Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company

Lenny Rachitsky
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. Vp of product at Figma told me, Mijica 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.

Mihika Kapoor
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 like see ahead into the horizon and be wildly ambitious.

Lenny Rachitsky
Today my guest is Mehika Kapoor. Mehika is a design engineering PM hybrid at Figma, where she was an early PM on Figjam 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 youll hear in our conversation, is beloved by everybody that works with her. Prior to Figma, Mexico 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 theres so much we can learn from stellar, on the ground product managers like Mejica.

In our conversation, we drill into many of the skills that Mejica has cultivated that have 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 figmas most successful products and features and how many of them began at hackathons and maker weeks. Mejika 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 honestly this could have gone for another 2 hours. With that, I bring you Mehika 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.

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Mejika thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. Leni I am a huge fan of the podcast and really excited to be chatting today. Just, just to set expectations. This is going to be a Mexico Lovefest podcast and what I want to try to do with our time here is kind of have like an archaeology of Mexico 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 Mexicas 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 a bunch of colleagues at Figma to 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.

Mihika Kapoor
Okay. 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 PM's are traditionally supposed to be great at. So happy to chat about what makes sense. Okay, that's actually really cool.

Lenny Rachitsky
So let's save that for the end. The things you think you're bad at. The way I see this is a reverse performance review. 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? Do 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.

Mihika Kapoor
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 trying a bunch of other things and then realizing that, like, oh, hey, maybe this Pm thing 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, um, 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 strengths, 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.

Lenny Rachitsky
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 at. Okay, so the first is vision. So sho Kuamato, VP of product at Figma, told me that Mihika 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 best pitches I've ever seen internally at what it could become, why it'd be differentiated, etcetera. And like every new project, this had up and downs. But she's incredibly driven to 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.

Mihika Kapoor
So my take is that vision is everything. It is 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, 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, I just want to underscore the importance of 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 and come out with a compelling vision, you know, 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 you know, 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, and you want to be constantly, even in the vision phase, ensuring 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 start from scratch and learn about the user and then translate that into designs and then translate that into engineering, and it becomes this very, almost like, linear 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? 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 where 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 our 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?

Lenny Rachitsky
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. So before I was working on the new product, I was working on the Figjam team, and I was an early member of the Figjam 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 Figjam and what success might look like for Figjam, a part of it that I was really invested in was the meetings experience and specifically what the world would look like if we were successful at bringing people together into a common space.

Mihika Kapoor
And one of the early insights was, okay, what is the most common meeting that takes place in a figjam file? It's a brainstorm. 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. So you have this proof point of an activity that works really well inside of a figjam file. But then at the same time, something that's really interesting about figjam, people often ask, oh, you guys are figma.

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 figjam on steroids. Every single activity in this company is done in Figjam. It's like our product reviews are in there, our gantt charts are in there, bug bashes are in there. Like, every single thing is in figjam.

And there was this gap between the way that we were using figjam as a company and the way that the rest of the world was using it. But brainstorms were working. You think, okay, what's unique about a brainstorm? And you talk to your user, and you're like, why does a brainstorm make so much more sense in a figjam file than anything else? And what it comes down to is brainstorms are this incredibly democratizing process.

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're able to elicit reactions from people who are more quiet in a meeting or people who may prefer to ideate on their own before coming out to everyone and things like that. And so we kind of started with the seed of brainstorms being this highly democratic process. And what you see is that in most other scenarios, meetings are very one way. You kind of have one person talking and everyone else reacting.

This is true of a team kickoff. This is true of an all hands. This is true of basically 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.

We have this ritual called kudos boards inside of figjam, where everyone will kind of shower each other with love and just kind of call out their teammates for what they've done over the last week or so. And so how can we ensure that those kind of rituals are in our templates and that 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 anchor around that? And how can we get people to get into the flow? So then we started launching features like music, like voting, that really help you get into flow when you're in that file together.

Lenny Rachitsky
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 idea of brainstorming, 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. It could be a 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.

Mihika Kapoor
So I think a common occurrence is to kind of have the research readout, followed by the design crit, followed by the product review, and that's fine, that works in a lot of instances, but then you kind of have every team member thinking that their own deliverable is what they need to pour all their energy into. And what you actually want is for everyone to feel incredible ownership and incredible passion about this combined deliverable, so that it's 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.

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 the market space or the opportunity or the sizing and then decide to invest. Versus figma is very much a c. To believe and see, to feel that emotional pull towards this is something worth investing in. Got it.

Lenny Rachitsky
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. It's. I'm going to write out a paragraph or memo describing it. You can create mock ups 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. Is there anything you can share for how to do this where you don't have those skills? Yeah. Well, the good thing is that with AI, it's getting way easier, so.

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 Devin, 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 current AI revolution is that it's very much lowering the floor to starting out and to building something right.

Mihika Kapoor
And so recently I was doing a chat with David Huang from replic, and he's the head of marketing and design at Replitt, and he was basically talking about how if relet does their job right, you kind of start seeing it as your technical co founder. And I think, like, you know, kind of conversely, like at Figma, we kind of think about if we're doing our job right, 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 bringing things into existence. So I think one is like, yeah, I do think that we're just trending in a direction. And this was not true a year ago, where the floor to building something is just so much lower.

So that's one piece. I think the second piece is just 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 in the idea many months before the hackathon. And I was kind of verbally pitching it and it was kind of like, oh, yeah, maybe at some point in the future we would make an investment like this.

But what actually ended up happening was 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, 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.

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.

Lenny Rachitsky
Just go ask people for help because you're probably going to find someone that's going to help you out. 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 this strong conviction allows you to navigate the messy journey from zero to one and rally your team in a really powerful way. 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 like, 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, you know, probably towards that vision that we were just talking about.

Mihika Kapoor
But I'm a huge proponent of Jeff Bezos one way doors, 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 have 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 product sense and one was execution. And when you think about product sense, it's kind of like, okay, what is product sense? That's a really abstract term. And at the end of the day I think product sense is just having good intuition. And so there's kind of this question about, 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 girl the people around me on like how they use Figma and how they use figjam. 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 start with conversations ABC, then you progress to conversations def over time, you build this 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, okay, which path do we go down?

Now there's kind of the question of, okay, in the absence of any external signal, right, what can you do? And I think that a very common thing, especially for PM's 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, everyone has an opinion, right? So I think this. But like, what do I know compared to these people who've been in my company for like ten years?

Or 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 build up from zero and gather all of these insights to 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 the right idea, then they'll be like, oh my God, yes, let's totally do that.

And if it's wrong, 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. One piece of advice that I got from Yuki when I was working on my vision, sprint, was like, okay, when you go into research, you want to go in with something that's at least an a idea, or you think is at least an a idea. Because if you talk to users and you learn something about it, that's awesome.

Get to an a. If not, like, at least you're not at a b. And so I think that having that early conviction, willing to, 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. But then also something that's equally important when you have high conviction is to be willing to kill your darlings. If you hear something that tells you otherwise, you need to be sort of strong opinions, weakly held.

And if you get 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 PM's 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, 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 strong opinion of like, here's this, 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.

Lenny Rachitsky
What advice do you have there of just finding that balance and making it clear? Here's just my idea. We can change it. I would say that, you know, speaking about weaknesses, having such strong conviction absolutely has downsides. In particular, it can, it's possible that it doesn't have the desired effect.

Mihika Kapoor
So, for example, like, my designer, who I work with, his name is Kian. He's so talented. We work like this, like, literally for most of last year, we had like an hour long one on one every single day. And still that wasn't enough meeting time. Yes, we basically work together like this.

But he also told me that when I joined the company, he was like, who is this girl and why does she 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 where I'll be like, oh, I think we should do this. But I feel like medium confidence on it. So if you feel stronger, I defer to you.

And always being 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 that is really important in order to do this correctly is so I have a very direct communication style. Like, I will never sugarcoat anything. I will never say 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 PM's 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 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.

Lenny Rachitsky
So this direct communication point you made, somebody shared this quote, Alice Ching, who's, I think your em said this about you, that she's in awe of how direct you are. Especially how you can make it not personal to 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. Cause I think people hear this, they're like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna be direct. I'm gonna be so direct.

Be great. And then it's so hard to actually do. So is there maybe an example that comes to mind 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.

Mihika Kapoor
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? Mana, where I used to work, had this phrase feedback as 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 important that feedback is this constantly flowing thing, not something that happens once or twice a year when you have an official feedback cycle. And the way that I try and create this culture of constant, 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, maybe I have my way of seeing this situation. 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. Right?

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 XYZ. In order to 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 gonna drill into a specific trait.

Lenny Rachitsky
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, like, an insight about how you think people could be 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, being able to communicate it with.

And in your experience, communicating with prototypes and mocks is the way 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, 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 missed 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 Jiang, who is on your team, maybe he said, I feel no PM has ever got me so hyped about a feature. And Yuki said that you overcome people's doubts by building hype and hacking hype is the way he described it. Talk about this and why do you think it's so important and how you actually go about doing this. 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?

Mihika Kapoor
And, you know, different products need different levels of excitement to make it out the door. Right? If there is something that leadership has really strong conviction in, it's important for leadership to amp the whole company up behind that vision. On the flip side, if you 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 out the door. One example is we've been talking about 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 a sense of over winter break, everyone forgets what happened last year.

It goes at the door because you were hopefully doing something that took your mind off work. And so at the same time, there's kind of this sense of, how do you create forward momentum inside of a company in January when people are kind of slowly coming back into office? Everyone's trickling back in at different dates because everyone took slightly different, different pto. 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 and we have a keynote and set of fireside chats and stuff like that, and we talk about what's coming for the year.

And at this point, our product existed, but it was absolutely barely built. It was rough around the edges. It had bugs every day. Maybe, like, ten people in the company were using it, and, you know, something like that outside of the team. Yet it was so important to me that this product got visibility in this forum, because this was the first company wide forum of the year where we were, like, declaring priorities for the year, right.

And so it was, like, 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 Yuki, our CPO, were giving this keynote on, like, what does our year look like? And I really, really, deeply insisted that we should include a demo. I think what ended up happening is something like that. Like, a demo that wasn't meant to be a demo or that people weren't expecting does so much in terms of driving that sense of hype and helping people see what you yourself see in the future.

And what's really interesting is, 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 annual showcase to the world of what we're working on, in order to get everyone to see what you're seeing 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 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 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. And this pitch and product you're describing is the one that's going to be launching this mysterious new product, right? Yes. 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.

Lenny Rachitsky
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, God damn, no one's ever doing anything with it. 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 about 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, an emotional, visceral way and basically find opportunities to do that is kind of a lesson here. In my mind, there is, like, internal hype, which is how do you get buy in and everyone inside of the company to be banging their fist on the table for a product to get built. But there's also external hype, which is how do you get your users hyped about your product? How do you get them to really be so stoked when there are milestone occasions for your product or milestone launches, and for them to be celebrating with you? One of the things that I loved the most when I joined the company was, you know, Figma and design Twitter have had this very symbiotic relationship where each has grown with the other over time.

Mihika Kapoor
And what really happens is anytime we launch something, you have all of design Twitter celebrating with us. And one other moment when I thought it was very fun to drive hype was when I worked on Figjam in 2022, it was the one year Figjam anniversary in April. And project anniversaries, or product anniversaries, are quite an exciting milestone within the company. You bring everyone together, maybe you pop a bottle of champagne, you kind of celebrate how far you've come and what all you've learned since the launch. But we were really thinking, okay, Figjam is awesome.

But Figjam isn't just any product. Figjam has a personality. Figjam is cheeky. Figjam is fun. Figjam is, 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? Like, you wouldn't really have, like, an anniversary party. Like, you would throw it, like, a full on birthday party. 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, product of a bunch of new features. And what we did was we Easter egged them through the product.

And each sort of product that we were releasing inside of Figjam was hidden under this little birthday present. And throughout the day, we sent all of our users on an Easter egg hunt of presence inside of Figjam. And so not only was it Figjam getting the presence, but it was our users getting the presence. And so I think that hype as well is really tied to emotion. So to the extent that a person using a product can feel like, oh, this thing that is built in the product was built 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, like, every product has their own brand of delight or excitement or energy. So hype for Figjam is incredibly different than hype from Figma, where hype for Figma might be like, this really, really niche design capability that unlocks this pain point that designers have been having for years and years. And then hype for Apple might be the world's best unboxing experience or something like that, right? 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.

Lenny Rachitsky
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?

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?

Mihika Kapoor
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, etcetera. Now at Figma, we have a slightly more niche audience.

I think that hopefully ultimately we get to everyone. We started with design teams, now we're thinking about the entire product development cycle and how we can build for that. And then who knows? Beyond that could be anything. But I think that constantly immersing yourself in those circles where your users are is really important.

So for me, it's like anytime that I'm catching up with a friend who mildly works in tech or a tech adjacent field, like, I will generally be asking them about Figma. And I think what's really great is that as a company scales over time, their user base gets broader and broader. And so when we grew from a single product company with Figma, into now a multiproduct company with Figjam, Dev Mode, et cetera, our audience exploded. And we already saw latent behavior inside of Figma. But now it's 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 the product being great. It's also about the marketing and the perceptions that surround the product and potentially the hype that surrounds that. And so having those conversations about, I remember having an early conversation with folks from my previous team about, hey, why aren't you, are you guys using Bigjam? And they would be like, maybe sometimes.

And I'd be like, well, why aren't you using big dream? It's literally built for you, right? And then that led to a series of product insights that led us to invest in a set of features that would make it much easier for a non designer to get started out on the canvas. So we launched this kind of placeholder experience that rather than traditional templates, really let people see the various use cases and preview the various use cases on the canvas. And so that was incredibly important.

And then Figma, of course, is kind of like it's in this 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? Like you have 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, 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 litmus test for what you user needs, there are 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 sales 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 really leaning into that, building that relationship between these traditionally more siloed orgs and hopping on those calls is something that I'd really recommend. Awesome. Let's go actually one layer deeper here. So you're talking to people all the time about Figjam. Why aren't you using Figjam.

Lenny Rachitsky
What do you think of Figma? What do you think of this? You're hopping on sales calls. What do you do with what you hear? Is there kind of an operational approach where 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 in Figcham, for example? And then on the sales side, do you have a cadence where, like, I'm 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 of ways. So first is so like, yeah, let's continue using Figcham as an example. I think, like I mentioned, Figma as a company uses figjam for everything. Multiple figjam files are made per day, per meeting, et cetera.

Mihika Kapoor
We had this initial situation where people outside of the company were mostly using figjam for brainstorms. And so as we were scaling our Figjam sales team, I sort of set up 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 pushing 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 Bigjam. And this meeting, this is how I use Bigjam. And this meeting, this is how I use bigjam. Blah, blah, blah. And what that resulted in was I actually made a loom video walking through my week in Figjam that our sales team later distributed to a bunch of companies to inspire them as to like, hey, not only can you use Figjam for this, you can use figure for XYZ.

You can use it for your team pickups, you can use it for your retros, you can use it for planning your mom's birthday party. You can use it for literate 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. Um, 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 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. Conversely, like, sometimes, you know, the team might have a suggestion for 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 slack integration where you can react with an Asana emoji and then any piece of feedback that comes in from sales or from the rest of the company gets turned into a task in your backlog and you do 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 has top notch security practices, things get complicated fast.

Lenny Rachitsky
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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 feel, which makes me care deeply. Who wants to be led by someone who doesn't care about what they're building? Feels like that's an important part of the way you work and think. Is there anything you want to say about that?

Mihika Kapoor
When I started out my product career, I actually joined as RPM or rotational product manager at Meta, which was effectively a program that brought together new grad PM's. So people who had like 00:00 p.m.. Experience and taught them how to be PM's. And in the beginning of this program, we had a series of conversations with leaders across the company. 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 how to draft compelling product strategy, etcetera. 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, like, 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, 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, um, 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 that the more you believe in an idea, the more natural it is to be passionate about it.

Lenny Rachitsky
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 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, find thing, keep searching for? Is it, 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 the vision of that company, and understand your users, and understand if there's 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.

Mihika Kapoor
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, that should kind of like, guide the next steps in your career. And so I think that 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. The reasons why you would found inside of an existing company is if you think that there is a distribution advantage that you want to take advantage of, if there is a technical or platform advantage that you want to take advantage of, or there's also a reality which is slightly less risk. Depending on what your risk tolerance is, you can 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. 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 set of folks that you can recruit from 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 sometimes, yeah, it makes sense to found inside of a company and to use that to make your flame burn. Right. Sometimes it makes sense to found out.

Right. But I think that the first key to being passionate about 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 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 gotten really deep on a bunch of awesome stuff, and I'm really happy we did.

Lenny Rachitsky
There's four more skills of things you're amazing at. So here's an idea. Let me share the four. How about you pick two that you're 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's 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. What is creativity? That you're just like.

You have really creative solutions to problems. Two is empathy. You're really strong at 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 at. Just like. Okay, cool. Priorities are changing.

Great, let's go. 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. Yeah, sounds great.

So I guess culture. Let me start there. So, okay, so, yeah, show called you the culture carrier at Figma. 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.

Mihika Kapoor
I started at our first PM off site 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, 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 and if you are working with your friends. And so we were coming out of a long, intense day session and I was thinking about, okay, how do we break the ice? And hot seat is 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, generally speaking, quite friendly and comfortable for folks.

And so we kicked off this game. And what was really interesting was earlier that day we had done a personality test. So side note, our PM team is 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 off site, which is the strengths finder test.

And what had basically happened was over the course of that morning, we had all kind of dug into, 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 pot seat where it was like, we were digging into, like, what about people's backgrounds? Made them think the way that they do today. 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 hear after is that, you know, since then, hot seed has kind of become a tradition within the company. And so all the PM's went on to play it with their own teams. Yuki and Shiro went on to play it with the exec team, so on and so forth. And so it's kind of become this thing that 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 just get to know folks and 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, 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. 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 took our Bigma boardroom, which is called Bigma, and worked with another PM, Elin, to duck it out.

And like a red carpet, gold curtains, etcetera. And we bought 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, blah. And, you know, of course, forced everyone to give some sort of acceptance speech. 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 making people understand maybe someone who they don't know that well on the PM team, because then you kind of learn, okay, beyond them, kind of having this Zoom background, this is what's cheeky about them, or this is what's interesting or unique about them.

And so I think that culture is so important. 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 this remote first world that we live in. You also want to kind of take advantage of those times when you're able to get together and do things that make the team feel even geographically close, even when they're geographically spread out. Oh, man, so fun.

Lenny Rachitsky
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. And in theory, any PM on the team could have done this.

Mihika Kapoor
It's kind of interesting. Something that I'd 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, like, the innovation that comes out of that is bottoms up. And so I think in the first place, having a value play does a lot in order to make folks feel like these kinds of things are celebrated and time should be carved out for. Them to come back to your original point of just culture is everything. A lot of PM's are like, I have so much work to do.

Lenny Rachitsky
I have so many things to do. I'm just 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.

Mihika Kapoor
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, you know, 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?

And I think that 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 jump ship or something. I think, personally, I'm in love with my team. They give me so much joy and happiness on a daily basis. I was telling them the other day that when they post prototypes in our slack channel, sometimes I get little flutters in my chest.

When you have a crush on someone, I think that having that emotional connection to your team is fun.

And I think that emotional connection comes from 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.

Lenny Rachitsky
It's like, you can make it more fun. And I think the two examples you shared are awesome, because one is like a high end version where there's 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 it's there. Okay. So actually, I want to combat the perception that the figgies was a high production, high cost thing. It was very low cost.

Mihika Kapoor
I ordered everything on Amazon and assembled it in, like, an hour. And so there are ways to be, like, scrappy in kind of making things come together. And so I would say, like, don't be intimidated by any idea being, like, too large to take on and just kind of, like, go for it. That's an awesome correction. Okay, final trait you're great at.

Lenny Rachitsky
Somebody shared that. You pivot with grace and enthusiasm when things change, when priorities change, projects are killed, projects are spun up. This is something that a lot of people at companies just get so sad about. Oh, my God, things keep changing. My projects killed.

Oh, this priority changed. Feels 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, 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.

Mihika Kapoor
So companies like Airbnb and Pinterest were leading in industry, and they were leading not just because they, like, built technology and made it accessible, but because they were really using the interface layer to differentiate. So there was this point where, like, software had reached, like, a certain level of saturation, 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 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, yet the kind of groundwork to make that happen wasn't really, 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 coincidentally 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 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 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. And so I went from, you know, building something in a situation where I thought, like, finances, expenditures, connections, et cetera, were, 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 of a email address.

And I just went, like, on a spree, cold emailing so many people, so many executives about this 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, designers who I really admire, like Daniel Brica, Jamie, my old, et cetera, are 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, then 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, 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 suddenly speakers is not the most important thing. Fundraising is the most important thing. Or building a hype landing page so that you seem more legit than a very scrappy, few person student organization is the most important thing. And just being quite adaptable when it comes to resourcing, I think, is very important.

Lenny Rachitsky
That's an awesome example. It shows another trait of Mexica that in our archaeological study, which has come up a bunch, and I'm just putting my finger on it, is just like high agency. It feels like you're 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 I love that. And by the way, in designation 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.

Mihika Kapoor
And, yeah, last year we had folks like Stuart Weitzman and Joe Gebbia, 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 and, you know, marketers who are very design minded, etcetera, 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 bullet point the skills you find you're not good at?

Lenny Rachitsky
Just, I said we would come to this. What do you think you're not good at? And we won't go too deep here unless you want. So it's kind of interesting to, 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.

Mihika Kapoor
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, 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, like, 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 then stay up until 03:00 a.m. To do it. 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, sometimes you want to defer those decisions. And so that's also an important skill to learn. Awesome. Thanks for sharing all that. This touches on something that came up in a previous podcast episode.

Lenny Rachitsky
Nickel from Meta had this really interesting metaphor where there's kind of every superpower is a shadow. Basically everything you're amazing at, there's something that it'll be a problem 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, 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. So what I hear is you're kind of the go to person for zero 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 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? Yeah. In order for a company to stay competitive, a company needs to stay entrepreneurial.

Mihika Kapoor
If you are not constantly thinking about what's next, defining the industry standard, seeing around the corner from your competitors, you will get taken over, if that is 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. And it's really encouraged that people can kind of just like, 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 Multiedit, which was like a long clamored for 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 Jambot, which is an AI plugin inside of Figjam that has, you know, 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 push bottoms up. And so constantly thinking about 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, maybe just broadly, what does it take to do this?

Lenny Rachitsky
Well, to go from idea to, okay, that's a huge new product for a business. What have you learned just broadly, what are kind of the steps or the important elements of that? Well, 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. 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.

Mihika Kapoor
And in particular, there's this metaphor that really sticks with me, which is in greek mythology, all the gods sit on Mount Olympus, and there's this goddess, Hestia, who is the keeper of the hearth, and it is her job to always keep the hearth burning, even when all the gods peace out to go on their various quests. And I kind of think about the person or the team or the group of people who are pushing a zero to one ideas, being the, like hestias or the keepers of the hearth. And it is your job to 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 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.

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 idea, and that's the empathy piece. That's the piece that you will get from having conversations day in, 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 someone joins a company and they're like, oh, what is that flame burning there? And how can I learn more about. That coming up with a great idea, getting buy in for your idea and then spreading it within the organization.

Lenny Rachitsky
What have you learned about how to actually come 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 figjam to people. And so speaking about 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 the other tools or products that they might be using on a daily basis.

Mihika Kapoor
It's not enough to have a perspective on how well you are competing in the market, but you also need to know understand a person's full end to end tooling usage. The second thing is you need to ensure that what you're 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 how do we go from building for designers to covering the entire product development cycle and expanding to non designers in particular, and non designers is kind of this bucket term that we use for PM's and developers and marketers and so on and so forth. But how can we ensure that 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.

Lenny Rachitsky
Such an important point, basically understanding the business, not just here's my feature, here's my product, right? 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 with this.

We've talked about a lot of these things, building hype, creating a big vision. What else there that we haven't talked about that you think is really important? 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.

Mihika Kapoor
What basically happened was I kind of built connection to the idea by talking to users. And then I would have 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, what am I seeing? What are they not seeing?

And then what basically happened was we had a PM offsite where we were talking about strategy for the next year. And I again pitched this and it got like kind of momentum there, but not really. And then I think the third time when it actually stuck was at the maker week hackathon. And this was kind of an insane experience for me because I was actually hosting our hackathon. So I was kind of like working with our vp of design, Noah, in order to like spread the word about like, hey, everyone, pitch your ideas.

And to constantly, hackathons are interesting when they're virtual, right? Because you don't really know what people not in your office are doing. So you're constantly thinking about, okay, how can you hype up the whole company? 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 a limited time zone overlap and things like that?

And so I was simultaneously thinking about, okay, how do we kind of keep the momentum of this hackathon running? And then also, how do I push this idea bottoms up? And I think that something that's really important when you're making a pitch is to not be daunted by the scale of your pitch. So, for example, in this instance, the proposal was basically to introduce a new product, and building a product in a week is, for all intents and purposes, kind of crazy. But this is, I think, where the scrappiness piece comes in.

You need to be willing to be very clear about where you're willing to take the hit on quality or believability and where you need to push in order to make your thing feel believable. So one example of something that we did was we literally, in order to make this new product feel more real, and this was maybe a two line change in code, was we swapped out the figjam icon in our file browser to this new icon. Adding a whole new entry point is a lot of work, and you can't do that. But just swapping something and taking about what exists and changing the minor things in order to communicate what is different about your idea versus what exists today is something that you really want to lean into. What basically happened was, at the end of the week, we had this demo day, and I was going between introducing each of the demos to doing the demo, and did a little wardrobe change in between.

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?

Lenny Rachitsky
It gets 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 plus long staging or 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 Figjam and we had the problem. We built it, we put something on staging. And I was kind of like, okay, cool.

Mihika Kapoor
It's been on staging a week now. We can launch. And I was greeted with, no, we can't launch. And I think that leaning into that willingness to being vulnerable about your product and this acknowledgement that feedback is a gift, and that bits and pieces of feedback from across the company will 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. But the other benefit about putting something on staging early is that it makes people invested in your product. So if you think about, like, why are betas so valuable? And why are alphas 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 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 hopefully that just elevates the quality of the product.

Lenny Rachitsky
Is there anything else you want to touch on or share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning route? If you have an insight that only you have, I think on one hand you can kind of believe, like, oh, other people aren't thinking similar to me, therefore, 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 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 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, for example, if you think about the composition of a product team, you have engineers, you have designers, you have researchers, data scientists, etcetera, and different people want to be involved in the kind of like, product visioning phase.

Mihika Kapoor
To a different extent, there are some people who do want a solution handed to them, because for them, the most exciting part of the process is to find the technical solution in the code. On the other hand, there are other people who 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 highest functioning teams. Such a cool point and comes back to the personality tests that you spoke of earlier. Is that the best way to figure this out?

Lenny Rachitsky
Is it more just 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, 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.

Mihika Kapoor
And even if the decision is something along the lines of, like, okay, we have four options, and you can go in with, like, a leading point of view, but giving everyone the opportunity to, like, voice their perspective and push back if they 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.

Lenny Rachitsky
Are you ready? I am ready. Mejika, first question. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? Yeah.

Mihika Kapoor
I will start by saying that I am immediately skeptical of anyone who has 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. Are we talking about every book in the series, or at least 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 the fifth book, and then the person at the bookstore was like, 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 Min Jin 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 large scale things. So to see a single story traverse so many generations was very fascinating to me. And then from a more, like, businessy book perspective, which is maybe more what you're getting at, I think that I honestly like pseudo steer clear of how to books, but one that has had 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 creativity is so unencumbered and process is the opposite. So that's very fascinating.

Lenny Rachitsky
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 over story? I have not. I will add that to my I. Feel like, based on the way you described pachinko, this is a book for you.

It's a multi generational family story that I did not actually finish. It's very long, but I feel like you were there. Okay, I will go order it. Okay. Favorite recent movie or tv show?

Mihika Kapoor
Favorite recent tv show would definitely be severance. Mmm. Movie or shall we move on? Oh, movie. I recently watched Dune two and Dune one in the span of a week.

It was really fun. I watched Dune two because someone asked me to co host a premiere of Dune two with them, and I was like, okay, sounds good, sounds cool, but I need to watch Dune one. Good choice. I just watched Dune two. I don't know if a more epic movie can be made.

Lenny Rachitsky
I was just gripped. The visuals are stunning. Yeah, it's out of control. I watched it IMax. I think that was a good call, but it was stressful.

Favorite interview question that you like to ask folks when you're hiring? 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 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 that you love. Speaking about hype. I am kind of obsessed with, um, 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 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.

Mihika Kapoor
So that's one. And then I think the second is in the AI space. I'm really excited by Pika, which is video generation, video editing software. 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, um, or optimized for the tweet. Right.

And it's basically this situation where, like, 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, 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 gonna do? You're kind of stuck. But I think Pika 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 cue from that. Awesome.

Lenny Rachitsky
Good choices on Ark, whenever anyone asks me for a great onboarding flow, 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 top of his Twitter feed for 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 in 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 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.

Mihika Kapoor
It either tells you all the punchlines or it tells you the foundational backstory or something like that. And I think that to the extent that you go in either with no expectations or low expectations, that's the key to enjoying life. I love that tip. I recently learned the same piece of advice from Kevin Kelly's recent book. It's just a book of little tidbits of advice that he's learned over his life.

Lenny Rachitsky
And one of them is like, never watch the trailer if you're going to watch the movie. And I've been doing that ever since. I think that's an awesome piece of advice. Final question. We 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? I think it was me. And show tide.

I guessed correctly. Amazing. Mihika, you're everything I hoped 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.

Mihika Kapoor
I'd love that. Thank you so much for being here and for making time. Two final questions. 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 a hikapoor. 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 come to config. We will be announcing both this new product, but also so many cool things that the company is working on.

A lot of very exciting AI launches and more. And I think that having the community come together is a very special moment. So hope to see you there. 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. So to the extent that you see things, send them my way. There's going to be so many people anticipating these new products.

Please have low expectations. Okay. And the way we'll, 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 like, opening keynote, which is done by Dylan, but 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 going to do is to release the original vision deck when it launches, so you can look out for that. We will be watching. I will be at config. Can't wait to see you essentially on stage.

Lenny Rachitsky
Can't reveal yet what's happening exactly, but I think it's going to be awesome. Anyway, Mejika, thank you again so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Lenny. This was such a fun conversation.

Mihika Kapoor
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.

Lenny Rachitsky
If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma)

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1: Introduction

2: Developing a Vision

3: The Role of Hackathons

4: Handling Changes and Challenges

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