"I asked on Twitter who's the best product manager you've worked with you were the most mentioned my take is that your scope is the world nothing should ever perceive as being out of bounds VPR product..."

"mahika is a design engineering PM hybrid at figma where she was an early pm on fig jam and is now spearheading development of a new product that the company's going to launch in June she's known as th..."

"bunch of time on how to effectively bring new ideas in your company from zero to one to launch including getting to a bunch of the stories behind some of figma's most successful products and features ..."

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"companies like copy AI cinch TV and over 100 other SAS companies are using Paragon so they can focus their efforts on core product features not Integrations the result they're shipping Integrations on..."

"people looking for jobs we're ramping up the service in a big way I'm beta testing a bepoke head hunting style service and I'm opening up a handful of slots we work with a select group of companies ea..."

"in the world with one of the best product teams in the world so basically I just want to learn as much as I can from what you've learned and what you've done in order to create more mikas in the world..."

"other scenarios meetings are a very oneway right like you kind of have um like one person talking and one like everyone else reacting this is true of like a team kickoff this is true of like an all ha..."

"features like music like voting that like really help you get into flow when you're in that file together that is such a cool example I'm trying to uh be this archaeologist studying what you're talk w..."

"definitely I I think that uh when you're actually presenting a vision one of the most important things is that there is like a single artifact that the team is creating together so I think like a comm..."

"about figma is normally you will like talk about like the market space or the opportunity or the sizing and then decide to invest versus figma is very much a like C to believe and see to feel that lik..."

"out and to building something right um and so recently I was uh doing a chat with David Hong from replit and he's the head of marketing and design at replit and he was basically talking about how if r..."

"months before the hackathon and I was kind of verbally pitching it and it was kind of like oh yeah like maybe at some point in the future we would make an investment like this but what actually ended ..."

"and the way you describe it is pretty simple just go ask people for help because you may you're probably going to find someone that's going to help you out you mentioned conviction so that's a great s..."

"faith I think that one of the most important things for a PM to create for their team is momentum you have to constantly be creating forward progress you know probably towards that Vision that we were..."

"insatiable curiosity and talking to users at every chance you get so I will like go to dinners and Grill the people around me on like how they use figma and how they use fig jam and I think when you h..."

"think what might happen in those instances is you kind of like start from nothing right you start from zero and you're like okay I'm going to like build up from zero and like gather all these insights..."

"so I think that having that early conviction willing to being willing to communicate it being willing to get feedback from other folks in your team have them react to it then get users to react to it ..."

"that balance and making it clear here's just my idea we can change it I would say that you know speaking about weaknesses having such strong conviction absolutely has downsides in particular it can it..."

"so I think that whenever I join a team or whenever I start working with a new person I'm always like I always let them know I'm always like I am very direct and if you disagree with me I want to know ..."

"people focus on the matter at hand any other advice you have there for people to one either be more direct and successful in that being directness or is there an example you can share where like becau..."

"the way that I try and create this culture of constant like direct communication constant feedback is if you have feedback to give someone else I think you can start by asking hey do you have feedback..."

"very direct and being very honest and basically radical radical cander uh as some people describe it first of all is there anything else I missed specifically before I drill into one of these that sou..."

"so one example is like you know we've been talking about this product that I'm working on and coming out of winter break this year um there's kind of this sense or at least I always suspect that there..."

"keynote and so you know Chris our CTO and Yuki our CPO were giving this keynote on like what does our year look like and I like really really deeply insisted that we should include a demo and I think ..."

"to be like really Scrappy about it and to really like be the person who's like pushing your product to its limits in the right moments and I think what you find is that if you push your product to get..."

"company to be like banging their fist on the table for a product to get built but there's also external hype which is like how do you get your users hyped about your product how do you get them to lik..."

"inside of the product of a bunch of new features and what we did was we like Easter egg them through the product um and each sort of product that we were releasing inside of fig Jam was hidden under t..."

"important I love that example something else I'm finding as a thread throughout all the lessons and stories he shares is just an immersion in your user base and truly knowing what they're excited abou..."

"insightful conversations because I think that having a product shine and having a product do well and have great adoption isn't just about like the product being great it's also about like the marketi..."

"I'd really recommend awesome let's go actually one layer deeper here so you're talking to people all the time about fig Jam AR aren't you using fig Jam what do you think of figma what do you think of ..."

"of that amazing cool very tactical and useful this episode is brought to you by vanta when it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices things get complicated fast now you can as..."

"this will feel like oh I don't really love what I'm working on but I don't have I don't work at figma I don't have like the best of most amazing products maybe it's hard to get excited about stuff is ..."

"around so you've kind of hinted at this whole idea of starting zero to one and building new products within larger companies which I want to get to uh we've gone really deep on a bunch of awesome stuf..."

"just goes one is it goes a long way in terms of the product but two it makes you know speaking about passion like it makes your day-to-day so much more fun if you feel like you're working with your fr..."

"one of my favorites um I highly recommend the second thing that you asked about which was was the figgies and this is basically like an oscar style awards ceremony uh that was like hacked together and..."

"also you know making people understand like maybe someone who they don't know that well on the PM team because then you kind of learn like okay like Beyond them you know kind of like having this Zoom ..."

"cultures everything a lot of PMS are like I have so much work to do I have like so many things to do I'm just like working all day every day what can you tell them about why this is so important and w..."

"happiness on a daily basis I was telling them the other day that like when they like post like prototypes in our slack Channel like sometimes I get like little flutters in my chest like when you have ..."

"just kind of like go for it that's an awesome correction that okay final uh trait you're great at somebody shared that you you pivot with Grace and enthusiasm when things change and priorties Chang pr..."

"leaders and originally my plan was to build this within an organization that already existed at Princeton um because you know they had the funding they had the resources they had the expertise in orde..."

"scrappiness so I think I have like a very high ability to like thrive in ambiguity and to like pull things together last minute so for example it's like very common that I am like editing a product re..."

"thanks for sharing all that this touches on something that came up in a previous podcast episode um Nel from meta had this really interesting metaphor where there's kind of every superpower has a shad..."

"segue to talking about building completely new things at at large companies so what I hear is you're kind of the go-to person for zero to one stuff at figma which is incredible figma is one of the mos..."

"this huge run with it culture where run with it is also one of our core values and it's really encouraged that people can kind of just like Sprint off in a direction and that is seen not as a distract..."

"awesome and clearly figma is very good at this so let's dive a little deeper say somebody wants to make their culture more entrepreneurial or wants to become better at this individually maybe just bro..."

"like Wildfire um and can build that level of hype you need for an entire company or an entire set of people to be clamoring for something to get built and so like more concretely I think that there ar..."

"because the current product that I'm working on actually came out of a conversation or a set of conversations where I was pitching fig Jam to people and so kind of speaking about uh you know kind of c..."

"right idea such an important Point basically understanding the business not just here's my feature here's my product or here's like what feels like great cool thing to build okay so that's the idea ge..."

"this and they would be like maybe and I would be like okay like what what am I seeing what are they not seeing and then what basically happened was we had a PM offsite where we were talking about like..."

"so like one example of something that we did was we like literally like in order to make this new product like feel more real and this was like maybe a two change in code was we like swapped out the F..."

"multi-month plus long staging or dog fooding process and so something that was really interesting to me was one of the first projects that I worked on at the company was we were building sections in a..."

"and so I just think about like putting things early on staging and getting people involved in the cycle as like opening up the doors to the product development process and you know hopefully that just..."

"which is maybe an aspect that we like did not touch on is that understanding motivations is in my opinion one of the keys to running a team successfully and driving an idea forward so you know like fo..."

"very powerful such a good tip I feel like I could ask you questions for at least two more hours but we're not going to do that maybe we'll have round two someday with that we reached our very exciting..."

"exciting lightning round are you ready I ready mahika first question what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people yeah I will start by saying that I am immediately skeptica..."

"Potter maybe it contributes to creativity I don't know are we talking about every book in the series or at least the one book no no no you have to read the entire series and you have to read it in ord..."

"to watch Dune one good choice I just watched Dune 2 I don't know if a more Epic movie can be made I was just like gripped the visuals stun yeah it's out of control I watched at IMAX I think that was a..."

"take you from that awesome good choices on Arc uh I whenever any whenever anyone asked me for a great onboarding FL that's the one I point people to and we had Josh Miller on the podcast in the past a..."

"question we talked about the figgies you mentioned there was an award for PM least likely to write a PRD was that you that won the award for chance oh I think it was me and show tied okay I guessed co..."