Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma)

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 that Figma told me, Mahika is really great at creating a vision and getting people to see what she sees. We lean heavily into designing and prototyping, even before a project gets a green light.

Starting point is 00:00:22 If you and your team do your job correctly, what does the world look like? Say somebody wants to make their culture more entrepreneurial. What does it take? We have this concept called Maker Week, which is our internal hackathon, giving people the breathing space to see ahead into the horizon and be wildly ambitious. Today, my guest is Mahika Kapoor. Mahika is a design engineering PM hybrid at Figma, where she was an early PM on FIGM,

Starting point is 00:00:51 and is now spearheading development of a new product that the company is going to launch in June. She's known as the go-to-person at Figma for leading new zero-to-one products, and as you'll hear in our conversation, is beloved by, everybody that works with her. Prior to Figma, Mejika founded Design Nation, a national nonprofit that democratizes undergraduate student access to a design education, and led several products and launches at Meta focused on commerce and creators. On this podcast, I bring on a lot of amazing senior product leaders, but there's so much we can learn from stellar on-the-ground product managers like Mahika. In our conversation, we drill into many of the skills that Mahika has cultivated, that have

Starting point is 00:01:29 contributed to her success, including how to develop a compelling vision, get buy-in for your ideas, how to develop conviction, empathy, the importance of culture and how to create a culture on your team and within the company, and also how to deal with the constant change that happens within successful organizations. We also spent a 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, and how many of them began at hackathons and Maker Weeks. Mahika is a truly special product manager and leader, and I feel fortunate to have had this chance to learn from her. We went quite long on this conversation, but

Starting point is 00:02:09 honestly, this could have gone for another two hours. With that, I bring you Mahika Kapoor, after a short word from our sponsors. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. This episode is brought to you by Paragon, the embedded integration platform for B2B SaaS product development teams. Are your users constantly requesting new integrations with other SaaS platforms that they use? Unfortunately, native product integrations take months of engineering to build, and the maintenance never ends. Paragon enables your engineering team to ship integrations seven times faster than building in-house,

Starting point is 00:02:53 by removing the complexities around authentication, messy third-party APIs, and debugging integration errors. Engineering teams at companies like copy AI, cinch, TLDV, and over 100 other SaaS companies are using Paragon so they can focus their efforts on core product features, not integrations. The result? Their shipping integrations on demand, which has led to higher product usage, better retention,

Starting point is 00:03:19 and more customer upsells. Visit useparagon.com. to see how Paragon can help you go to market faster with integrations today. That's use p-a-a-a-g-o-n.com slash Lenny. This episode is brought to you by Lenny's Job Board. As many of you may or may not know, for the past couple of years, I've been running a recruiting service. I've introduced over 30 companies to their next hire

Starting point is 00:03:44 and helped build a candidate pipeline for tons more. I've been fortunate to work with companies like RAMP, Pigma, Shopify, many more, plus a bunch of exciting young startups. connecting each to extremely talented engineers, designers, and product leaders that make up my community. Because of its success and the value that it's driven to companies and to people looking for jobs, we're ramping up the service in a big way. I'm beta testing a bespoke headhunting style service, and I'm opening up a handful of slots. We work with a select group of companies each month.

Starting point is 00:04:12 If you need to make a key product hire or quickly expand your team, I'd love to see if I can help. Head to Lenny'sjobs.com slash talent and hit meet candidates to get started. That's Lenny'sjobs.com slash talent. Mejika, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me, Lenny. I am a huge fan of the podcast and really excited to be chatting today. Just that expectation. This is going to be a Mahika Love Fest podcast.

Starting point is 00:04:42 And what I want to try to do with our time here is kind of have like an archaeology of mehika to understand what you've learned about product and building product. in particular because you are thriving at Figma, which is one of the most interesting and successful tech companies 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 majikas in the world. That's kind of my goal here because I feel like that would be. Mildly frightening. In a very cool way, not in a creepy way. So what I did to prep for this conversation is I, as I said, reached out to bunch of colleagues at Figma.

Starting point is 00:05:23 ask what you're especially strong at. And what I want to do is kind of go through some of these key skills. And they're essentially the core attributes of great product managers and learn from you, learn from what you learned about how doing these things well and just what you do to be successful at these things. How does that sound? That sounds good. I guess one thing to call out is that I think when I think about my own PM style, it's definitely not a tick all the boxes style. There are plenty of things that I'm very bad at that PMs are traditionally supposed to be great at. So, you know, happy to chat about what makes sense. Okay, that's actually really cool.

Starting point is 00:06:00 So let's save that for the end, the things you think you're bad at. Like, the way I see this is like a reverse performance review. Like, here's all the things you're amazing at. Let's just go spend all our time on that. But I think that's going to be really important. But I guess just along those lines, what I'm hearing is there's a sense of like, do the things you are good at really well. This is a trend on the podcast is lean into your strengths. Is that the way you see it?

Starting point is 00:06:21 You have thoughts along those lines of just the fact that you've been successful knowing you have these things you're not amazing at that we'll talk about. It's important to have two things. One is, of course, lean into your strengths. I think that PMing is traditionally a sort of generalist role and people fall into it in a number of ways. But most often than not, I hear people fall into it by like trying a bunch of other things and then realizing that like, oh, hey, maybe this PM thing

Starting point is 00:06:50 makes more sense for me. So like for me personally, it was I have always been like a very like left brain, right brain kind of a person. I majored in CS and minored in visual arts. And when I worked as a software engineer, I really missed the design side. And when I worked as a designer, I missed the technical. And moving into product was a really great way to kind of straddle both and have more touch points across the product development cycle. And so I think that, you know, based on how you fell into it, you might have different spikes and different strings and leaning into those is really important. But for the other things, it's also, of course, important to have like a sort of growth mindset and to constantly be, like, conquering what comes next.

Starting point is 00:07:31 Okay, cool. Okay, so I'll save the stuff you think you're bad at for later. Let's start with the stuff you're amazing. Okay, so the first is vision. So show Cuomato, VP of Figma, told me that Mahika is really great at creating a vision and getting people to see what she sees. She's working on a new project now and put together one of the things. the best pitches I've ever seen internally at what it could become, why it'd be differentiated, et cetera. And like every new project, this had up and downs, but she's incredibly driven to

Starting point is 00:07:59 keep the flame alive throughout these ups and downs. Can you just talk about what you've learned about doing this well, creating a compelling vision, getting people excited, getting buy-in for big ideas? Yeah, absolutely. So my take is that vision is everything. It is very, really important to create a vision that you believe in, that your team believes in, and that your company believes in. Because the reality of the product development cycle is that it's so messy, it's so chaotic. You're going to have, you know, extreme highs and extreme lows. You're going to march in a certain direction only to hear from your users that it might just be the wrong direction and totally pivot. And in order to ensure that moments like that are not discouraging,

Starting point is 00:08:50 but rather sort of learning opportunities for your team, it's so important to be anchored on that singular vision because then any step along the way feels like forward progress. So first just want to underscore the importance of like having that vision and that perspective on if you and your team do your job correctly, what does the world look like? In terms of crafting a compelling vision, I think that there are sort of a few aspects. The first is that you cannot go into a vacuum

Starting point is 00:09:25 and come out with a compelling vision that does not exist. You have to be fundamentally inseparable from your users and also fundamentally inseparable from your team. And so I think that there is sort of this important cross-pollination of functions that is really important in crafting a compelling vision. You want to always ensure that there are research insights that help you feel what a user is feeling. You want to ensure that there are beautiful designs and prototypes that help communicate what this future world looks like. And you also want to root it in engineering and feasibility.

Starting point is 00:10:09 And you want to be constantly, even in the vision phase, assuring that what you're marching after is something that is achievable and something that you can work towards. And so I think a lot of folks, when they think about visioning, they kind of think about, okay, how do we like start from scratch and learn about the user and then translate that into designs and then translate that into engineering? And it becomes this like very almost like linear,

Starting point is 00:10:35 process. And I think that to the extent that you can have this cross-pollination of ideas and people working together, that leads to a really strong vision. And there's this book that I love called the Medici effect, which basically talks about how when people come from different places, and you have that confluence of ideas, that leads to innovation at the end of the day. The second piece is, okay, like, once you have your vision, like once you have talked to your users and built up your perspective and things like that. It's like, how do you communicate it internally? And how do you help everyone around you see what you're seeing?

Starting point is 00:11:10 And I think something that's really unique about Figma is that it is a fundamentally, very, very detail-oriented culture. And it's also a company that very much practices what it preaches in terms of the future being visual communication. And so, you know, you kind of find that, or I've found that words will only get you so far. So when I put together a vision with my team at Figma, it's all about like not just your traditional, like, okay, here are pain points and then here are solutions. And then here is the timeline and costing. But rather, how can you bring all of those things together? And how can a vision pitch effectively be like pain point solution proof point? Pain point solution proof point. Because at the end of the day, simply describing a product idea in words is not as compelling as seeing a testimonial from a user on top of a prototype or a mock and really feeling the pain points. Is there an example that we could talk about? I know you can't talk about the product you're working on yet, but from the past of a vision that you crafted, maybe to share what the vision was or how you came to that to make this even more real?

Starting point is 00:12:23 So before I was working on the new product, I was working on the fig jam team. And I was an early member of the big jam team. And whiteboarding was sort of something that really took off during the pandemic because it was the first time that people were not together in office, couldn't like jam together, couldn't just like throw up a whiteboard behind them physically. And so there was kind of this question of like, okay, how do you combat these like disparate teammates and pull them together into a common space? And I think that when we think about fig jam and what success might look like for fig jam,

Starting point is 00:13:10 a part of it that I was really invested in was the meetings experience. And specifically like what the world would look like if we were successful at bringing people together into a common space. And one of the early insights was, okay, what is like the most common meeting that takes place in a fig jam file? It's a brainstorm, right?

Starting point is 00:13:32 It's like you have a bunch of people, you're coming together, and they're like dropping a bunch of stickies and stuff like that. And so you have this proof point of an activity that works really well inside of a fig jam file. But then at the same time,

Starting point is 00:13:46 something that's really interesting about fig jam, people often ask, like, oh, you guys are Figma, like, How do you guys use Figma as a company? And it's kind of interesting because I feel like we use Figma, the way that everyone uses Figma. But we use Fig Jam on steroids. Like every single activity in this company is done in Fig Jam.

Starting point is 00:14:03 It's like our product reviews are in there. Our Gant charts are in there. Our bug bashes are in there. Like every single thing is in Fig Jam. And there was this gap between like the way that we were using Fig Jam as a company and the way that the rest of the world was using it. But brainstorms were working, right? And so you kind of think like, okay, like what's unique about a brainstorm?

Starting point is 00:14:21 And you talk to your users and you're like, why does a brainstorm make so much more sense in a fig jam file than like anything else? And what it comes down to is brainstorms are this incredibly democratizing process, right? It's this process where ideas can come from anywhere, where it's not the loudest or the most important person in the room who's doing the talking. But it's everyone altogether and you are able to elicit reactions from people who are more quiet in a meeting or people who like may prefer to like ideate on their own before like coming out to. everyone and things like that. And so we kind of started with the seed of like Greenstrom's being this like highly democratic process. And what you see is that like in most other scenarios, meetings are a very one way, right? Like you kind of have like one person talking and one like everyone else reacting. This is true of like a team kickoff. This is true of like in all

Starting point is 00:15:14 hands. This is true of basically like every sort of scenario. And so what we fundamentally started marching towards was how can we create this world where the generative nature of a brainstorm is basically the norm in other kinds of meetings, right? Where a team kickoff is not just like a PM and a designer handing mocks to an engineer, but it's like everyone leaving stickies and everyone commenting at the same time. Or everyone kind of like leaving, like we have this ritual called like kudos boards inside of fig jam where everyone will kind of like shower each other with love. and just kind of call out their teammates

Starting point is 00:15:52 for what they've done over the last week or so. And so how can we ensure that like those kind of rituals are in our templates and then we're teaching people how to take any meeting and make it more democratic. And then you kind of anchor on this vision around like, okay, what does a more democratic workplace look like? And how can we get people to like anchor around that? And how can we get people to like get into the flow?

Starting point is 00:16:13 So then we started launching 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 be this archaeologist studying what you're describing and breaking it apart. So what I'm hearing essentially is there's kind of this insight that you find of like, oh, here's a way we should think about the way future of work. It should be more democratic building on this, this idea of brainstorming,

Starting point is 00:16:38 which is like one of the most inspiring ways of working where it's not just someone sitting in the silo. And then you take that and create kind of a, here's what the world could look like if we could turn the product into this, make everything this feel this way, very democratic. And then there's this pitch that you eventually make of like, here's the product. And you talked about how the way you pitch it is here's a pain, here's a solution, and here's a proof point of that solution. Could be testimonial or some data, I imagine. Definitely. I think that 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 common occurrence is to kind of have like,

Starting point is 00:17:21 the research readout, followed by the design crit, followed by the like product review. And that's like, that's fine that that works in a lot of instances. But then you kind of have every team member thinking that their own deliverables, like what they need to pour all their energy into. And what you actually want is like for everyone to feel incredible ownership and incredible passion about this combined deliverable. So that it's like a unified team who believes in a singular set of insights. So what's an example of that? Is it like a deck in Figma? Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:17:55 So we often make our decks in Figma. And I think that we lean heavily into designing and prototyping even before a project gets a green light. So I think that's something that's really unique 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 emotional pull towards this is something worth investing in. Got it.

Starting point is 00:18:25 So that's what I was trying to get to is how do you actually deliver a vision? So a lot of people here, I need to create a vision. I'm going to write out a paragraph or memo describing it. You can create mockups. The way you're describing essentially make it as real as possible, not just mocks, but actual prototypes potentially. Many people don't have design skills or designers on their team or engineering skills to build a prototype.

Starting point is 00:18:48 Is there anything you can share for how to it? do this where you don't have those skills. Yeah. Well, the good thing is that with AI, it's getting way easier. True, true. A couple of weeks ago, cognition launched, which for those who don't know is a startup that made this AI agent called Devon,

Starting point is 00:19:10 which can code anything for you, supposedly. It definitely took Twitter by Storm and got me super stoked. And so I think something that's interesting about the like current AI revolution is that it's very much like lowering the floor to starting out and to building something right um and so recently i was uh doing a chat with david huang from replet and he's the head of marketing and design at replet and he was basically talking about how if replet does their job right you kind of start seeing it as your technical co-founder and i think like conversely, like at Figma, we kind of think about if we're doing our job, right,

Starting point is 00:19:52 like maybe in the future people will think about Figma as their designer co-founder, right, where you can kind of like go in and use it to start like bringing things into existence. So I think one is like, yeah, I do think that like we're just trending in a direction and this was not true a year ago where like the floor to building something is just like so much lower. So that's like, that's one piece. I think the second piece is just like go around and ask people. And so for example, for the project that I'm currently working on, I used a hackathon to pitch it. And basically I built conviction and the idea like many months before the hackathon.

Starting point is 00:20:36 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 up happening was like we have this concept called Maker Week, which is our internal hackathon where the entire company goes on pause for a week. And I think that most people think that like, oh, hackathons are only a time for engineers to build. And I think that that's one of the biggest mistakes ever. I think that anyone can have an idea and can literally what I did was like walk around the New York office asking every single person like, will you work on this thing with me? And, you know, eventually someone says yes. And then you can use that to like build momentum, grow the team and build something great.

Starting point is 00:21:16 But I think that like never letting your own skills stop you from like going out there, making a pitch, and then turning that into reality is really important. I love both of these points and pieces of advice. I feel like I always say that if a PM has a designer partner that can just do help them with a deck or help them with ideas, you're such a superpower. Everything just looks so much more interesting when you have a designer helping you craft your idea. And the way to describe it is pretty simple. Just go ask people for help because you may,

Starting point is 00:21:45 you're probably going to find someone that's going to help you up. You mentioned conviction. So that's a great segue to where else, where I wanted to go next. So I asked Yuki, chief product officer at Figma about your strengths. And he told me that conviction, that you get extremely strong conviction extremely quickly. He said that the strong conviction allows you to navigate the messy journey from zero to one and rally your team in a really powerful way.

Starting point is 00:22:11 he actually wanted me to ask you this very question. How do you get to this strong conviction and how much of it is true, deep conviction versus there's an inkling of like instinct that this is going to work and then you prop it on the sense of conviction to get people a rallying behind you and to kind of take the sleep of 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, probably towards that vision that we were just talking about. But I'm a huge proponent of Jeff Bezos's one-way doors,

Starting point is 00:22:49 two-way doors framework. And I think that especially in a software company, most things are two-way doors. You can come back. And so it's so important to have an opinion and use that opinion to anchor people. around and how people react to. So I used to work at Meta before I worked at Figma, and Meta basically distilled the product role into two core capabilities. One was ProductSense,

Starting point is 00:23:21 and one was execution. And when you think about Product Sense, it's kind of like, okay, what is product sense? It's like a really abstract term. And at the end of the day, I think ProductSense is just like having good intuition. And so there's kind of this question about like, okay, how do you build up intuition. And I think that it's just by like having this 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 stigma and how they use fig jam. And I think when you have a conversation with someone, it's so much more powerful in terms of getting those anecdotes to stick in your head. And what actually happens is once you start having enough conversations, let's say you know,

Starting point is 00:24:03 you start with conversations ABC, then you progress to conversations. decisions, DEF, over time, you build this like almost repository or library of conversations that you can draw from as you're making product decisions. And so I think that that's a really powerful thing to lean into as you're thinking about like, okay, which path do we go down? Now there's kind of the question of like, okay, in the absence of like any external signal, right? Like, what can you do? And I think that a very common thing, especially for PMs who are younger in their career is to think that your opinion isn't right or might not be reflective of what the user thinks. So you think like, okay, I believe this. And at the end of the day,

Starting point is 00:24:46 like, everyone has an opinion, right? So I think this, but like, what do I know compared to like these people who've been in my company for like 10 years? Or like, what do I know compared to like my users who are using the product? And so then I 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 to like get to a good place. And I think my take is that putting out an idea, even if it's totally wrong, is a much better catalyst for getting to a good solution because people are much more likely to react to an idea than to nothing. So if it's like the right idea, then they'll be like, oh my God, yes, like let's totally do that. Right. And if it's wrong,

Starting point is 00:25:35 then it's like, okay, then they will take you in a different direction and you end up with something that's probably much more opinionated than if you hadn't put anything out there. And so it was funny, like one piece of advice that I got from Uki when I was like working on my vision sprint was like, okay, when you go into research, you want to go in with something that's like at least an A minus idea or you think is at least an A minus idea because if you talk to users and you learn something about it, that's awesome, get to an A plus. If not, like at least you're not at a B. And so I think that having that early conviction, 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, is so important.

Starting point is 00:26:14 But then also something that's equally important when you have high conviction, quote-unquote, is to be willing to kill your darlings if you hear something that tells you otherwise. You need to be so sort of like strong opinions weekly held. And if you've got external signal that's telling you something different, you should be ready. to pivot and have that agility to do so. There's a lot of PMs that kind of worry about having too strong of an opinion and being like, here's what we're doing because then there's this like, oh, okay, they're just, they just want us to do the thing they want us to do.

Starting point is 00:26:46 And we don't have a voice. We don't have a chance to influence. It seems like you find a really magical balance of like strong opinion of like, here's what we should be doing. But people still love working with you and don't feel like, I haven't heard like, oh, she just tells us what to build. what advice do you have there of just finding that balance of making it clear? It's just my idea we can change it.

Starting point is 00:27:07 I would say that speaking about weaknesses, having such strong conviction absolutely has downsides. In particular, it's possible that it doesn't have the desired effect. So for example, my designer who I work with, his name is Keen, he's so talented. We work like this. Literally for most of last year, we had like an hour long one-on-one every single day. still that wasn't enough meeting time. Yes. Like we like basically like work together like this. But he also told me that when I joined the company, he was like, who's this girl and why does she

Starting point is 00:27:41 have so many opinions? And so I think that something that I have learned to do over time and I think that's something that's like a good sort of thing to lean into if you are a PM who has strong opinions is to be very direct about how much you care about your opinions. So like now I'll do this thing, or I'll be like, oh, I think we should do this. But I feel like medium confidence on it. So if you feel stronger, like, I defer to you. And always being like very, very, very, very explicit about like, I feel really strongly about this. Or like, this is my hypothesis. Or I do not have an opinion here. I defer to you. I think the second thing that I would mention is real, that is really important in order to do this correctly is. So I have like a very direct communications

Starting point is 00:28:29 style. I will never sugarcoat anything. I will never say, like, I like something. If I don't like something, if I'm in a meeting and someone tells me, they don't agree with me. I will tell them I don't agree with them back. In return, I really like it when people are very direct with me. And 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 that. because I think sometimes what can happen is really strong, strongly minded PMs can go into a conversation and can be like, oh, I think we should do X, even though they actually feel medium confidence about X. And then the rest of the room is like, oh, my God, that PM feels so

Starting point is 00:29:11 strongly about like doing X that I'm not going to say anything because they clearly have like so much conviction in X. And what you actually want is for everyone to feel comfortable speaking up. And so creating that culture where everyone feels comfortable giving their opinion and communicating their level of confidence is really important. So this direct communication point you made, somebody shared this quote, Alice Ching, who is I think your EM, said this about you, that she's in awe of how direct you are,

Starting point is 00:29:38 especially how you can make it not personal help 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, because I think people hear, this, they're like, oh yeah, I'm going to be direct. I'm going to be so direct. It's going to be great. And then it's so hard to actually do. So is there maybe an example that comes to mind

Starting point is 00:30:03 of like, here's something you did recently of like, oh, wow, okay, I see what she's talking about. So I think that directness only works if it's two-way. If it is one person being really direct with another person and the other person being afraid to talk, you will end up in probably a not-great relationship where communication is only going one way and both people will be like in their own head. The person being direct will be like, why is the other person not responding to my feedback? And then the other person will be like, why am I the only one getting so much feedback? You know, matter where I used to work had this phrase, feedback is a gift. And I so deeply believe in this. And in order to really lean into that phrase and really embody it, I think it's really

Starting point is 00:30:50 important that feedback is this like constantly flowing thing, not something that happens like once or twice a year when you have an official feedback cycle. And 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 from me? And kind of taking the feedback first. So then that person feels like, okay, like maybe I have my way of seeing this situation. like let me communicate that and get off my chest. And then when you give your feedback, it's sort of even. And then feedback, in my opinion, is something that you should always act on.

Starting point is 00:31:30 So then to the extent that you can as soon as possible put that into effect and be like, okay, I'm hearing this. I'm going to do X, Y, Z in order to like combat that. I think then that incentivizes the other person to do the same. Okay, let me quickly summarize what we've gone through so far in their archaeological study. And then I'm going to drill into a specific trait. So one is just having a really powerful vision that people get really excited about. And the way you described it is kind of find an insight about how you think people could be,

Starting point is 00:31:59 in this example, how people could be working maybe through this brainstorm approach. And then kind of expanding that into something where this is what would happen if we achieve this in the future and this is what the world could look like. And that's something people get really excited about. So kind of creating compelling vision, be able to communicate it with. And in your experience, communicating with prototypes and mocks is the way that you find. it to be most effective. Also, just getting to strong conviction, whether it's real or not, but it sounds like it's actually very genuine about an idea and making it clear you're like very excited about this and here's how it's going to be amazing for the business and the company,

Starting point is 00:32:32 and here's why you should be excited about it. Also, you talked about being very direct and being very honest and basically radical, radical candor, as some people describe it. First of all, is there anything else I miss specifically before I drill into one of these? That sounds right. Okay, cool. So kind of along these lines, something else that came up a bunch of in my emails with folks that you work with is how you build hype really effectively. And you talked about this a bit of just like creating momentum about an idea. So you got this idea, get everyone pitch it, get everyone excited. And then it just continues to build hype and momentum. So a quote from Carl Zhang, who is on your team maybe. He said, I feel no PM has ever got me so hype about a feature. And Yuki said that you overcome people's doubts by building hype and hacking hype is the way described it. Talk about this and why do you think it's some point and how you actually go about doing this.

Starting point is 00:33:31 When you are spearheading an idea or a product, it's really on you to have a pulse on how everyone else is feeling about that product. right and you know different products need different levels of excitement to make it out the door right if there is something that you know leadership has really strong conviction in it's important for leadership to like amp the whole company up you know like behind that vision on the flip side if you are yourself are pushing a zero to one idea from the bottoms up the onus is even more on you to make sure that that project and that product is constantly propped up and that people are excited about it for it to make it at the door. And so one example is like, you know, we've been talking about

Starting point is 00:34:24 this product that I'm working on and coming out of winter break this year, there's kind of this sense, or at least I always suspect that there's the sense of like over winter break, everyone forgets what happened last year. You know, it's like goes at the door because you were hopefully doing, you know, something that took your mind off work. And so at the same time, there's kind of this sense of like, how do you create forward momentum inside of a company in January, right? When people are kind of like slowly, you know, coming back into office, everyone's like trickling back in at different dates because everyone took like slightly different PTO. Like how do you kind of like rally people in a certain direction? And so we have this thing at Figma called SKO or sales kickoff, which is like every year the sales team comes together.

Starting point is 00:35:09 and we have like a keynote and you know, set of fireside chats and stuff like that. And we talk about like what's coming for the year. And at this point, our product, like it existed, but it was absolutely barely built. It was rough around the edges. It had bugs every day, maybe like 10 people in the company were using it and, you know, something like that outside of the team. Yeah, it was so important to me. that this product got visibility in this forum,

Starting point is 00:35:42 because this was the first company-wide forum of the year where we were declaring priorities for the year, right? And so it was so important to me that this product had some sort of a moment, or, you know, speaking of like show don't tell, like a demo in the context of this keynote. And so, you know, Chris, our CTO and UK, our CPO, we're 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 what ended up happening is something like that,

Starting point is 00:36:20 like a demo that wasn't meant to be a demo or that people weren't expecting does so much in terms of like driving that sense of hype and helping people see like what you yourself see in the future. And what's really interesting is like I think that hype is something that you can't really create hype for something you don't believe in, in my opinion. The only way to create hype is to get people to see what you see. And so I think that it's incredibly important to leverage very large forums like that, like Maker Week, like sales kickoff. Like, you know, we have config, which is our like annual showcase to the world. of what we're working on in order to get everyone to see what you're seeing.

Starting point is 00:37:10 And to be really scrappy about it and to really be the person who's 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 visibility, maybe even beyond what the current stage of product development merits, is that you have really incredible learnings because the more that you can put your product in front of people and get them to use it, the more signal you get on how it's trending. And so what ended up happening was like something that could have originally been perceived as a distraction to the team actually ended up being something that added so much fuel to the fire in terms of one, giving us like product insights to inform our next steps. And two, getting the entire company to feel, truly deeply feel excited about getting this thing out the door.

Starting point is 00:37:58 And this pitch and product you're describing is the one that's going to be launching this mysterious new product, right? I feel like we're going to build so much hype for this thing whenever it comes out. I'm so excited to learn what it is coming back to the point. So what I'm hearing essentially is you find it's important to take responsibility for this thing to become a thing at a company. Like a lot of people have an idea. They build a prototype. They build a hackathon project. And then they're like, goddamn, no one's ever doing anything with it.

Starting point is 00:38:24 It's not going anywhere. Nothing ever happens. What I'm hearing is it's on you to get people excited about it and find these opportunities to get people excited by it. And there's also this like, what I'm feeling is like the feels is really important. It's like you have all the data probably. There's probably a logical case for this that you've made across the company. But what you're describing here is you need to get people like hyped about it in like emotional visceral way. And basically find opportunities to do that.

Starting point is 00:38:51 It's kind of a lesson here. In my mind, there is like internal hype, which is how do you get buy in and like everyone inside of the company to be like fanging 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 like really be so stoked when they're like milestone occasions for your product or milestone launches and for them to be celebrating with you? And one of the things that I love the most when I joined the company was, you know, Figma and design Twitter have had this like very symbiotic relationship where like each has grown with the other over time. And what really happens is like anytime we launch something, you have like all of

Starting point is 00:39:36 design Twitter celebrating with us. And one other moment when, you know, I thought it was very fun to drive hype was when I worked on fig jam. In 2022, it was the one year fig jam anniversary in April. And, you know, project anniversaries or product anniversaries are quite an exciting milestone within the company, right? You like bring everyone together, Maybe you've hop bottle of champagne, you kind of like celebrate how far you've come and like what all you've learned since the launch. But we were really thinking like, okay, like, you know, big jam is like awesome. Like fig jam isn't just any product.

Starting point is 00:40:15 Like fig jam has a personality. Fig jam is like cheeky. Fig jam is fun. Fig jam is like has this like cute skeuomorphism going on where you feel like, you know, it's your friend. And so like, okay, how would you like celebrate that moment for a friend? you wouldn't really have like an anniversary party. Like you would throw it like a full on birthday party.

Starting point is 00:40:34 And so what we basically did was at the one year anniversary of Big Jam, I worked with the marketing team and our engineering team in order to basically like kick off a mini launch inside of the product of a bunch of new features. And what we did was we like Easter egged them through the product. And each sort of product that we were releasing inside of Fig Jam was hidden under this little birthday present. And throughout the day,

Starting point is 00:41:04 we sent all of our users on an Easter egg hunt of presents inside a fig jam. And so, like, not only was a fig jam getting the presents, but it was our users getting the presents. And so I think that hype as well is, like, really tied to emotion. So, like, to the extent that a person using a product can feel like, oh, this thing that is built in the product

Starting point is 00:41:26 was built, like, for me. Not to advance the company's goals or anything like that, but to make me feel special to make me feel happy, I think that's a really key instrument in driving hype as well. And I think that something that's quite interesting about hype and getting your users to feel strongly about your product is that every product has their own brand of delight or excitement or energy. So hype for fig jam is incredibly different than hype from Figma, where hype for Figma might be like this really, really niche design capability that like, unlocks this pain point that designers have been having for years and years. And then hype for Apple might be like the world's best unboxing experience or something like that. And so like leaning into a product's brand in order to figure out what is the optimal way to generate hype with your audience and form that connection is something that's really important. I love that example.

Starting point is 00:42:20 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 about, what problems they have. And you talk about having strong conviction and painting a grand vision. It's one thing if someone that doesn't do that, does that. It's just like, why would I believe them versus someone that like you, where you're just constantly talking to users and actually have, understand what they need. So I guess the question here is just what advice would you share with folks to build that, to be immersed with users?

Starting point is 00:42:56 like, what do you actually do? How do you actually do that? Are you just organizing meetings, events? Are you scheduling chats? How do you do this? Yeah. So I think it honestly depends on the product. So when I worked at Meta, it was so easy. Everyone and their mom had opinion about the product, which was really great because it meant that anyone you met, you could kind of ask them what they liked, what they didn't like. You can relay that through the company, et cetera. Now at Figma, we have a slightly more niche audience. I think that, you know, hopefully, ultimately we get to everyone. We started with design teams.

Starting point is 00:43:33 Now we're thinking about like the entire product development cycle and how we can build for that. And then, you know, who knows, you know, beyond that could be anything. But I think that constantly like immersing yourself in those circles where your users are is really important. So for me, it's like, you know, anything. time that I'm like catching up with a friend who like mildly works in tech or a tech adjacent field, like I will generally be asking them about like Figma. And I think what's really great is that, you know, as we as a company scales over time, their user base gets like broader and broader.

Starting point is 00:44:09 And so when we grew from a single product company with Figma into now a multi-product company with FIGM, dev mode, etc., our audience, exploded. And we already saw latent behavior inside of Figma, but now it's like even more clear how wide reaching the product is. And so something that I find incredibly useful is to not just ask users of your product what they think about your product, but to ask non-users about your product why they are not using your product. And actually, I think that those are the most 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 marketing

Starting point is 00:44:55 and the perceptions that surround the product and potentially like the hype that surrounds that. Right. And so having those conversations about like, you know, I remember having like an early conversation with folks from my previous team about like, hey, like, why aren't you like, are you guys using big jam? And they would be like, oh, like maybe sometimes and I'll be like, well, why aren't You're using Big Jim. It's like literally built for you, right? And then that led to like a series of product insights that, you know, led us to like invest in a set of features that would make it much easier for a non-designer

Starting point is 00:45:25 to get started out on the canvas. So we launched this kind of like placeholder experience that rather than traditional templates really like let people see the various use cases and preview the various use cases on the canvas. And so that was incredibly important. And then, you know, Figma, of course, is kind of like, it's in this like prosumer space where it's like, you talk to anyone in tech and maybe they're your total addressable market. But then there are some products I know that people work on, which are very removed from the average person, right?

Starting point is 00:45:53 Like you have like infra products, security products, and things like that where you can't just like walk up to someone and have a conversation with them about like, you know, why aren't they using your product because that conversation might not make any sense. And so in those instances, I think that what's really important is it depends on the stage of company that you're at. If you're at an early stage company, you need to be the one going out there and having conversations with your users and just like literally like looking up your users through whatever channel is necessary and like figuring out how you can connect with them. I think this is also why like founder market fit at startups is so important is because like to the extent that you can use yourself as a limitless test for what user needs there are.

Starting point is 00:46:36 That helps you move really fast in the product development cycle. And then if you're on the larger side, I think that having a really tight relationship with your like sales team. team is really important and basically just like being on sales calls because you want to be in a situation where the customer pain points on sales calls are cross pollinating into the product roadmap. And you also want to ensure that your sales team has visibility into like what might be coming and are constantly informing that. And so I think like really leaning into that, building that relationship between these traditionally like more siloed orgs and hopping on those calls is something that I'd really recommend.

Starting point is 00:47:16 Awesome. Let's go. Actually, one layer deeper here. So you're talking to people all the time about fig jam. Aren't she using fig jam? What do you think of figma? What do you think of this? You're hopping on sales calls.

Starting point is 00:47:27 What do you do with what you hear? Is there kind of an operational approach where you, do you just put in your head and sticks in your head and rolls around and comes up, things emerge? Do you have a place you put these insights you're learning? Are you putting post-its and fig jam, for example? And then on the sales side, do you have a cadence where, like, I'm going to going to join a sales call once a week. Here's a person I love in sales. I'm going to try to join all the calls. How do you actually operationalize these things? The insights get operationalized in a number

Starting point is 00:47:52 of ways. So first is, so yeah, let's continue using fig jam as an example. I think, you know, like I mentioned, like, Figma as a company uses FIG jam for everything. Like multiple FIG jam files are made like per day per meeting, etc. We had this initial situation where people, outside of the company, we're mostly using FIG jam for brainstorms. And so as we were scaling our fig jam sales team, I sort of set up like a recurring cadence with the folks in our sales team in order to understand like, okay, like what are you guys hearing? And then I would share what was coming. And then I would use their input as signal as to like what should be prioritized or deprioritized on the roadmap. And they would use my signal to understand what were the various use cases that they could be pushed.

Starting point is 00:48:43 with the customers. And one thing that happened during one of the meetings was I literally walked them through, this meeting, this is how I use FIG jam, and this meeting, this is how I use FIG Jam, and this is how I use FIG Jam, and this meeting, this is how I use FIGGM. And what that resulted in was I actually made like a loom video walking through my like weekend FIG jam that our sales team later distributed to a bunch of companies to inspire them as to like, hey, not only can use FIGM for this, you can use picture for like x, y, Z. You can use it for your team pickups. You can use it for your retros.

Starting point is 00:49:16 You can use it for like, you know, planning your mom's birthday party. You can use it for like literally planning your all hands. You can use it for sketching out the contents of what's going to go into your next deck, so on and so forth. And so it basically like manifests in two ways. The first is having it inform like the prioritization of your product roadmap. And then the second is what like ideally creating artifacts that the sales team can use

Starting point is 00:49:40 to evangelize the things that you are seeing and the like stepping stones to that vision that you are creating. And then the last thing is that sometimes the conversations aren't immediately actionable, right? Sometimes like the sales team has an insight or has a request that is just like objectively not feasible because the team has too much on its plate.

Starting point is 00:49:59 Conversely, like sometimes, you know, the team might have a suggestion or something that might be pitched to sales folks that's like too early given the stage of the conversation. And for that we basically have We store it in Asana, basically. We create, like, we have this integration, which many companies might have, which is like Slack integration where you can, like, react with an Asana emoji.

Starting point is 00:50:22 And then, like, any piece of feedback that comes in from sales or from the rest of the company gets, like, turned into a task in your backlog. And then you do, like, a weekly grooming of that. Amazing. Cool. Very tactical and useful. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company, company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now, you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance

Starting point is 00:50:50 for SOC2, ISO-27,1, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, VANTA. VANTA's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risks. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com slash Lenny. That's V-A-M-T-A.com slash Lenny.

Starting point is 00:51:28 Another thread that I've noticed, and this isn't, I wasn't planning to go in this direction, but is just you just care so deeply about the things you work on. Like, you actually really, really love it and want it to be incredibly successful. and feels like you're just always thinking about it, reminding me this quote from your colleague Carl, they shared, that it feels like you care deeply, which makes me care deeply, who wants to be led by someone who doesn't care about what they're building?

Starting point is 00:51:55 Feels like that's an important part of the way you work and think. Is there anything you want to say about that? When I started out my product career, I actually joined as an RPM or rotational product manager at META, which was effectively a program that brought together new grad pms, so people who had like zero PMs and taught them how to be PMs. And in the beginning of this program, we had a series of conversations with leaders across the company.

Starting point is 00:52:24 And one particularly notable conversation was with Julie Zhu, who was the first ever intern at Meta and the VP of Design. And she was giving us feedback and advice about, you know, how to draft compelling product strategy, et cetera. And something she said that has stuck with me throughout my entire product career is that when two people disagree about product strategy, it is because they have different assumptions. Because if you have the same assumptions, there is no reason why a person should think, like, we should do X versus we should do Y. And so it's kind of like, okay, how does this relate to what you were just asking about, like,

Starting point is 00:53:07 feeling deeply and caring about what you're building. I think that it's really important to not just build a roadmap because it's handed to you or not just build an idea because it's handed to you. I think that you need to understand in the event that it's like, you know, a top-down strategy. What are the assumptions that led to folks believing that that is the right idea? And then if it is you pushing something bottoms up, you need to be able to ensure that everyone, else has the same assumptions that you have in your head that leads them to, like, believe deeply or not believe deeply. And I think what's really important is that people can, you know, to Carl's point, like gauge how passionate someone is about a project. And my take is

Starting point is 00:53:55 that the more you believe in an idea, the more natural it is to be passionate about it. I imagine people listening to this will feel like, oh, shit, 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 the most amazing products. Maybe it's hard to get excited about stuff. Is there anything you could share there? Just like say you're working on something that you're not so passionate about. Is it like fine thing?

Starting point is 00:54:19 Keep searching. Or is it like just figure out something you're excited about? Any advice there for someone in that boat? My first piece of advice would be to not just think about the scope of what you are working on as the thing that happens to be in flight at any given moment. But to, if you're working in a company, like, take a step back, understand, like, the vision of that company and understand your users,

Starting point is 00:54:49 and understand if there's, like, anything in that space that you are passionate about. I think it's quite easy to believe that the project that you're working on is your scope. My take is that your scope is the world. and to the extent that you can figure out, does the idea that you're passionate about fall within your company versus fall outside of your company,

Starting point is 00:55:12 that should kind of like guide the next steps in your career. And so I think that, you know, potentially like common misconception is that founding something is just for, you know, capital F founders. But I think that anyone can found something. You can found something inside of an existing company. You can found something from scratch. And there are different reasons why you would do each, right? Like the reasons why you would found inside of an existing company is if you think that

Starting point is 00:55:48 there is a distribution advantage that you want to take advantage of, if there's a technical or platform advantage that you want to take advantage of. Or there's also like a reality, which is like, you know, it's slightly less risk. So, you know, depending on what your risk tolerance is, you can like figure out what makes sense. There are things that are harder inside of an existing company, right? It's like harder to take an executive decision. You actually cannot take an executive decision. You need to receive buy in on every single decision that you make.

Starting point is 00:56:16 Sometimes it's like harder to move faster. And then sometimes there are things that are just like different when you're starting inside of an existing company versus like starting something outright. So the things that are different is like building a team. is quite different. Like the way that you recruit and the like set of folks that you can recruit from, like that composition is quite different. And then the way that you pitch and who you are pitching to is quite different. And so I think that, you know, sometimes, yeah, it makes sense to found inside of a company and to like use that to like make your flame burn, right? Sometimes it makes sense to found outright. But I think that, you know, the first key to be like passionate about

Starting point is 00:56:56 what you're working on, is to find an idea that you're passionate about. I love this metaphor of the flame where it applies both to you as a person at a company and keeping that flame going and building it and then also the idea and the project that accompanies a little flame that you're kind of growing over time, building momentum 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. We've gone really deep on a bunch of awesome stuff and I'm really happy we did. There's four more skills of things you're amazing at.

Starting point is 00:57:25 So here's an idea. Let me share the four. How about you pick two that you are most passionate about that you think you have the most advice to share and then we'll just do those and then we'll go to what you've learned about building something completely new at a larger company. How does that sound? Perfect. Okay. So from folks that you work with, the four other skills, things you're amazing at. And I still want to hear the things you think you're not amazing at. One is creativity. They're just like you have really creative solutions to problems. Two is empathy. You're really strong. it empathizing with users and using that to build amazing products. Three is culture show tells me you're the culture carrier at Figma, which is amazing because the culture there from out of here is amazing. And then four is dealing with change. You're amazing and just like, okay, cool, priorities are changing. Great, let's go.

Starting point is 00:58:15 Here we go. Which of those two feel most interesting to you? maybe we can do a lot or two because they're a little bit different than the other things we've been discussing. Sounds great. So I guess culture. Let me start there. So, okay, so yeah, show called you the culture carrier at Vigma. I hear there's some fun things you all do there. There's something called the hot seat. There's something called the figgies. First of all, can you maybe explain these two things? And then just broadly what you find is important about focusing on culture as a PM. Yeah, I can definitely talk about those two things. So Hot Seat is actually a tradition. I started at our first PM offsite post-pandemic. So this was March of 2022. The PM team was like sub-15 people at that point. And we all fit around a dinner table, which is no longer true today. And it was really important to me that we all got to know each other in a context that was outside of work. I think that. PMing is a highly collaborative function. And to the extent that you have great relationships with all the teams that you're interfacing with,

Starting point is 00:59:28 that 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 friends, you know, and if you are working with your friends. And so, you know, we were coming out of a, like, long, intense day session. And I was thinking about, like, okay, like, how do we break the ice? And Hotseat is like this game where you go around the table and each person gets two minutes on the clock and everyone else at the table can ask them anything. And if they want to, they can decline to answer. But we try and keep it like generally speaking like quite friendly and comfortable for folks.

Starting point is 01:00:05 And so we kicked off this game. And what was really interesting was earlier that day we had done a personality test. A side note, our PM team is like obsessed with personality tests. Which personality test, by the way? We, to this day, say the best one was the one that we did at this offsite, which is the strengths finder test. And what it basically happened was over the course of that morning, we had all kind of dug into like, like, we were saying like, what are our strengths? What are our weaknesses, et cetera? And we had this like really fun foundation to build on during the game of Pots seat where it was like, we were digging into like, what about people's backgrounds made them think the way that they do today?

Starting point is 01:00:44 and like what random anecdote at age seven of playing catch with their dad in the field led to how they thought about auto layout blah blah blah blah and I think that you know being able to understand what motivates a person is so important when you're working with them and also just like in building a connection with them and so that was this like that was this moment that really brought the whole team together and something that I was really gratified to hereafter is that, you know, since then, hot seat has kind of become a tradition within the company. And so all the PMs went on to play it with their own teams. Yuki and Scher went on to play it with the exact team, so on and so forth. And so it's kind of become this thing that

Starting point is 01:01:23 now anytime that like someone joins the team, it's like, okay, you put them in the hot seat. And then, you know, if you're meeting someone's like significant other, you like put them in the hot seat. And it's this thing that is just like totally spread. But it's a really fun way to like just get to know folks and what what drives them. So that's one of my favorites. I highly recommend. The second thing that you asked about, which was the Figgies. And this is basically like an Oscar style awards ceremony that was like hacked together. And so where the Figgies was inspired from was actually every year we have, you know,

Starting point is 01:01:59 I was mentioning like SKO, our sales kickoff. And on the last night of SCO, there's like this award ceremony where they appreciate all of the incredible work that has taken place in the Sales and Marketing org. And I saw this and I was like, this is incredible. Like we should absolutely be celebrating the product team as well when we're together. And so what I did was I basically like took our Bigma boardroom, which is called Bigma. And like worked with another PM Elan to deck it out and like a red carpet, gold curtains, etc. And we bought like little Oscar trophies for everyone and got their names written on it and voted people in for all of these like absurd categories like most likely to name their child figma, most likely to go their career without writing a PRD, blah, blah, and you know, of course forced everyone to give some sort of acceptance speech.

Starting point is 01:02:59 But I think that, you know, making people feel appreciated for the even just like the quirks and the energy that they bring to the team. is something that's incredibly important. And celebrating that diversity together is something that I think goes a long way in terms of making people feel close. 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 background, this is what, you know, this is what's like cheeky about them or this is what's like interesting or unique about them. And so I think that culture is so important. And Figma has this core value called play, which I love, which really emphasizes just that everyone should be having fun at all times and work should be fun and gathering should be fun. And I think that I personally am like a huge believer in like in this remote first role that we live

Starting point is 01:03:54 in. You also want to kind of like take advantage of those times when you're able to like get together and you know do things that make the team feel like even geographically close. close even when they were like geographically spread out. Oh man, so fun. And I love that it's just like you did this, right? It's not like Dylan is adding all these rituals to the team. It's very bottom up.

Starting point is 01:04:18 And in theory, any on the team could have done this. It's kind of interesting. Something that I had heard Vishal Shah, who was the former head of product at Instagram say, is that often in companies, culture is set top down. and then the innovation that comes out of that is bottoms up. And so, like, I think in the first place, like, having a value, like, play, you know, does a lot in order to make folks feel like these kinds of things are celebrated and, like, time should be carved out for them. To come back to your original point of just cultures, everything, a lot of PMs are like, I have so much work to do. I have, like, so many things to do.

Starting point is 01:04:55 I'm just, like, working all day every day. What can you tell them about why this is so important and worth putting some time into? and should everybody, or is it just like, if you're excited about this, do it if not. Don't worry. I think culture is important in that it establishes trust between groups of people. And so I think that, you know, actually earlier, you were asking about passion and what makes someone feel passionate about work. And I think that realistically, that passion breaks down into two things. One is like, are you passionate about the vision that you're building towards, which we spoke about. But the second thing is, are you passionate about the people who you work with?

Starting point is 01:05:35 And I think that, you know, roadmaps change, products change, but feeling a connection to the folks that you're working with make you much more durable as a team. It means that when times get tough, which they will, your gut instinct is to rally together and collaborate together to find a solution rather than to, like, jump ship or something. I think, like, personally, like, I'm, like, in love with my team. They give me like so much joy and happiness on a daily basis.

Starting point is 01:06:04 I was telling them the other day that like when they like post like prototypes in our Slack channel, like sometimes they get like little flutters in my chest like when you have a crush on someone. And I think that like having that emotional connection to your team is fun. Like I think that like and I think that that emotional connection comes from like investing in culture. And again, it's like you did it. You made it happen, right? It's not like, oh, this sucks. My team's no fun. It's like you can make it more fun.

Starting point is 01:06:32 And I think the two examples you shared are awesome because one is like a high end version where there's like a lot of work. And the hot seat is just like a quick idea that takes no work, just an idea. And then you just ask to do it. And that's there. Okay. So actually I want to combat the perception

Starting point is 01:06:46 that the figgies was a high production, high cost thing. It was very low cost. I ordered everything on Amazon and assembled it in like an hour. And so there are ways to be like scrappy and kind of making things come together. And so I would say like don't be intimidated by any idea of being like too large to take on.

Starting point is 01:07:05 I'm just kind of like, go for it. That's an awesome correction. Okay. Final trait you're great at. Somebody share that you pivot with grace and enthusiasm. When things change and priorities change, projects are killed, projects are spun up. There's something that a lot of people, companies just get so sad about. Oh my God.

Starting point is 01:07:27 Things are keep changing. My project's killed. Oh, this priority changed. I feel like you've learned to make that a superpower. What can you share about what you've learned there and how to leverage that into doing great and being successful? For this one, I could actually maybe give an example that preceded my product career,

Starting point is 01:07:45 which was when I was in college, I actually founded a national design conference for students across the country. And the way that this came about was when I was in college, design was very much having a watershed moment in tech. So companies like Airbnb and Pinterest were leading an industry, and they were leading not just because they built technology and made it accessible, but because they were really using the interface layer to differentiate. So there was this point where software had reached a certain level of saturation

Starting point is 01:08:24 where things that were not possible were now suddenly possible, and now suddenly possible in multiple companies. And design became this differentiator, which is really exciting. But at the same time, none of this was reflected in most schools across the country. And so I went to Princeton and there was like nothing that resembled product design

Starting point is 01:08:43 in our curriculum. And this was baffling to me because I was like, there is such clear momentum, you know, speaking about momentum in industry about this being a profession that is like so important. and so influential in building the next generation of companies,

Starting point is 01:09:01 yet the kind of groundwork to make that happen wasn't really there. And then I interned at Facebook, and I realized that my entire class of 25 interns had very similar experiences, where they too were self-taught product designers. And so that summer, I actually watched a movie, which was a documentary that was coincidentally produced by Envision that featured folks like John Maeda, amongst others, I was talking about how design changed the world that we lived

Starting point is 01:09:27 in and was going to rewrite the future, which I really believed in. And so I was sort of incentivized to found this conference called Design Nation that would democratize access to a design education and bring together top students from across the country with like industry leaders. And originally my plan was to build this within an organization that already existed at Princeton because, you know, they had the funding, they had the resources, they had the expertise in order to kind of like make this a reality. And then what actually ended up happening was like they too were skeptical of the business value of design and didn't think it would be possible for something like this to be funded.

Starting point is 01:10:04 And so I went from, you know, building something in a situation where I thought like finances, expenditures, connections, etc. We're like totally taken care of to having none of that and needing to like build it from the ground up. And it was funny. One of the best pieces of advice I got in college was don't underestimate the power for dot edu email address. and I just went on a spree, like, cold emailing, like, so many people, so many executives about this, like, problem that I was trying to solve. And what actually ended up happening was people would hop on the phone with me. And a lot of the folks who I spoke to, you know, designers who I really admire, like Daniel

Starting point is 01:10:44 Berka, Jamie Myrold, et cetera, were folks who would be like, oh, my God, this was such a problem when I was in college. Like, of course I'll help you solve it. I can't believe it hasn't been solved yet. And so, you know, ultimately, like, it grew into this conference that, you know, lasted many years, brought together folks from originally around the country than more recently around the world. And ultimately, like, did live under that broader organization. But I think, like, having the ability to, you know, like, in the absence of formal backing or something,

Starting point is 01:11:17 still, like, chase after something and maybe pivot the way that you're thinking about it or pivot the way that you are allocating your own time. Like maybe, you know, suddenly, like, speakers is not the most important thing. Fundraising is the most important thing. Or, you know, building a hype landing page so that you seem more legit than a, like, very scrappy few-person student organization

Starting point is 01:11:40 is the most important thing. And just being, like, quite adaptable when it comes to resourcing, I think is very important. That's an awesome example. It shows another trait of Mexica that in our archaeological study, which has come up a bunch

Starting point is 01:11:57 and I'm just putting my finger on it, is just like high agency. It feels like you just consistently just like, I will make this happen myself. This problem exists. We need more product designers in school. I will solve that problem. And so, and I love that.

Starting point is 01:12:13 And by the way, in Design Nation, for folks that want to explore that, how do they find that? And it's still going, right? Yeah. So you can Google Design Nation. and we have like an Instagram page amongst other things. And yeah, last year we had folks like Stuart Weitzman and Joe Gevia,

Starting point is 01:12:32 who's one of the co-founders of Airbnb, come and speak, which was super exciting. Awesome. And then who is it for? It's for students, like people in college that want to learn to be designers? Yeah, it's for design-driven college students. I think one thing to call out is that one of my focuses in the early years was to ensure that this is for not just like capital D. designers, but like design-driven students. So we also took like engineers who are very design-minded

Starting point is 01:12:59 and, you know, marketers who are very design-minded, et cetera, because of that core belief that the, you know, most innovative solutions will come out of people that are kind of like operating at this intersectionality. Okay, so we've talked about all kinds of things you're amazing at. Before we transition to what you've learned about just building new stuff at larger companies, which you're very good at. Can you just bulletpoint the skills you find you're not good at? Just if I said we would come to this, what do you think you're not good at?

Starting point is 01:13:31 And we won't go too deep here unless you want. So it's kind of interesting because I think that there are many things that we talked about that are actually a double-edged sword in practice. So let's start with the conviction piece. I think that the good thing about being high conviction is that you're able to, you know, sell forward. and to get people to feel strongly about something and a next step in the future. I think the downside of that is if there is less of a history of working together,

Starting point is 01:14:02 there might be skepticism about like, oh, are you just pushing something because you believe in it? Or are you pushing something because our users actually needed it? And so in those moments, it becomes really important to, like, constantly be highlighting user proof points. I think the second is, like, scrappiness. So I think I have 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 review deck minutes before we are about to present or that like I haven't started until the night before and stay up until 3 a.m. to do it.

Starting point is 01:14:38 And this is like somewhat fine. But then I think that other people don't always love it because they're like, hey, like maybe let's start earlier next time. It's like, I get that. The third piece would be, I get very consumed by the details of something. And I think in a lot of instances, this is great. Also, at a certain point, like, sometimes you want to defer those decisions. And so that's also, like, an important skill to learn. Awesome.

Starting point is 01:15:11 Thanks for sharing all that. This touches on something that came up in a previous podcast episode. Nikkel from Meta had this really interesting. metaphor where there's kind of every superpower as a shadow. Basically, everything you're amazing at, there's something that you'll, it'll be a problem, a liability basically for you. And so I think what you're pointing out is you're amazing at some of these things, but there's downsides.

Starting point is 01:15:33 And I think that's really important for people to know. And we already talked about just something you believe that. I also believe it's just you will have things you're not good at, focus on things you're amazing at and just getting better at those things and use that to achieve because it ends up being a lot more. Also, kind of building off of that is as you scale your team, it's really important to be self-aware of what those blind spots are and to sort of hire for that. Because at a team level, you want individuals to be spiky and you want team to be well-rounded. That's a great segue to talking about building completely new things at large companies.

Starting point is 01:16:12 So what I hear is you're kind of the go-to-one stuff at Figma, which is incredible. Figma is one of the most admired, successful tech companies in the world. And you're the person people look to to build completely new stuff. So first of all, why are you so passionate about this stuff? Why do you want to be working on brand new stuff like this? And why is it important for companies to be good at this? In order for a company to stay competitive, a company needs to stay entrepreneurial. If you are not constantly thinking about what's next,

Starting point is 01:16:46 defining the industry standard, seeing around the corner from your competitors, you will get taken over if that is like a reality. And so consequently, I personally love to screen for very entrepreneurial companies and companies that have that culture. And so Figma has this huge run-with-it culture, where run-with-it is also one of our core values,

Starting point is 01:17:08 and it's really encouraged that people can kind of just like sprinting sprint off in a direction and that is seen not as a distraction, but rather a manifestation of the company's values. And so at the company, you know, some of our most monumental launches have come out of hackathons and have come out of bottoms up projects. So like recently this week, we had a launch of multi-edit, which was like a long clamored for a feature where folks can, you know, edit things across multiple frames at the same time. That was a like multi-year, multi-product long initiative. We have things like Jam Bot, which is an AI plug-in inside a fig jam,

Starting point is 01:17:52 that has come out of an AI hackathon that we had last year. Our entire Widgets platform was originally a hackathon project. And so there is this culture of celebrating things that have been pushed bottoms up. And so constantly thinking about like how can people within the company be entrepreneurial, both in terms of getting new products up to users and in terms of improving internal processes is just like a culture that you constantly want to be facilitating and leaning into. 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.

Starting point is 01:18:32 Maybe just broadly, what does it take to do this well, to go from idea to, okay, that's a huge new product for our business. What have you learned just broadly? What are kind of the steps or the important elements of that? I think that there's this, you know, interesting metaphor that you were calling out earlier about a zero to one project being like a flame.

Starting point is 01:18:55 And flames are interesting because they're sort of destined to die at the end of the day. And I think about the person who is pushing a zero to one idea, as kind of being the keeper of the flame. And in particular, there's this metaphor that really sticks with me, which is in Greek mythology, you know, all the gods sit on Mount Olympus. And there is this goddess Hesdiah, who is the keeper of the hearth. And it is her job to always keep the hearth burning,

Starting point is 01:19:30 even when all the gods like piece out to go on their various quests. And I kind of think about the person or the team or the group, people who are pushing a zero to one idea as being the like Hestias or the keepers of the hearth. And it is your job to like stoke the flames and the embers if they are at risk of dying out. And it is also your job to ensure that the idea can spread like wildfire 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 are three things you need to do in order to be successful at bringing an idea into existence. The first is you need to have the right

Starting point is 01:20:14 idea, right? And that's the empathy piece. That's the piece that you will get from having conversations day and day out with your users. The second is you need to secure buy-in for that idea. So that's the vision piece. You need to be able to rally an entire set of folks, but honestly, most importantly, your leadership and your team behind an idea. And then the third is you need to be able to make it spread like that wildfire. You need to get it to a point where, you know, someone joins a company and they're like, oh, like, what is that flame burning there? And how can I learn more about that? Coming up with a great idea, getting buying for your idea, and then spreading it within the organization. What have you learned about how to actually come

Starting point is 01:20:57 up with an idea that is actually a good idea? So it's funny 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, you know, constantly having these user conversations, I think in order to have the right idea, there are two key elements. The first is you need to have that user empathy. You need to be constantly having conversations with your users, diving into what are their pain points, not only about the product that you're working on, but general perceptions about your company and also general perceptions about like the other tools or products that they might be using on a daily basis. It's not enough to have a perspective on how well you are

Starting point is 01:21:41 competing in the market, but you also need to know, like, understand of persons like full end-to-end tooling usage. And then the second thing is you need to ensure that what you're kind of working towards ladders into a company goal. And so something that's very top of mind at Figma or something that has been very top of mind at Figma has been, you know, how do we go from building for designers to covering the entire product development cycle and expanding to non-designers in particular?

Starting point is 01:22:15 And, you know, non-designers is kind of this like bucket term that we use for PMs and developers and marketers and so on and so forth. But how can we ensure that, you know, our tooling suite is reflective of all the different stakeholders that make the product development process what it is. And so I think that, yeah, just like constantly having the conversation with the users and also constantly being anchored around not what are you currently working on, but what is the broader company goal is something that will help you come up with the right idea.

Starting point is 01:22:48 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 a great cool thing to build. Okay, so that's the idea, getting buy-in. what have you learned about how to do that? Well, clearly, you've been very successful at this. We've talked about a lot of these things, building hype, creating a big vision. What else are there that we haven't talked about that you think is really important?

Starting point is 01:23:11 I think the key to being successful at zero to one is to honestly have optimism that borders on delusion. You need to have an insane, almost like reality distortion field where you don't hear the word no, or at the very least, you translate it into a not yet. And so I think that in terms of pitching, I'll be honest, my first few pitches of this idea were not successful.

Starting point is 01:23:46 What basically happened was like, I kind of like bold conviction the idea by talking to users, and then I would have like ad hoc conversations with folks around the company, and I would be like, we should do this. And they would be like, maybe. And I would be like, okay, like, what am I seeing? What are they not seeing?

Starting point is 01:24:04 And then what basically happened was we had a PM offsite where we were talking about like strategy for the next year. And I like, again, pitched this. And it got like kind of momentum there, but not really. And then I think the third time when it like actually stuck was at the Maker Week hackathon. And this was kind of an insane experience for me because I was actually hosting our hackathons. So I was kind of like working with our BP of design NOAA in order to like spread the word about like, hey, everyone pitch your ideas and to constantly, um, hackathons are interesting when they're

Starting point is 01:24:38 virtual, right? Because you don't really know what people not in your office are doing. Right. So you're constantly thinking about like, okay, how can you like hype up the whole company, right? Like, how can you hype up the SF office with what people are building in New York? And how can you ensure that London stays included even though there's like a limited time zone overlap and things like that? And so I was like simultaneously thinking about like, okay, how? how do we like kind of keep the momentum of this like hackathon running? And then also how do I like push this idea bottoms up? And I think that something that's really important when you're making a pitch is to not be

Starting point is 01:25:09 daunted by the scale if you're a pitch. So for example, in this instance, the proposal was basically to like introduce a new product. And building a product in a week is like for all intents of purposes kind of crazy. But you, this is, I think, where, like, the scrappiness piece comes in. You need to be, like, willing to be very clear about, like, where you're willing to take the hit on, like, quality or believability and where you need to kind of, like, push in order to make your thing feel believable. So, like, one example of something that we did was we, like, literally, like, in order to make this new products, like, feel more real. And this was, like, maybe a two-line change in code was we, like, swapped out. the fig jam icon in our file browser to this new icon.

Starting point is 01:26:00 And like adding a whole new, like entry point is like a lot of work. And you can't do that. But like just swapping something and taking about what exists and like changing the minor things in order to communicate, like what is different about your idea versus what exists today is something that you really want to lean into. And what basically happened was at the end of the week, we had this demo day. And I was like going between like introducing each of the demos to like doing the demo and did like a little wardrobe change in between.

Starting point is 01:26:27 And I think that what ended up being really great about presenting an idea like this in a company-wide forum, which I highly recommend, is that at that point, it becomes not just you evangelizing the idea, but your teammates and your colleagues and your peers evangelizing the idea. And that sense of momentum carries a lot of weight, I think. And this kind of bleeds into the next bullet point you shared of spreading the idea across the company. It feels like this is part of it, just like getting it. spread in a big powerful way initially. But what else have you learned about just getting this to spread across the company? It's kind of like this flame spreading throughout the organization. I think something that's very unique about Figma as compared to other companies is we have a multi-month

Starting point is 01:27:11 plus long staging our 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 inside of FIG jam. And, you know, like, we had the problem. we built it, we put something on staging. And I was kind of like, okay, cool. Like, it's been on staging like a week. Like now we can like launch, right?

Starting point is 01:27:36 And I was greeted with like, no, we can't launch. And I think that leaning into that willingness to being vulnerable about your product and this acknowledgement that, you know, feedback is a gift and that fits and pieces of feedback from across the company will like help your product mature and get to a place. where it's ready to go out the door is really important. And what's really interesting is this helps the team who's working on the product because you're getting feedback. And that's the most direct benefit of putting something on staging early.

Starting point is 01:28:11 But the other benefit about putting something on staging early is that it makes people invested in your product. So if you think about why are beta is so valuable and why are alpha is so valuable, it's because when someone gives you feedback and then the team in charge, implements that change, you see that and you're like, I shaped that part of the product, right? And to the extent that you can get as many people in the company feeling like they shaped XYZ parts of the product, I think that's really powerful because then you kind of are ensuring that there is this constant feedback loop and there is this constant like investment in thinking

Starting point is 01:28:51 about like how can we collectively like drive towards success. Because at the end of the day, like product development is a team sport, right? Like, you know, it takes everyone to make something successful. 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 like elevates the quality of the product. Is there anything else you want to touch on or share or leave listeners with before

Starting point is 01:29:19 we get to a very exciting lightning room? If you have an insight that only you have, I think on one hand, you know, you can kind of believe like, oh, other people aren't thinking similar to me. Therefore, like, maybe I'm wrong. But I would actually flip that because I think if you have an insight that other people are not seeing, it is even more on you to get people onto the same page. And so to the extent that you can like shout from the rooftops about all the insights that you're learning, I think that in and of itself creates a more entrepreneurial culture within the company because chances are other people, people will see you doing that. They'll be inspired to contribute in the same way as well. I think the last thing that I would say is, 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, for example, if you think about like the composition of a product team, you have engineers, you have designers, you have

Starting point is 01:30:24 researchers, data scientists, et cetera. And different people want to be involved in the kind of like product visioning phase to a different extent. There's some people who do want a solution hand to them because for them, the most exciting part of the process is to like find the technical solution in the code. On the other hand, there are other people who like find it really hard to feel passionately about a thing that they have not contributed to. And so I think to the extent that you can understand these motivations of your team, of your leadership, of your peers, and constantly ensure that you are catering to the individual as opposed to the average, that is what, in my opinion, leads to one of the, like, highest functioning teams. Such a cool point. It comes back to

Starting point is 01:31:12 the personality tests that you spoke of earlier. Is that the best way to figure this out as it more just like watch people and try to guess at what they're most excited about? Oh, I think you have to directly ask them. So anytime someone joins my team, I like, especially on the engineering side, because I think this is where there's the greatest variance, I will literally ask like, how much do you like being involved in product decisions? And to the extent that you can take decisions in the open, that is excellent. And even if the decision is something along the lines of like, okay, we have like four options. And you can go in with like a leading point of you. But giving everyone the opportunity to like voice their perspective and push back if they

Starting point is 01:31:58 want to, I think that that's like 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've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? I'm ready. Mejica, 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 skeptical of anyone who is not read Harry Potter. So, you know, if you're one of those people, go read Harry Potter. Maybe it contributes to creativity. I don't know. Now we're talking about every book in the series or at least

Starting point is 01:32:37 the one book. No, no, you have to read the entire series. And you have to read it in order. It's actually funny. When I was in kindergarten, my mom bought like the fifth book. And then the person at the bookstore was like, no, no, no. We were like, okay, got it. And then the others that I would recommend are, from a fiction perspective, I think Pachinko by Minjin Lee is incredibly beautiful and powerful. It's like a multi-generational Korean saga. I think I'm personally just like motivated and moved by like large scale things. So to see a single story traverse so many generations was very fascinating to me. And then from a more like, this. to see book perspective, which is maybe more what you're getting at. I think that I honestly

Starting point is 01:33:24 like pseudo-steer clear of how to books, but one that has had like a particularly large impact on me is Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull. And this is about the founding story and scaling of Pixar. And what was so interesting to me about this book was it basically talks about how you create a process around cultivating creativity. And it's interesting because like creativity is so unencumbered and processes the opposite. So that's very fascinating. My favorite lesson from that book is that it sticks with me is the ugly baby metaphor, which feels like so tied to the way you think and operate. And I won't get into it. By the way, have you read the overstory? I have not. I will add that to my list. I feel like based on the way you described Pichinko, this is a book for you.

Starting point is 01:34:09 It's a multi-generational family story that I did not actually finish. It's very long. But I feel like Okay, I will go order it. Okay. Favorite recent movie or TV show? Favorite recent TV show would definitely be severance. Mm. Movie or shall we move on? Oh, movie?

Starting point is 01:34:29 I recently watched Dune 2 and Dune 1 in the span of a week. It was really fun. I watched Dune 2 because someone asked me to co-host a premiere of Dune 2 with them. And I was like, okay, sounds good. Sounds cool, but I need to watch Dune 1. Good choice. I just watched Dune 2. I don't know if a more epic movie can be made.

Starting point is 01:34:48 I was just like gripped. The visuals were stunning. Yeah. It's out of control. I watched it in IMAX. I think that was a good call. But it was stressful. Favorite interview question they like to ask folks when you're hiring?

Starting point is 01:35:01 I like to ask people what motivates them, but also people often ask me what is my favorite hot seat question, which I think is kind of similar. And my answer to that is that it's like highly dependent on the person and there is no go-to hot seat question. And I almost feel the same way about interview questions. Favorite product you recently discovered they love? Speaking about hype, I am kind of obsessed with the browser company arc onboarding flow, specifically the onboarding flow. I think that they do such a good job of, like, amping you up for not only like the larger change

Starting point is 01:35:40 that they're trying to make in terms of, you know, personal operating system, but of showing you to what extent their team thinks about the details of the product where a lot of other products might cut corners. And I think their ability to communicate the ethos of their product through that is really powerful. So that's one. And then I think the second is in the AI space, I'm really excited by PICA, which is, you know, video generation, video editing software.

Starting point is 01:36:08 I think that in my mind, one of the biggest shortcomings of AI, the way that a lot of people are building it today is that it's optimized for the demo or optimized for the tweet, right? And it's basically this situation where I think about it as like, in my mind one of the biggest goals of AI right now is the like de-black boxification of AI

Starting point is 01:36:32 because it's not really useful to like enter a prompt and get an output that you can't interact with. Because then it's like, if something's a little bit off, what are you going to do? You're kind of stuck. But I think PICA is doing a really great job of like not just investing in the foundational video models, but also giving you the ability to manipulate the output. And so I'm excited about that approach and I hope that more companies take you from that. Awesome. Good choices on ARC. Whenever anyone asked me for a great

Starting point is 01:36:59 onboarding follow, that's the one I point people to. And we had Josh Miller on the podcast in the past and I was proud that he pinned our interview as like his Twitter top of his Twitter feed for like a year, which made me really happy. Do you have a favorite? life motto that you often come back to or share with friends or family that you find useful in life or work. Yeah. Life is a game of expectations. And so speaking of books and movies and things like that, I will never, ever watch a

Starting point is 01:37:27 movie trailer or read the back cover of a book. Because I think it means that you're going into it with too many expectations. It either tells you all the punchlines or it tells you like the foundational backstory or something like that. And I think that like to the extent that you go in either with like no expectations, expectations or low expectations, that's the key to like enjoying life. I love that tip. I recently learned the same piece of advice from Kevin Kelly's recent book,

Starting point is 01:37:52 or it's just a book of little tidbits of advice that he's learned over his life. And one of them is like, never watched the trailer if you're going to watch the movie. And I've been, I've been doing that ever since. I think that's an awesome piece of advice. Final question. You talked about the figgies. You mentioned there's an award for PM least likely to write a PRD. Was that you that won the award for chance?

Starting point is 01:38:09 I think it was me and showtide. I guess correctly. Amazing. Mejika, you're everything I hope you'd be on this podcast. I feel like we could have talked for, I keep saying this, but at least two more hours. Maybe we'll have a follow-up. I'd love that. Thank you so much for being here and for making time. Two final questions.

Starting point is 01:38:28 Where can folks find you if they want to reach out and follow up on anything? And how can listeners be useful to you? Yeah. You can find me on Twitter. I'm at Mahikapur. It's kind of my first name and last name, smushed together. And in terms of how users can be useful to me, So one is, you know, come to config.

Starting point is 01:38:47 We will be announcing both this new product, but also like so many cool things that the company is working on, a lot of very exciting AI launches and more. And I think that like having the community come together is a very special moment. So hope to see you there. You know, cough, cough, try the new product when it comes out. And I don't know, I'm always like on the lookout for like cool new products. I like to be, you know, someone who tries things out early.

Starting point is 01:39:11 So to the extent that you see things. them my way. There's going to be so many people anticipating these new product now. It's just going to be like, holy moly. Please have low expectations. Okay. And the way we'll know is you, are you pitching and presenting it or how do we know this is going to be your product once we see it? It'll probably be in the opening keynote, which is done by Dylan. But, you know, I'll probably give a config talk on it as well. So that's how you will know. And I'll probably tweet about it. What I was actually like going to do is to to release the original vision deck when it launches.

Starting point is 01:39:48 So you can look out for that. We will be watching. I will be at Config. Can't wait to see you there. Can't reveal yet what's happening exactly, but I think it's going to be awesome. Anyway, Mejica, thank you again so much for being here. Thank you for having me, Lenny.

Starting point is 01:40:03 This was such a fun conversation. It was such an honor and a privilege to be on the podcast. So really thank you so much for having me. The honor was mine. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

Starting point is 01:40:30 You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.