An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)
Yuki Yamashita, CPO at Figma, discusses Figma's product philosophy, hiring, and growth. He emphasizes storytelling, PMs owning the "why," customer proximity, and fostering internal product usage to build high-quality software and community-led growth.
Deep Dive Analysis
15 Topic Outline
Yuhki Yamashita's Career Journey to Figma CPO
The Importance of Storytelling for Product Managers
Why Product Managers Must Own the 'Why'
Figma's Obsession with Customer Proximity and Feedback
Working with Dylan Field: Intuition and Customer Focus
Challenges and Learnings from Figma Features
Strategies for Building High-Quality Software at Figma
Figma's Evolving Approach to OKRs and Goal Setting
Hiring Philosophy for Product Managers at Figma
Figma's Community-Led Growth and Sales Strategy
Advice for Product-Led Growth Founders
Potential Impact of Adobe Acquisition on Figma's Product
Embracing a 'Work in Progress' Mindset
Recommended Books and Media
Favorite SaaS Tools and Figma/FigJam Widget
7 Key Concepts
Storytelling in Product Management
Great product managers are great storytellers, focusing on synthesis to distill complex information into cohesive narratives and creating 'memes' or memorable insights that stick and drive action across the company. This involves resetting one's internal context to explain problems from scratch, assuming no prior knowledge.
Owning the 'Why'
Product managers are uniquely responsible for understanding and articulating the fundamental 'why' behind a product or feature. This enables designers and engineers to make great local decisions at scale, even when the PM isn't directly involved, and helps identify root causes of problems for bigger product impact.
Canaries in the Coal Mine
This refers to using specific, sometimes low-engagement, customer feedback (like a single tweet) as an early warning sign for potentially larger underlying issues. It's a way to balance vocal minority feedback with broader data, ensuring no blind spots in understanding customer experience.
OKR Challenges
OKRs can be problematic for core experience teams, often leading to either secondary metrics that don't truly matter or top-level business goals that PMs lack full control over. This can result in performative work, post-rationalized projects, and a lack of genuine team commitment to moving the stated objectives.
High Down with UX Conversations
A skill valued in PMs where they can quickly navigate between high-level problem discussions and detailed user experience (UX) solutions. This allows for efficient exploration of solution branches and ensures progress in discussions by covering various altitudes of a problem.
Fast Forwarding to the Future
An approach to decision-making where PMs imagine the outcomes of experiments or user studies before conducting them. This helps teams be more efficient by identifying if a proposed action would truly compel a different course, or if it's better to decide not to build something if the outcome is predictable and unimpactful.
Community-Led Growth
A growth model where a product's expansion is driven by passionate users within companies who act as advocates and evangelists. The sales team's role becomes empowering these internal champions with data and stories to make a stronger case for wider adoption and leadership buy-in.
8 Questions Answered
Storytelling is crucial because it enables PMs to synthesize disparate ideas into cohesive narratives, make insights memorable (memification), and compel action in a constantly distracted world. It helps transfer knowledge effectively and influences stakeholders by framing problems and solutions clearly.
Owning the 'why' is essential for scaling product development, as it empowers engineers and designers to make great local decisions without constant PM oversight. It also encourages PMs to delve deeper into customer problems, potentially uncovering underlying conditions for greater product impact.
Figma ensures high quality by having its entire company, especially product teams, consistently use their own products ('dogfooding') in creative ways, like building internal presentations in Figma or conducting performance reviews in FigJam. This fosters personal accountability among employees to continuously improve the product.
Figma has a 'love-hate' relationship with OKRs, having deprecated them at one point due to issues with performative metrics and lack of team commitment. They now focus on 'legibility,' 'actionability,' and 'authenticity' in their goals, sometimes favoring a 'report card' approach or 'commitments' over traditional OKRs, acknowledging they are still iterating.
Figma seeks PMs with strong storytelling and communication skills, demonstrated by their ability to frame problems compellingly and synthesize complex information. They also value PMs who can engage in 'high down with UX conversations' (quickly moving between high-level and detailed UX discussions) and 'fast forward to the future' by imagining experiment outcomes to make efficient decisions.
Figma views its growth as 'community-led,' where the sales team's primary role is to empower internal champions (passionate users within companies) to advocate for Figma. They equip these individuals with data and stories to make a stronger case for wider deployment and leadership buy-in, fostering human connections and loyalty.
Figma's early growth was driven by an intentional focus on building community, fostering organic conversations, and allowing users to 'open source' their work by sharing files. Programs like 'Friends of Figma' further connect users across geographies, building loyalty and providing the enthusiasm and courage for internal champions.
Working with Dylan Field involves engaging with a leader who is highly intuitive and instinct-driven, with his intuition built on thousands of customer interactions over a decade. He often needs to 'see it to feel it' in terms of solutions and exhibits an extreme level of customer obsession, caring deeply about individual user experiences.
28 Actionable Insights
1. PMs Must Own the “Why”
Product Managers should uniquely own the ‘why’ behind a product or idea, as this enables designers and engineers to make great local decisions and scales decision-making across the team.
2. Develop Storytelling as Skill
Cultivate storytelling as a critical skill for PMs, as it’s essential for synthesizing information, driving action, and effectively transferring knowledge within the company.
3. Obsess Over Customer Proximity
Maintain an obsession with being close to customers, consistently putting the product in front of them, asking for feedback, and implementing it to build evangelists and shape the product.
4. Get Everyone Using Product Internally
Encourage and enable your entire company to use your product as much as possible, even creatively (e.g., using it for internal presentations or processes), to naturally improve quality and uncover issues.
5. Cultivate Emotional Product Love
Aim to create a product that users (and internal teams) ‘irrationally’ love, to the point where they passionately evangelize it, as this emotional response fuels growth and advocacy.
6. Equip Customers with New Philosophy
Beyond just solving problems, equip customers with a philosophy or vision for a new, potentially controversial, way of working, which they can champion as part of a ‘revolution’ for your product.
7. Empower Internal Champions
For product-led growth, empower internal champions within customer companies with data, stories, and visibility into your product’s evolution to help them advocate for your product and facilitate wider adoption.
8. Foster Personal Accountability for Quality
Create a culture where employees, especially engineers and designers, feel personal accountability and a direct relationship with end-users, motivating them to fix issues and improve the product.
9. Empower Bottoms-Up Bug Fixing
Allow and encourage developers to fix issues they notice, as this bottoms-up energy can be a more effective way to improve product quality than top-down mandates.
10. Leverage Engineer Buy-in
Recognize that engineers are more motivated, efficient, and creative when working on problems they personally identify with or advocate for; seek their buy-in to increase commitment.
11. Prioritize Goal Legibility, Actionability, Authenticity
When setting goals (like OKRs), focus on making them legible (understandable to all), actionable (inspire different daily actions), and authentic (honestly depict what the team is doing).
12. Apply “Five Whys” for Root Cause
Use the ‘five whys’ technique (asking ‘why’ repeatedly) in retrospectives or postmortems to find the root cause of problems and fix underlying conditions for bigger product impact.
13. Practice Synthesis in Storytelling
Develop the power of synthesis by distilling many different opinions or disparate parts into a cohesive message or creating frameworks to talk about complex problems.
14. Make Stories Memorable (Memification)
Aim for ‘memification’ of insights (data, research) so they stick and are easily cited by leaders in meetings, compelling action and facilitating knowledge transfer within the company.
15. Escape the Curse of Knowledge
When storytelling, reset your internal computer and assume no context, building the story from scratch to make it accessible and understandable to anyone, even those with no prior knowledge.
16. Use Real-World Metaphors
When explaining complex concepts, borrow real-world metaphors or grounding examples to make them much more understandable and accessible to a broad audience.
17. PMs: Dip Into Design
PMs can benefit from directly experiencing design roles to build empathy, push product from a different angle (focusing on the best experience), and learn how to communicate effectively with designers.
18. Designers: Win Over PMs
If you are a designer, learn how to win over Product Managers and speak in their language to effectively advocate for design decisions and push for the best possible experience.
19. Monitor Concerning Feedback
Create a system (e.g., a dedicated channel) to monitor even low-engagement customer feedback, such as tweets with few likes, as they can act as ‘canaries in the coal mine’ signaling deeper issues.
20. Balance Feedback Portfolio
As a PM, ensure you have a balanced portfolio of different kinds of feedback (e.g., support tickets, sales conferences, social media) to avoid blind spots and get a holistic view of customer experience.
21. High Command of UX
Develop the ability to quickly explore solution branches, understand different altitudes of a problem, and navigate UX conversations efficiently to make progress in discussions.
22. “Fast Forward to the Future”
Practice imagining experiment or user study outcomes (‘fast forward to the future’) to make more efficient decisions and avoid building things that won’t compel action or yield useful results.
23. Decide Not to Build
Recognize that deciding not to build something is as important as building the right things, which is possible through foresight and the ability to see around corners.
24. Build Community Intentionally
Focus on intentionally building a community around your product, fostering organic conversations and sharing (e.g., open-sourcing files or creating local user groups) to drive growth and loyalty.
25. Challenge Designed Assumptions
Remember that all products, processes, and tools are designed by people and are not necessarily perfect; always be open to rethinking and improving them rather than assuming they are fixed solutions.
26. Use Notion for Organization
Utilize Notion as an all-in-one team collaboration tool for coordinating tasks, content calendars, sponsors, guest prep, and even personal projects to enhance efficiency and organization.
27. Streamline Security Compliance with Vanta
Use Vanta to automate up to 90% of SOC 2 compliance work, enabling businesses to get ready for security audits in weeks instead of months, accelerating growth and building trust with customers.
28. Use FigJam Alignment Scale
Utilize the FigJam Alignment Scale widget during product reviews or discussions to quickly pulse-check team sentiment (e.g., aligned or not aligned) and identify areas needing further discussion.
7 Key Quotes
People who work with me know that I often talk about storytelling. And in fact, if you've ever reported to me, storytelling has showed up in some kind of performance review, I feel.
Yuhki Yamashita
Dylan's always reading customer feedback, and in fact, reads the most customer feedback of all of us, and has been doing that for like a decade, right?
Yuhki Yamashita
But for Dylan, I think it's very hard for him to really kind of like fully get bought in until he kind of sees like the end implementation to viscerally feel like if this is a good solution or not.
Yuhki Yamashita
It's so important that you're using your own products.
Yuhki Yamashita
There has to be this almost like irrational, this like emotional response to your product, right? This like love for it, right?
Yuhki Yamashita
And I think that's what worked well for Figma too, which is like, there's something controversial about this idea that, you know, everyone can see what you're doing, right?
Yuhki Yamashita
It's really easy to listen to some of these podcasts and feel like, oh, 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.
Yuhki Yamashita
1 Protocols
Five Whys for Postmortems
Yuhki Yamashita (describing Figma's engineering team practice)- When something goes wrong, ask 'Why did this happen?'
- For each answer, ask 'Why did that thing happen?'
- Continue asking 'why' deep enough to find the root cause.
- Fix all identified root causes to prevent recurrence.