importance of Storytelling is understood but maybe I I would share two things that are specific about it that I think are interesting
one is just understanding the power of synthesis and you know it's this idea that maybe even as kind of like a early career PM you know you're inside some of these reviews and you know a lot of people say hey like at least you could take some notes for the meeting right so
that you know you're adding value and so that's commented by saying here but I think the most powerful part of that is that in some ways YouTube synthesize what happened right and a lot of things are said in a review and there's still this kind of like bring it all together
into like a distillation of a message and even that's like that's a lot of power I think you know what do you take away from all these different opinions that all these leaders had and like how do you push that uh you know push the project forward from there so that's kind of one example or another example
is I really love thinking through Frameworks and offering ways and of talking about a problem where waves and thinking about a problem and that's kind of synthesis to figuring out all these different disparate parts and kind of you know coming up with a way to a lens
to look at something and I feel like it's something that was I learned mostly through kind of literature classes almost you know where you're doing kind of literary commentary and you're reading like uh William Yates poem and you're trying to kind of like You observe all these interesting things but
then you're you have to take those different observations and like distill into a thesis into something cohesive and I think that's what a good PM can do like all these different ideas and opinions and problems and how to kind of distill it down and so I think that's one aspect of Storytelling that's really
important and the other aspect of Storytelling of course is like you know a story is only as good as you know the actions that's capable of driving and a lot of times that I often coach my product managers are on we're living in a world where everyone is constantly distracted right
and you kind of get like these 30 seconds of attention at a time and so just the ability to kind of like really tell something powerful that sticks is really important kind of like the memorability of it and I often talk about mimification which is this idea that like I found this out most at Uber
I feel where there are certain insights Data Insights research insights that were mimified to the point where like someone like Travis or Dara was just like this Insight in the middle of a meeting and you know that you've really done your job as maybe a researcher or a
data scientist or product manager if like people are able to do that and draw from that in that way and that's what ultimately kind of like sticks right and so when you kind of start thinking thinking about it from that perspective it's really powerful because it's the
way in which knowledge is transferred within the company and you kind of you know compel Accenture or you know when when I'm kind of like uh being maybe ask questions by other readers or stakeholders the thing that's going through my head is like okay there's this kind of story that that leader is
trying to develop or like a meme about like what this project is about or you know what the biggest problem is and so what kind of story are they trying to kind of like create in their heads so that they can kind of like remember or talk about what's happened and if you
kind of take that mice that you just realize that it's a really useful way to think about everything I'm really excited to chat about this idea because it comes up a lot uh the power of Storytelling it's similar to like being good at Vision it's like yams are always told like hey you gotta improve in
Vision here's like a skill that's the great PMS are really strong at and I feel like storytelling is similar it's like a this vague cloud of a skill that you you build over time and you mentioned a few things that you recommend to people that you work with like think of it as a Me Maybe is there
anything else like when you're doing a performance review with the PM and they're they're like one of their skill gaps is storytelling is there anything else you recommend they specifically do to get better at the skill or is it just yeah do it again and again and watch me
do it watch other people do it and you'll learn yeah I think of it as kind of like resetting the internal computer of my brain a little bit so that like I start from scratch again and when I'm starting from like no context at all can I build up the story from there and
explain what's happening and oftentimes they're just like caught in the middle of everything and you have all this context that might not be obvious if you step away from it for just a second I guess the kind of the way to think about it is put yourself in another user's shoes and that user is someone who has
no idea what's happening and still wants to understand in a new nuanced enough way what you're grappling with and so that kind of by Grease that moment and to pull yourself out helps you tell a better story in many cases so that's that's one thing actually comes to mind
yeah got it so it's kind of escape the curse of knowledge a little bit and just like assume people don't know anything about the context the background why this is important come back to the beginning yeah I think another thing that I where I learned storytelling is through teaching so when I was kind of
like a course assistant for a computer science class and I had to explain pointers you're like okay like I really have to borrow on real world metaphors or something that is like much more grounding because if you assume a lot of knowledge then like it can be inaccessible to a lot of people and so
if you can tell a story that any student can understand then you've really done your job and once you learn that skill of being able to tell anyone who has no context then it becomes much easier to kind of turn to these other audiences that are kind of closer and closer when
I asked you in our newsletter interview what one of the core philosophies of product managers is in the way you think about product and the role of a PM at figma an interesting thing that you highlighted is that to you it's really important that PMS own the why of a
product and an idea and I think it connects to what you're talking about now I'm curious just why you think that's so important for product managers and why that's so core to the way you think about product and at figma I really can't remember where I heard this but it really stuck with me because you
know oftentimes if it's debate about well is the PM the person comes to put the idea and the answers usually no it doesn't have to be at all and in many cases you know arches like their customers come up with a ton of different ideas right and you know certainly kind of the what and how are
things that are shared uh within the company and not something that PM uniquely drives but I do think the why is something that I really always hold the PM uniquely responsible for and I think the place where I learned this the importance of this the most was actually
first at YouTube I had uh been working at Microsoft for a long time and you know I was earlier in my career so I was just really focused on my what we called our feature crew like our engineer designer Iris you know our tester and just writing specs that really specify
exactly how everything works right and so that was kind of the Microsoft culture back then and your specs had to be perfect right then I moved over to YouTube and all of a sudden you know you're responsible for an entire app and you have a pretty big team and you cannot specify everything
that happens and so naturally designers and Engineers are just making their own choices right like maybe there's an error handling situation and you know in Microsoft culture you would have had a table that specifies exactly what happens during that era right but in Google culture it's kind of like okay
well the answer is well designers they can kind of figure it out so then it's like how do they make a really great decision how do they you know I mean all these local decisions that you're not a part of how do you make sure that a great decisions made and if everyone has
an understanding of why we're doing this what problem we're solving then you know people can make really great decisions it's the only way you can really scale so that's kind of where it came from and then since then I've started to realize also that there are other functions that
do this well so for example our engineering team at figma whenever we do at retro or postmortem you know we do this thing called five wise right and it's kind of the idea of the behind it was like well why did this happen how did it happen okay and why did that thing happen and go deep enough where
you can kind of find the root cause and go fix all those things and I think a PM can do this too which is you know a customer is asking for a feature but then he would say okay why are they asking for it and kind of back out the problem but I think there's one more
step you can take which is like why do they have that problem in the first place and maybe there's something there and that could be an opportunity to you know make a bigger product impact by fixing kind of like that underlying condition that created the problem in the first place that's so cool that you
actually do the five wise I hear people talking about the five wise all the time and I don't know I haven't heard people actually using it so you actually do this at your postmortems you said yes sir engineering team uh that's accepting though yeah that's so interesting can
you talk a bit more about these postmortems is this just like when something goes wrong or is this just every project retrospective post-mortem sort of thing as it relates to Five Wives it's more when something went wrong but I do think we have a a retro culture it's law like where you know
there's always opportunity to make things better and if you don't create kind of the environments to talk about it then you know some of those will go unaddressed forever so cool okay another attribute of the product team and how you build product and figment that you
should that was really interesting is you mentioned that you just have an obsession with a proximity to customers that you make sure your PMs and products are really close to customers when you hear that you're just like imagine everyone listening is like oh yeah we're really close to customers we talk to
customers all the time of course you got to talk to customers I'm curious what it is that maybe you think sets you apart in terms of how you think about being close to customers and if there's a story maybe of I'm just like wow this is how close we are to customers it's maybe
something that emerged out of that that'd be really cool to hear well I think a lot of it starts with our origin story in many ways uh which is that way back when when Dylan the small group of people were building figma yeah this is the time when no one believed that was possible to have a design editor in the
browser right and so it just seemed like science fiction almost and yet what Dylan did you know consistently throughout was just put the product in front of designers ask them for feedback come back to them the next time way back feedback implemented and it becomes better and better and better and you
know and no moment was their tentative expectation that the designer suddenly turns around and implements that tool in their organization it was really just about kind of like listening really carefully to what the community had to say and through that process making them
you know evangelists right and that's kind of where a lot of how figma came to be and why we have such a strong connection with our community where we've actually you know they've really helped shape you know the product to date and there's a deep belief in that and they're the ones that are now
advocating for figma and helping us spread within the community within their company so you know that's kind of the backdrop for why we have such a strong connection with with our customers and you know there's a lot of things that you see so for example if someone on my
team show and oftentimes so we'll tweet out to the community like here's what we're thinking or you know we're actually thinking about focusing a lot more in prototyping what are the top problems you're seeing and you know people come back with all these different answers because everyone's
passionate and we kind of go in there and just look at all the feedback and understand what people are saying and just have a stronger pulse on how people are feeling and that's not to say that everything is an implemented verbatim but you know we really find it useful to
feel like we have a sense of what people are thinking and I think like the most crazy version of it maybe is you know Dylan's always reading customer feedback and pro infections reads the most customer feedback of all of us and has been doing that for like a decade right
and oftentimes you know there used to be this thing where he would drop in tweets that he sees into different slack channels to be like hey this seems concerning or we're getting this feedback and a guy kind of got to a point where you know we got big enough where people would feel like they had to
drop everything and deal with that tweet so Chris RC deal and I kind of like intervened we created this new channel private Channel called concerning tweets and it just you know for uh this small group of us that Dylan can kind of like drop those in and these are tweets that
aren't going viral by any means they're just things that he sees with like one like sometimes zero likes but he feels there's an essence of Truth to them and we make sure that you know we look at what's going on there and see if there has had something you know much bigger that we should be focusing on but that's
kind of like the extent to which you know someone like Dylan from a you know from top down implements this idea that like we need to be staying close to what our users are saying that's an awesome idea for a channel a way to kind of contain that uh potential Madness that
it creates is there anything else you've learned around hearing feedback like that in a tweet let's say or are just a few loud voices and deciding what to actually work on do you have kind of an approach there just deciding what's worth paying attention to as we've built out our research and data functions you
know it's really important to kind of balance out the vocal minority with you know what's actually happening right so I really view some of those tweets more as kind of like canaries in the coal mine in a way and inputs into many inputs we have around you know everything our customers could possibly
be experiencing and you know it's important to realize that you know we have certain forums like our support tickets where customers are tend to be much more dissatisfied and we have other kinds of inputs that are kind of sales conversations with prospects you know where it's really
more about perceptions around figma in some cases and I think it's just important especially as a product manager to feel like you have this balanced portfolio of different kinds of feedback to know that you don't have any blind spots so I think that's one of the
things that like I I focus a lot on when I came in which is like you know the figma team is very good at Twitter and you know staying on top of the sentiments and luckily for us a lot of designers are on Twitter right but the reality is that most of our audience at principally probably aren't and so you
know building our capabilities to extract feedback or or Insight from those other sources as well that reminds me I think Twitter was really instrumental to the beginnings of figma I believe Dylan made this kind of social graph of the most influential designers on Twitter and that was kind of as good
a market strategy get those designers on figma and then I think he open sourced as his code to do that is that right yeah yeah that sounds right to me like um and it's very intentional about which designers we need to win over I think it was very novel at the turn what is it
like to work with Dylan field uh he's you know as an outsider he's a legend feels like he's an incredibly smart talented hard-working CEO there's always tension a little bit between a cheap product officer and a CEO and so I'm just curious what's he like to work with as a product leader and then is there
like I don't know memory that comes to mind of just like a way that encapsulates what it's like to work with Dylan we're very different actually and uh you know diligence very it's very based on intuition and Instinct and that intuition is actually built off of you know
thousands and hundreds of thousands of you know customer interactions where he might look at something and be like you know what this isn't gonna land well or you know here is the biggest problem right now and you're kind of like well how does it conclude that and you know
part of my job is kind of like filled out that logic Street for him of like how does it arrive at that conclusion so that people can kind of understand that at scale in a way but his is very much about that or you know I think there's a way which sometimes it's a product manager you kind of want to lay
out a problem and say okay we're gonna first focus on this problem and then bear obese three approaches we're going to take this approach and vocabulary review you know every step along the way but for Dylan I think it's very hard for him to really kind of like fully get
bought in until he kind of seeds like the end implementation to literally feel like if this is a good solution or not and so I think that's kind of like the kind of thinker he is where it really needs to see it to to kind of feel it but it's not totally random it's based on like all these interactions of
customers and somehow encoded in him to kind of like build up some of those kind of intuitions and I think one of the things that's really interesting about him is that like his he actually really cares like very deeply about any given user and how they're feeling about big
line I remember when during the height of the pandemic we were doing a 101 walking around Dolores Park because you know this is the era where you would take meetings you could take meetings they're all outside right and then he you needed to use the bathroom so he came out to my house in
the Castro he's a bathroom and then he met my partner and my partner was on figma and sigum pulled up because you know he's just doing work and Dylan you know just went straight in there and wanted to ask what the biggest problems were or like what's not working and they
started kind of like geeking out on some issue around Google fonts and you know this is like the first major interaction between the two of them but it's kind of one of those things where like that's how much Dylan cares and on one level it's just you know it's easy to say hey this is like a single user who just
happens to be using your product and be dismissive with it or not care about deeply because you think you already know like all the biggest problems but that's not as edited um and so that's kind of the level of kind of I guess customer Obsession if you will um that he exhibits and and then in turn
informs um his intuitions that's amazing figma is like 10 years old at this point right like he's been at this for a long time like a decade and the fact that he's still so obsessed with just like a random person just using figma and he's taking the opportunity to like
experience it in real time every chance he gets sounds like yeah hey Ashley head of marketing and flat file how many B2B SAS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers at least 40 and how many of them screw that up and what happens when they do
well based on our data about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding so if your CSV importer doesn't work right which is super common considering customer files are chock full of unexpected data and formatting they'll leave
I am zero percent surprised to hear that I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both sign up conversion and increasing long-term retention getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important totally it's
incredible to see how our customers like Square Spotify and Zora are able to grow their businesses on top of flat file this because Flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster if you'd like to learn more or get
started check out flat file at flatfile.com Lenny [Music] as an outsider it feels like figma's just like always firing in all cylinders shipping the best product people love it I use it I should have mention this but I use it probably every day for my newsletter for illustrations and Banners
and all the stuff yeah like I don't know what I do without it and it always feels like vegan is just killing it I know that's never the reality I'm curious is there a story of something that just maybe didn't work out the way you hoped whether it's a feature or launch or
something like that that just kind of shows people that it's like not everything always works out we run experiments all the time that don't come back with winning results you know and we certainly have built a lot of more complex features that took a while to take off so a good example of this is in
a design system space we have something called branching emerging and branching and merging is its workflow maybe you're building a really complex design system and then you don't want anyone ever on random way touching your components that are used by thousands of other projects
so you kind of create this workflow of someone maybe you to effectively suggesting a change you're reviewing it and then posting it in and so in theory makes a lot of sense and things that our customers asked us for but once we built it you know in the initial stage it just
didn't really see that much with option and you know it didn't feel great because it was like a really big investment for us so it's like a lot of work that we put into it and there's just many different reasons some of it was performance some of it was like this was a foreign workflow and it just takes
time and like us helping customers kind of implement some of those workflows we realized some gaps because we don't really use it that much ourselves and so I think as we're getting bigger one of the things I'm realizing is that we're starting to build a lot of features that
are not necessarily for organizations like ours and when we do that we really need to be creative about how we understand how effective those are because we've had such a strong culture of internal testing and dogs looting and those are the things that really helped make sure
the quality of our product was good enough but now we're working with really new types of customers and you know needing to push ourselves and build that muscle So speaking of high quality software again I'll repeat I think figma is one of the most beloved software products it's kind of become Central to
a lot of the ways people work it's also I think one of the fastest growing SAS products in general and I don't know this may be the ultimate softball question but I'm just curious what is it that you do at figma to build such high quality software because it's rare for
B2B software especially what do you do as a product leader as a product team to just set this High bar make sure that the stuff that you put out is great consistently and you know the more tactical the better it's so important that you're using your own product products and I think we're in a very
lucky position where all of us can get creative around using pigma in some way and obviously designers are you know that internally within figma are kind of the most vocal and the ones who are in the product like six hours a day essentially but even for PM's like one
of the first things I did when when I arrived was we're a little bit more of a memo culture and I was like you know what we should be a deck culture because we can build those decks in figma and you know just that act alone allows you to kind of encounter a lot of issues and
for you to get familiar with it and so I think there are ways in which sometimes you have to get kind of creative to enable your company your entire company to to use the product more or as an example recently we just did uh calibrations for performance reviews and fig jam and our head of design node I
kind of came up with this amazing template and we've distributed it through HR and that was another reason for everyone to use big gym and so that's the biggest thing the more hours people are spending inside your product internally I think it just naturally becomes better because a lot of times
it's not just about people raising their hands and saying that's the problem it's more about like you just want to make your own own workflows your own day-to-day better and derive satisfaction from improving that right so the takeaway there is get your product teams to use the product as
often as possible that is a really clever way of doing that at figma like I was I know you mentioned in our newsletter interview that you switch from memos to decks usually goes the other way around and now I get the kind of the second order effects of that
where people are building their decks in figma that is very clever not everyone's building collaboration software but that is a really clever idea and I think there's probably a bit of trickle down from Dylan's obsession with the product in making it just continuing to just like be obsessed with
making it a great experience combined with that right like people using the product and this trickle down of we really need to make this as awesome as possible there are other templates for example when I was at Uber you know especially working on the driver's side
of course like we went out and driving and that kind of speaks to some aspects of it but one of the things that I've I've realized is when you are logging a bug and you kind of like add some Engineers to it to have them look into it the degree of motivation is so different if that engineer has somehow
experienced a problem in some way so for example you know everyone at Uber would take Ubers into work right and if an engineer worked in a driver app saw a driver struggling with something they would find a kind of like find it embarrassing and kind of feel personally
accountable to go and fix that and like when you can create that sense of personal accountability then like all these crazy things happen and you know all this progress happens so I think for us as getting creative at Uber about okay well how do we kind of increase those interaction points to the point
where like if someone building feels like they have some kind of personal relationship with the the end user and this is what happens at stigma too where a lot of our designers still personally accountable in a way because all their customers are you know people they already know in in the community like on
Twitter and all those kinds of things so they feel like they have to put something out there that's defensible or that they're really proud of so I think that kind of personal accountability can really make a difference now begs a question of I imagine this engineer at
Looper coming back to their desk and like I'm gonna fix this bug and then their PM's like no we got a ghost to hit here's our priorities we got this road map we don't have time to fix this right now it's just one random bug and so there's kind of a two-part
question just like give a approach to that do you encourage Engineers designers just fix stuff that seems broken slash you mentioned that you have a fun experience with okrs and how you've approached okrs at figma and you've kind of gone back and forth a little bit and so maybe as a second part
just like talking about your experience with okrs at pigma um the first part I would say that I think one most powerful things especially for startups is that kind of Bottoms Up energy right and maybe a developer noticing something is wrong and just going off and fixing it and
for the most part I try not to get in the way of that because if people are doing that constantly and everyone a company is kind of trying to make the product better that is sometimes a way more effective way to improve the quality of experience than this like top down of like oh let's define this
quality experience metric and you know try to like change all the things because you might miss these things so that's one one aspect and the second thing is you know I think a lot of PMS have grown to realize this which is like if you ask an engineer about how much time it'll cost to go and build
something and it's something that they came up with or they're advocating for it's almost always half the time as something that like you are asking for sapn right and that kind of like motivation is so different and that's why you know getting the buy-in of developers is really important right
because you want to feel like they're personally vested in this problem and then all of a sudden like their their willingness or their creativity or all these things Spike and so when you kind of think about all those things when there's a situation where like an engineer or a designer is trying to fix
kind of like a real custom problem I'm kind of like by all means right so that's on that okr is like totally bigger topic and maybe I'll kind of set it set the context of why I have such this like love-hate relationship with it which is that a lot of my career I've
actually just worked on core experiences and okrs are kind of like the date of my existence in a way right because when you're working on the core experience sometimes you're just kind of like I'm just trying to make the experience better and sure I can come up with this
like be aslay to measure what that looks like but you know that's not what I'm thinking about every day anyways it just seems like very performative and there's just like a lot of work that goes into it and you kind of encounter one of two situations like one is you come up with some secondary metric that nobody
actually cares about right that technically you can measure and technically you can move but like you haven't actually proven that it really matters so maybe it is some kind of like satisfaction metric that you kind of have on a slim survey but you know you haven't actually done the work to show
that that actually has correlations with retention or anything that actually quote matters for real in the business or you know it's some kind of weird usage metric or something like that right and then the other extreme is to say like no we're going to be ambitious
that we're going to send it for business schools so for example you know even if I was the PM for the rider experience at Uber I'd be like you know what we're going to contribute incremental trips because the experience is going to be so good that we can get more people to come
back right and I think the reality for a lot of that is it's kind of a metric that you don't have full control over or there are many hops intelligent kind of affects it and like okay well maybe we can make the experience better and maybe that kind of a group enters their
attention and maybe this you know and by the time you get there you actually can't even prove that you moved like the top level metrics so either you incred something that like matters but you can't move or you make it something that you just move it doesn't actually matter
so that's kind of a relationship I've had about marriage and so even you know it's really frustrating right so when I write that think about you know one of the things I realized is that you know we had okrs but people were kind of trading it almost as like a to-do list or a task list of like okay here's how
by the end of quarter I need to complete these tasks and and then I almost feel like you know I I did my job kind of thing and we would have these Dreadful meetings where we go through these spreadsheets um and like have people stand up in front of everyone and like talk about
those commitments or those those key the results rather but they were dreadful for a reason which is that like you just couldn't really understand what the team actually really cared about and it kind of got to this point where we had all these and this kind of is similar to the secondary metric problem
but like either you could approve that you actually moved it or you're trying to work on something that like I don't actually understand why it's useful and so that was when I kind of deprecated it on you know and said I just want to understand like your headline like what are you trying to do
like philosophically and just like don't stress about whether you can measure it or not just excellent understand what you're optimizing for right and let's first have that to date right and then once they get there then let's talk about okay well what are some ways that
you can measure it and some of it's qualitative something it's quantitating that's fine and I almost kind of feel like sometimes it's better to take the report card like approach of saying hey just give yourself a score tell me how you derived that score let's all understand that like the metrics and
those inputs that go into it can change over time and we're gonna get more sophisticated about how we measure it right but like at least everyone understands like what on Earth you're trying to go for right so that's kind of like where you know uh where I kind of moved in my first year
outside and then we hired a head of data so he's a friend of mine you know from Uber too and one of the things she kind of felt was like okay but this is still very risky and super subjective so like let's just try to bring over Kiara's back and see if we can just do them
better next time right and so we've done that and they were definitely better than like you know when I first arrived just because we had a data science team and you know we had more rigor around metrics and things like that but again like this time it was less about not understanding what people were doing but
more like not understanding if teams are actually committed to moving those okrs and one of the problems that you find is you know we have these okrs but they kind of feel like these post-rationalizations of the projects that you're working on anyway and at the end of quarter you kind of come back and
see if there's oks move fingers crossed right but like if you stop an engineer in the middle of the hallway or the virtual hallway instead of stake and ask them okay like what are your team's biggest goals are okr it's like how many times like they wouldn't be able to say
they're just like well I'm working on this project that's really important right and so it's like well what's the point of kind of publishing this okay or if like you're actually not thinking about moving it on a daily basis almost right and so that's when you know we tried to
experiment with this terminology like well maybe we call it commitments instead like people would kind of take it a little bit more seriously and it's kind of my belief that you know oftentimes like commitments are kind of this pair between the Y and the what and sometimes the face of the commitment is
the what it's like a project and there are many y's behind it or it's the why and there are many projects behind it that kind of what's trying to formalize that idea but it if I could tell a little bit complicated a little bit or sometimes people are like well like I
mean okay has exist for a reason and like this is basically an okay art with just like a different name so my honestly ever since we still haven't figured it out you know and we're still iterating on a bunch of different things but I think I've developed some philosophies around it
which is you know no matter what you call it right because like you know these it doesn't matter as much I think that like for me there are three things that really matter about like the good opr and what is legendary like people look at it and understand what it is and like it's not some like
weird obfuscated metric that doesn't mean anything to anywhere I think like actionability like I want an OTR to inspire action like you look at that and you're like it stirs actually makes me want to like do something differently right and then the third one is authenticity which is like
does this actually honestly depict what you're doing or what you're trying to do on a day-to-day basis because if it doesn't then like it's hard for me to trust that that matters or if that's something that just happens to describe what you're doing but isn't really
connected in a meaningful way then you know I I kind of question the value of it all so that's why I am in the process but you know I definitely um all years to advice around this kind of stuff because I feel like we haven't quite cracked the code I love hearing that that whole journey I feel like you
always hear from product teams here's what we do now you never hear here's the experiments we've been through here's what we've tried here's what worked for a while here's what doesn't work now and here's what we're doing now so it's really cool just to hear all the experimentation you've done clearly
figma is a company where you encourage experimentation and trying new things that aren't working and it's cool that you have the flexibility to just like let's just do headlines for now no more no more specific goal metrics we're just gonna build things that we think are
important and then the newsletter post for folks that are listening you should actually show the templates that you're using these days for planning your projects and handling yeah hero KRS so folks can check those out if they're interested in seeing how you're doing
that now you also mentioned you've hired this awesome data scientist and maybe just expanding that further imagine a lot of the success of figma and the product that you built is the people that you hire at figma I believe you have 22 product managers which sounds very small for a company like figma and
I imagine they're all amazing I'm curious what you look for in product leaders and product managers that you hire that may be other folks aren't as focused on and just like what does the interview process look like at figma yeah I shared some of these things right like I really feel passionately about
storytelling and you know not to give it away or anything but one of my favorite interview questions is asking describe to me a time when you're part of like controversial product assistant right and you know what did you do and all those things and I think it's it's
really revealing because you know if they can kind of like set up this conflict and understand like why this problem is really important and represent both sides and such that you can understand why that conflict existed in the first place and they can do it and it's kind of like you know even
keeled way where you you realize that they can take on these different perspectives like you start to worry a lot about that person I think or sometimes I just ask them for basic things like okay talk about kind of like a big problem that you worked on and the thought experiment for me is always like
coming out of that do I feel compelled to work on that problem right and no matter how boring it sounds on the surface like I think a really great product manager kind of like can cast something as like well this is why it's so exercising their slides so interesting I like really rally the
tricks so that's kind of one big thing of like storytelling communication because at the other day like so much of our job is around that I think other than that you know some of the things that I value are things like I kind of think about as like high bandwidth ux
conversations it's kind of like we talk about problem and you know I think about kind of like when it's foreign Solutions it's kind of this tree of okay this these branches of Explorations and it you kind of finally arrive at these Solutions and like a ton of people who
can go up and down branches really quickly have a really high a command of all these different altitudes as well so that we can talk through a lot of things at that at the end of the day kind of feel like we walk away with some progress and and you know I I think that like at Uber our first estate product
Officer Jeff Holden was someone who often talks about kind of fast forwarding to the Future and this idea that you know okay like let's just pretend we ran that experiment what do you think it'll come back with or let's pretend we like ran you just use a study and like the kinds of TMS that have the
ability to kind of imagine those outcomes I think like it helps us be much more efficient too because we're like well if we all think that's gonna go there and that's not going to compel us to taking the X and why do it at all right and so I think a lot of PM is
about kind of those kinds of shortcuts that you have to take right and it's not just about what we build it's about you know building the right things and sometimes this is important to like decide not to build something but it's all only possible if you can have that kind of like imagination or that ability
to see around quarters I love that I was going to ask you for your favorite interview questions in our lightning round and you jumped ahead which is great and those are a really good exam samples hopefully they don't give too much away I want to chat a bit about growth and
how figma grows if you ask people about product-led growth and just like whenever people talk about product like growth they're always like companies like figma slack dot dot figma's always like seen as a model of product-led growth and a product that grew through product
I imagine now there's a very robust sales team and I imagine even earlier than people probably imagine there was a sales team I'm curious as a product leader what you've learned about how to effectively work with sales and what you teach your product managers about how to work with
sales to collaborate effectively we're really lucky to have a sales team that understands our product really well and can hold their own with customers who are often also you know design leaders product leaders and things like that and I think that kind of credibility goes a
really long way one of the things that I kind of we all collectively realizing is you know we talk about product-like growth but in some ways you know I I like to think about it more as kind of like community-led growth or there are certain people inside a company that feels so strongly about figma and that
they're helping kind of push for it in these like Advocates and evangelizing for big ball right and so oftentimes like what the Philistine does is really Empower those individuals to make a stronger case or kind of connect them to the rest of the company so that we can
kind of get a wider deployment or more readers to buy it and things like that and so oftentimes a sales team is kind of like playing that role of you know creating those human connections and helping equip designers to feel passionately inside a company with the data you know with the stories and all
those things to help make a case and I think that's like the most powerful way in which we can spread where you know this the space of like figma is not the sales team but in fact it's the internal you know designer right and so that's kind of like the mental model that I
think we've been using and we're fortunate enough to have people inside companies who are so passionate to kind of want to play that role is that when you kind of like take that lens on then you start to kind of understand okay like how can we help set this person up for success and the
sales team has like different ways to do it like the product team can help in terms of like giving them visibility into how we're thinking about like involving the product or what other customers might be doing and so I really see it as kind of this partnership to enable a bat as much as possible you
know and I think that's what to me what product like growth you know looks like a figma is that that is really interesting basically making your Champion inside the company kind of a superhero helping them be more effective at what they're already doing which is evangelizing this product that they
really love interesting is there anything that you think figma did early on that you think was really important for it to start to grow either in this way or in a different way imagine there's just like a lot of product-led growth Founders that are trying to create a product-led growth
product and they fail and so I'm curious just like what do you think people often miss and what do you think figma did right that got it going I think a lot of it was about the level of intention around building community and the more there are organic conversations happening about stigma the
better right and one of the nice things about figma is you can kind of like share out a file that you've been working on and like effectively open source something but it's kind of your way of saying here's how we do it at XYZ company and sharing that with the rest
of the community and you know when people see that and when people kind of feel like they have this like Insider review and how other companies work that's where there's a lot of interest right and you know more recently you know over the last few years we've really been focused on a program called
friends of figma where we have people who are passing about figma in all different geographies kind of like come together in like a Discord Channel they meet uh regularly and are helping us evangelize and again that's kind of like that human connection between users and
then between us and the users is something that really helps build that kind of like loyalty which is the thing that then fuels all the Champions to really kind of push for it internally and give people kind of like the enthusiasm and courage to do that in Psycho organizations
it's interesting how many corollaries there are to notion and how they got started I recently chatted with Camille I don't know if you heard that episode but there's a lot of similarities with how notion use their Community to help jumpstart growth and continue to grow
totally it's interesting that that's you can call that Community like growth product like growth there's a lot of overlap there potentially for sure what advice would you have for folks that are I don't know maybe you already shared this but just like if you're a product LED growth founder listening to this if
any other piece of advice to that founder about how to get started with their product their Community their growth strategy anything else you'd want to share there you need a different way to talk about what we just talked about is just like you know there has to be
this almost like irrational it's like emotional response to your product right and it's like love for it right first it has to be cultivated internally too like you know people internally have to authentically love something to really stand behind it but then you know externally too if people are loving
something to the point where they can you know sing at the top of their lungs and just like really talk about how figma it's great like if we can get there like that's that's like a wonderful place to be right and I think that's both a combination of like you've really solved their problems lol but you
also kind of like equip people with a philosophy around a different way of working and I think that's what worked well for figma 2 which is like there's something controversial about this idea that you know everyone can see what you're doing right or that you know
multiple designers can be in the file at the same time like we like to say that one of the first responses we saw or A1 stigma was if this is a future of design I'm quitting right concerns and careers and there's that kind of like tension of that narrative attention but like that is signal that
you're kind of part of this revolution but you're trying to change something and when it didn't equips you know your customers or user base with that and I think that's something that they can really get behind and champions it's not just that they're tempting for a tool
they're also championing for like a new way of working obviously that's a tall order or someone to kind of come up with that but hopefully you know if you're a Founder you're working on something your mission is so big that like you you have those kind of ideas and it's like how do
you actually equip your customers to want to talk about that that's awesome reminds me of a quote and kind of a tagline that the Airbnb first grow team had for a long time love drives growth not the other way around they made posters of this put it all over the product teams I love that part
of the office and seemed to have worked for Airbnb clearly working for figma one last question feels like a question we have to touch on I don't know how much you can say about all this stuff but with the potential acquisition with Adobe which I know isn't done yet but I'm just curious what do you think will
change may change your hoping will change you're hoping won't change in how you build product at figma within Adobe totally yeah I mean you know as you said it hasn't closed yet and so we're still independent companies but you know when we think about that theoretical future I
think about kind of like people often ask me so like what's going to happen in terms of like the products that you work on and how is that gonna influence figma and dances we don't know yet but you know I get excited about two Avenues one is just like really continue our current
mission of making product design better and the reality is we look at product design a lot of people are still using both Adobe and stigma alongside each other right and maybe you're creating that micro interaction in After Effects or maybe you're kind of doing that intricate like illustration in
illustrator or you know editing raster in Photoshop right and and then you're bringing some of those things into figma but when you think about kind of like the end-to-end product development process there's so many ways in which if we can make all those things seamless so
that you're not like juggling a bunch of apps or able to have one single sense of truth that's really exciting to me to think about so concretely what that means I don't know yet but like as kind of like thinking through those Journeys that gets exciting for me and then the
other thing is really collaborating with the rest of adobe and thinking about kind of you know we've figured out something really interesting in the in the form of real-time multiplayer collaboration and that is a platform Adobe has a much broader set of use cases that they've been pursuing and
like what do those two things together like what could that enable right and that gets exciting for me to think about all the creative tools that I've used in the past video editing or 3D objects and things like that where it's like okay if we can bring in the power of the browser
of multiplayer of you know this feeling of like openness would that make it way easier for people would it make it much easier for people to share work or get involved so those are the things that kind of like go through my heads in terms of like what's possible in terms of what you know I don't want to change
like I really think that we've figured out something amazing in terms of our relationship with the community you know we talked about kind of like proximity to community and our users like those are things that we we intend to keep and keep doubling down on and I think it's
that's an important part of the magic of how figma works so it's something that you know I think I will continue to do and that's why I draw a lot of motivation from in the first place awesome you also get to work with Scott belsky which is going to be pretty sweet and yeah hoping to get Scott on this
podcast at some point too that'll be awesome any closing thoughts before we get to a very exciting lightning round it's really easy to listen to some of these podcasts and just feel like oh these these people have kind of figured everything out right but the reality is
we haven't you know and we're still experimenting with a lot of things you know who cares is really good example that but a lot of other things right and so you know just the other day I wrote about kind of this idea of like us living in a work in progress world and I was talking about more from the context
of like we live in a world where all of our products our product class our strategies our work in progress and like how do you like work in a world like that when what you were doing can change the next day right but you know in a similar way I think the way we work the
the way we run product processes as product managers or is itself very much a work in progress so I would love to kind of encourage this kind of conversation lady that you're facilitating just because you have so much to learn from each other and I'd love to continue to learn more from all
of you like I'm interesting ways that you grapple and be like age-old problems around things like how to set goals or you know how to review work or how to plan so anyway just wanted to kind of like signal that we are very far from perfect and I really eager to learn from
everyone else as well I love that that also reminds me of something that Airbnb Founders always came back to Joe and Brian were both designers and as you learn to be a designer you kind of are taught that everything around you is designed by someone someone just decided this webcam
is going to look this way and working this way this chair somebody decided very specifically it's going to be like this and we kind of assume the things that we're working within are just like they're figured out someone much smarter than me figure this out but it's usually
just someone just like you that had to figure something out quickly and then that's what you're doing now and so they always encouraged everyone to just remember someone designed this doesn't mean it's the perfect solution and you should always rethink things like that and not assume yeah well with that we've
reached our very exciting lightning round I've got six short quick questions for you I'll just go through them pretty quick whatever comes to mind share and we'll see how it all goes sound good all right that's great awesome what are two or three books that you've most recommended
to other folks first one that comes to mind is switch and it's really about how to affect organizational change something that sincere uh recommended to me and yeah the difficulty of like affecting change in a large organization basically and how to overcome that the second one I would say is my favorite
book of all time is one called the story of the stone and it's a Chinese novel one of the most famous Chinese novels of all time it's like thousands of thousands of pages it all takes place in a garden but it's it's one of the most beautiful piece of work I've read so I
like to recommend that you have nothing to do with yeah you see thousands of pages yeah about a stone wow I will check this out I love it I've not heard this one before favorite other podcast other than the one you're currently on oh I'll have to admit you know I am actually much more
of a visual learner not like a listener and so I rarely listen to podcasts by the two that I I have listening to in Earnest so it's a personalized stereo a long time ago and then in the earth so you know I think some of the best actually but otherwise more into reading awesome this show is also on YouTube for
folks that don't like listening and like watching things plug plug favorite recent movie or TV show last movie I watched was called the good nurse and it was about kind of a serial killer uh working in a hospital but it was a very different take on it it was very human it wasn't grotesque at
all and it was talking about how broken a system was so highly recommend it it's quite sad but yeah okay good tip what are some SAS products that you love that you maybe use at figmaier that you just discovered that you find very useful kind of cheating but like you know I
said medicine earlier like we're starting to use the big Jam for everything from calibrations to interview debriefs to product reviews to everything so that's thoroughly started to dominate our usage it's been cool to see and then you know we ever use those suspects like slack and Asana and then
we're kind of all over the place on the rest like some of us use Notions some of agencies Dropbox to me personally it's Coda and so we're kind of still quicker than that one oh I say Dropbox paper very cool yeah I love that product and I feel like no one uses it anymore but
it's cool that you guys do final question favorite fig Jam or figma Plug-In or template we have this one called the alignment scale which is a widget that you can insert into figure by Design actually but and we use it all the time so basically it's just a simple scale and whenever people click it their
face appears on one end of the spectrum or the other and so it's a quick way of being like we're doing a product review we're on a pulse check we drop it in and we're like how are people feeling a line up not aligned and you know if people are lying we just move on if not then
you know you know that it's worth a discussion so it's just yeah it's just a fast way to figure out where all the hot spots are awesome and if folks want to find that they can actually go to the newsletter interview that we did I think if you just Google how figma builds
product it comes up number one and then there's a link to actual templates you can plug that right in Yuki thank you so much for being here I am gonna go play with figma and fig Jam right after this two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to reach out learn more are you
guys hiring anything there and then two how can listeners be useful to you yes to get buy me online on Twitter or LinkedIn feel free to reach out there in terms of how you can be useful to us you know we're really starting to build a lot of products for this audience right
uh for product managers big Jam is one example of this right so you know definitely try it out give us a feedback tell me all about all the cool things that you're doing or you wish you could do on big Jam or fake love and they can tweet at me they can find me anywhere and of course we're also hiring so if
you know great people or are interested yeah there's a lot of roles so please get in touch awesome Yuki thank you so much for being here thank you so much for having me Lenny thank you so much for listening if you found if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast
Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode [Music]