An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)

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.