Key points
- Figma CPO Yuhki Yamashita says storytelling is a PM's core job because PMs rarely build and must motivate teams around the right problem.
- Yamashita calls Uber's decision to show riders the price before pickup its hardest product call, betting users should know what they pay.
- Yamashita says AI lowers the floor and raises the ceiling in design, converging design and product management.
Figma bet on collaboration before designers wanted it
Product management is a storytelling job. Because PMs rarely build, their leverage comes from making a team care about the right problem. Yuhki Yamashita, Figma's chief product officer, illustrates this with his career and with Figma's contrarian bet on multiplayer collaboration, which became an industry standard.
Takeaways
- Storytelling is the product manager's core job. Product managers rarely write code or design, so their job is motivating everyone to focus on the right problem, and that runs on narrative. Startups need alignment around a story because resources are scarce, and people who believe the vision forgive gaps.
- Figma bet on collaboration before designers asked. At launch in 2016 people said they would change careers if that was design's future, and no designer was asking for collaboration. Six years later multiplayer editing is an industry standard. Uber was an early customer in 2017.
- Deep customer connection made Figma special. Yamashita encourages his product team to talk to users and build relationships, even texting them for their top five issues. Listening deeply means asking what problem a requested feature solves instead of building it.
- To build something people love, love it yourself. Some of the best things get built because an engineer and a designer were passionate about an idea, not because of a metric or business objective. People use products because they believe in the vision.
- Don't over-optimize your career path. Yamashita followed his interests from graphic design to computer science to product management at Microsoft, then the YouTube iOS app at Google, Uber, and Figma. He thinks about the narrative he would tell his kids or grandkids.
The Uber upfront pricing decision
- Many riders used Uber without thinking much about the price, so showing the fare up front risked scaring them away.
- The team felt users should know what they were paying, and Uber's job was to make the ride as cheap as possible.
- Yamashita says the decision was not his alone and that a big team was involved.
- He learned from Uber that operations, what happens on the ground, matter, and that an email can sometimes change behaviour.
What AI changes for design
- AI makes creation faster and lets more people take part in design work.
- Figma's head of design Noah described the shift as the floor being lowered and the ceiling raised, so more people can create while experienced designers produce more and higher-quality work.
- Yamashita says designers already work with components like LEGO blocks and are moving up the stack.