00:13:03 · Yuhki Yamashita
[00:13:03] S8: Customers of Figma. And as part of that, I got to know the team as well. And one of the things I love about Figma is that it really fits my world view, which is that design is for everyone. These boundaries between disciplines are blurred. That's what the pool is promoting. And because it was so aligned with how I thought about design, how I wanted to be a part of design, I wanted to be part of that mission. When I moved from Uber to Figma, I felt it was less about moving back from design to product, but rather being part of an organization that brought all of these things together. And so today in my role, design is part of my organization, product management is part of my organization. So it was kind of the best of both worlds. But most of all, here at Figma, we really believe that there are, in fact, a lot of things that, are overlapped. And some designers do PM's jobs, and some PM's do designers jobs, and that's okay. And I think that's kind of, like, how I see the world evolving a little bit as well. Sometimes I, you know, you can look at my career and say, Oh wow, like you made the perfect moves at the perfect time. But really all I was doing was pursuing my interests and what I was really passionate about. Because at the end of the day, I work on something that I'm excited about in terms of, like, maybe a change to the world or a change to kind of the way design is approached. And it fails. At least I still got to work on something that I was excited about and learn from it. I think, you know, some people are trying to, like, over optimize their career. But, really, if you follow the things that you're really excited about, then it's more likely that you'll want to put more effort into it. You'll you'll put more effort into making it a reality. So that's the first thing. I think the second thing is I often think about storytelling for my own career as well. Like, what is the narrative that I get excited about? What is the narrative I want to tell maybe my kids or grandkids way in the future about what it is I did? Why did I do it? Why did I find exciting. And sometimes those are ways that I can kind of say, hey, like, oh, I'm really excited about this story. How can I make that possibility? And so those are some ways that I think about my career as well. So back in 2019, we were still super small.
00:15:15 · Yuhki Yamashita
There were some early adopters like Uber or even Microsoft and Airbnb, but not everyone has believed in the power of Figma yet. There wasn't a designer asking to solve this problem around collaboration at the time. And in fact, in 2016, when Figma first launched, this was the common reaction. Right? People saying, if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers. People were really scared of collaboration back then. But fast forward six years, and multiplayer collaborative editing of design is considered an industry standard, a necessity. So both this example at Figma and at Uber show that some of the best products actually do start and are born from an intuition around an idea, a particular solution. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely true that, you know, there are some people who are very resistant to the idea of getting more people into the file and having a design tool in the web. When I talk about listening, it means listening very deeply, and sometimes what people are telling you in the surface is not enough. And one of the things that, the engineering team that does that I really love is called the five whys. Why is the customer saying that? Right? Like, why do they feel that way? Well, because they have this problem. Why do they have that problem? Keep going deeper and deeper and deeper, and that's when you get to the real truth. Sometimes this takes place in the form of customers telling you they want feature x. One way of listening is to just build feature x. But a better way of listening is saying, why do you want feature x? What problem is there? Why do you have that problem in the first place? Is there something better that we can build? And so I think it's that depth that's really important. Every product has some point of view. Every product that's trying to disrupt the current way of working definitely has its point of view. Right? Uber was disrupting taxis, and so they
00:17:04 · S0, S1, S2, S4, S5
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00:18:11 · S5, S6, S7
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00:18:44 · Yuhki Yamashita
[00:18:44] S8: I had a point of view of what a better world could be. Figma was disrupting design and had a perspective on where design needed to be. And so that disruption actually still comes from customer insights, but customers might not might not be expressing it in that way. They might just be expressing a pain point that they don't realize is solvable. And so that's the thing that I think great products are able to do is to understand those pain points, get users to articulate that, and then, like, come up with creative solutions that people might not have thought of before, that people couldn't imagine. I always try to do the exercise of putting myself in different users' shoes, trying to visualize how they would interpret what we're building. And if it doesn't quite make sense for any one of those users, then I start to kind of question whether it could be better. I definitely do the exercise of just kind of, like, pretending to be different types of users and feeling the experience through their shoes or their eyes. So that... Yeah. That's one of the first things. The second is sometimes with decisions, you don't always know, if it's the right decision. And as part of that, you kind of ask, hey, is this a one way door or a two way door? If it's a one way door where once you make the decision, you can't change back, then you spend a lot more time on it. If it's a two way door, then we can experiment and learn from it. And so that's a way in which not every decision has to be perfect so long as, you know, we're thinking about some of those future implications. As the product team, we really wanna be participating in that community, understanding what they're thinking and engaging. And so one of the things I always encourage my product team to do is just go out there to talk to users, to build relationships. A lot of my product team are on a relationship with customers where they can just text them and say, hey, like, what do you think about this idea? Or what's your top five issues right now? And get that kind of input. And that kind of input is what helps us build intuition and prioritize. So that deep connection with customers is really, I think, what makes... Has made Figma special, but something that we really prioritize. In order to build something that people love, you have to love it yourself and you have to be really proud of it.
00:20:50 · Yuhki Yamashita
One of the things that I've always observed in my career is sometimes the best things that get built aren't built because there was this perfect metric that we wanted to move or because there was this perfect business objective. And it was just simply because maybe an engineer and designer really were passionate and really wanted to build something that they were proud of and that they wanted to show their friends or other customers or people in the community. And that's the kind of excitement that it's hard to create. But if that exists, naturally, it starts to show up in your product because no longer are you trying to fight for all this... Adding all this delight and magic into the product, or rather, it's just happening naturally because it's really part of the culture. I think one of the most important things in in a startup and a company is to be aligned around the story we're telling. Why should people be excited about Figma? Where is it going? Why is that exciting? And aligning everyone around it because in a startup, you just don't have that many resources, and so you need everyone prioritized on the right, focused on the right things. And in order to do that, you know, we need to rally around a story internally. And then externally, you know, a lot of people are using your product not just because they like the product in front of them, but because they believe in your vision and your philosophy. And the more that you can tell that story and get people to kind of understand where you could be going, they could be, much more forgiving if your current product doesn't quite have everything. I've always talked about the importance of storytelling, especially for product management, and I think it's important for a couple of different reasons. The first is, you know, as a product manager, you're often not the person building the final product directly. You're not necessarily writing the code. Oftentimes, you're not really designing directly either. You're operating in a in slightly removed way, and so your core job is to motivate everyone to be focused on the right thing or to be motivated to solve a