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

Lenny Rachitsky: I asked on Twitter, “Who’s the best product manager you’ve worked with?” You were the most mentioned.

Mihika Kapoor: My take is that your scope is the world. Nothing should ever perceive as being out of bounds.

Lenny Rachitsky: VP of product at Figma told me, “Mahika is really great at creating a vision and getting people to see what she sees.”

Mihika Kapoor: We lean heavily into designing and prototyping even before a project gets a green light. If you and your team do your job correctly, what does the world look like?

Lenny Rachitsky: Say somebody wants to make their culture more entrepreneurial, what does it take?

Mihika Kapoor: We have this concept called Maker Week, which is our internal hackathon, giving people the breathing space to see ahead into the horizon and be wildly ambitious.

Lenny Rachitsky: Today, my guest is Mahika Kapoor. Mahika 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’s going to launch in June. She’s known as the go-to person at Figma for leading new zero-to-one products. And as you’ll hear in our conversation, is beloved by everybody that works with her. Prior to Figma, Mahika founded Design Nation, a national nonprofit that democratizes undergraduate student access to a design education, and led several products and launches at Meta, focused on commerce and creators.

On this podcast, I bring on a lot of amazing senior product leaders, but there’s so much we can learn from stellar on-the-ground product managers like Mahika. In our conversation, we drill into many of the skills that Mahika has cultivated that have contributed to her success, including how to develop a compelling vision, get buy-in for your ideas, how to develop conviction, empathy, the importance of culture, and how to create a culture on your team and within the company, and also how to deal with the constant change that happens within successful organizations.

We also spent a bunch of time on how to effectively bring new ideas in your company from zero to one to launch, including getting to a bunch of the stories behind some of Figma’s most successful products and features, and how many of them began at hackathons and Maker Weeks. Mahika is a truly special product manager and leader, and I feel fortunate to have had this chance to learn from her. We went quite long on this conversation, but honestly, this could have gone for another two hours. With that, I bring you Mahika Kapoor, after a short word from our sponsors. And if you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It’s the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.

Mahika, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Mihika Kapoor: Thank you for having me, Lenny. I am a huge fan of the podcast and really excited to be chatting today.

Lenny Rachitsky: Just to set expectations, this is going to be a Mahika love-fest podcast. And what I want to try to do with our time here is have an archeology of Mahika 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 Mahikas in the world. That’s kind of my goal here because I feel like that would [inaudible 00:05:11].

Mihika Kapoor: Mildly frightening.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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 your 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?

Mihika Kapoor: That sounds good. One thing to call out is that I think when I think about my own PM style, it’s definitely not a tick-all-the-boxes style. There are plenty of things that I’m very bad at that PMs are traditionally supposed to be great at, so happy to chat about what makes sense.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, that’s actually really cool. 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 just along those lines, what I’m hearing is there’s a sense of 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? Then we’ll talk.

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, “Oh, hey, maybe this PM thing makes more sense for me.” So, for me personally, it was I have always been a very left brain, right brain kind of a person. I majored in CS and minored in visual arts. And when I worked as a software engineer, I really missed the design side, and when I worked as a designer, I missed the technical. And moving into product was a really great way to kind of straddle both and have more touch points across the product development cycle. And so, I think that 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 a growth mindset and to constantly be 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 basic at. Okay. So, the first is vision. So, Sho Kuwamoto, VP of product at Figma told me that, “Mahika is really great at creating a vision and getting people to see what she sees. She’s working on a new project now and put together one of the best pitches I’ve ever seen internally at what it could become, why it’d be differentiated, et cetera. And like every new project, this had up and downs, but she’s incredibly driven to 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?

Mihika Kapoor: Yeah, absolutely. 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 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 that are not discouraging, but rather, learning opportunities for your team team, it’s so important to be anchored on that singular vision because then any step along the way feels like forward progress.

So, first, just want to underscore the importance of 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’s sort of a few aspects. The first is that you cannot go into a vacuum and come out with a compelling vision that does not exist. You have to be fundamentally inseparable from your users, and also, fundamentally inseparable from your team. And so, I think that there is sort of this important cross-pollination of functions that is really important in crafting a compelling vision. You want to always ensure that there are research insights that help you feel what a user is feeling. You want to ensure that there are beautiful designs and prototypes that help communicate what this future world looks like, and you also want to root it in engineering and feasibility. And you want to be constantly, even in the vision phase, assuring that what you’re marching after is something that is achievable and something that you can work towards.

And so, I think a lot of folks when they think about visioning, they kind of think about, “Okay, how do we 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 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, once you have your vision, 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, 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 not just your traditional, “Okay, here are pain points. And then, here are solutions. And then, here is the timeline and costing.” But rather how can you bring all of those things together and how can a vision pitch effectively be 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: Is there an example that we could talk about? I know you can’t talk about the product you’re working on yet, but from the past of a vision that you crafted maybe to share what the vision was or how you came to that to make this even more real?

Mihika Kapoor: 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 something that really took off during the pandemic because it was the first time that people were not together in office, couldn’t jam together, couldn’t just throw up a whiteboard behind them physically. And so, there was kind of this question of, okay, how do you combat these 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?

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, right? It’s like you have a bunch of people, you’ve coming together and they’re dropping a bunch of stickies and stuff like that. And so, you have this proof point of an activity that works really well inside of a 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. Our product reviews are in there, our Gantt charts are in there, our bug bashes are in there. Every single thing is in FigJam.

Mihika Kapoor: 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. And so, you kind of think, “Okay, what’s unique about a brainstorm?” And you talk to your users 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 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 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. Where a team kickoff is not just a PM and a designer handing mocks to an engineer, but it’s everyone leaving stickies and everyone commenting at the same time, or everyone leaving…

We have this ritual called Kudos Boards inside of FigJam, where everyone will shower each other with love and just kind 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 anchor on this vision around, 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 pile together.

Lenny Rachitsky: That is such a cool example. I’m trying to be this archeologist studying what you’re describing and breaking it apart. So, what I’m hearing essentially is there’s this insight that you find of, “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 one of the most inspiring ways of working where it’s not just someone sitting in a silo. And then, you take that and create kind of a, “Here’s what the world could look like if we could make everything this feel this way, very democratic.” And then there’s this pitch that you eventually make of, “Here’s the product.” And you talked about how the way you pitch it is, “Here’s a pain, here’s a solution, and here’s a proof point of that solution,” could be a testimonial or some data, I imagine.

Mihika Kapoor: Definitely. I think that when you’re actually presenting a vision, one of the most important things is that there is a single artifact that the team is creating together. So, I think a common occurrence is to 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 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 a singular set of insights.

Lenny Rachitsky: So, what’s an example of that? Is it like a deck in Figma?

Mihika Kapoor: 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 talk about the market space or the opportunity of the sizing, and then decide to invest. Versus Figma is very much a see to believe and see to feel that emotional pull towards this is something worth investing in.

Lenny Rachitsky: Got it. So, that’s what I was trying to get to is how do you actually deliver a vision? So, a lot of people, ” Here, I need to create a vision. I’m going to write out a paragraph or a memo describing it.” You can create mock-ups. The way you’re describing it, essentially, is 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?

Mihika Kapoor: Yeah. Well, the good thing is that with AI, it’s getting way easier. So-

Lenny Rachitsky: True.

Mihika Kapoor: 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. And so, recently, I was doing a chat with David Huang from Replit, and he’s the head of marketing and design at Replit. And he was basically talking about how if Replit does their job right, you start seeing it as your technical co-founder. And I think, conversely at Figma we kind of think about if we’re doing our job, maybe in the future people will think about Figma as their designer co-founder, where you can go in and use it to start bringing things into existence.

So, I think one is, 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 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 walk around the New York office asking every single person, “Will you work on this thing with me?” And eventually, someone says yes, and then you can use that to build momentum, grow the team, and build something great. But I think that never letting your own skills stop you from going out there making a pitch and then turning that into reality is really important.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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 help them with a deck or help them with ideas, that 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 you describe it is pretty simple. Just go ask people for help because you’re probably going to find someone that’s going to help you out.

Lenny Rachitsky: You mentioned conviction, so that’s a great segue to else where I wanted to go next. So, I asked Yuhki, chief product officer at Figma, about your strengths. And he told me 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 to true deep conviction, versus there’s an inkling of instinct that this is going to work and then you profit on the sense of conviction to get people rallying behind you and to kind of take this leap of faith?

Mihika Kapoor: I think that one of the most important things for a PM to create for their team is momentum. You have to constantly be creating forward progress, probably towards that vision that we were just talking about. But I’m a huge proponent of Jeff Bezos’s one-way doors, 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 like, okay, what is product sense? It’s like a really abstract term. And at the end of the day, I think product sense is just having good intuition.

And so, there’s this question about, okay, how do you build up intuition? And I think that it’s just by having this insatiable curiosity and talking to users at every chance you get. So, I would go to dinners and grill the people around me on 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 the question of in the absence of any external signal, what can you do? And I think that a very common thing, especially for PMs who are younger in their career, is to think that your opinion isn’t right or might not be reflective of what the user thinks. So, you think, “Okay, I believe this,” and at the end of the day, everyone has an opinion, right? So, “I think this, but what do I know compared to these people who’ve been in my company for 10 years?” Or, “What do I know compared to my users who are using the product?” And so, then I think what might happen in those instances is you kind of start from nothing, 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 Yuhki 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, at least you’re not at a B.” And so, I think that having-

If not, at least you’re not at a B. And so I think that having that early conviction, being willing to communicate it, being willing to get feedback from other folks in your team, have them react to it, then get users to react to it, is so important, but then also something that’s equally important when you have “high conviction”, quote, unquote, is to be willing to kill your darlings if you hear something that tells you otherwise. You need to be so sort of strong opinions weekly 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: There’s a lot of PMs that kind of worry about having too strong of an opinion and being like, “Here’s what we’re doing,” because then there’s this like, “Oh, okay, they 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 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 bill.” What advice do you have there of just finding that balance and making it clear? It’s just my idea. We can change it.

Mihika Kapoor: I would say that speaking about weaknesses, having such strong conviction absolutely has downsides. In particular, it’s possible that it doesn’t have the desired effect. So for example, my designer who I work with, his name is Kean, he’s so talented. We work like this. Literally for most of last year, we had an hour long one- on-one every single day and still that wasn’t enough-

Lenny Rachitsky: Everyday?

Mihika Kapoor: … 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 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 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 like, “I defer to you,” and always being very, very, very explicit about like, “I feel really strongly about this,” or, “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. I will never sugarcoat anything. I’ll 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 always let them know. I’m always like, :I am very direct and if you disagree with me, I want to know that.”

Mihika Kapoor: Because I think sometimes what can happen is really strongly minded PMs can go into a conversation and can be like, “Oh, I think we should do X,” even though they actually feel medium confidence about X. And then the rest of the room is like, “Oh, my God. That PM feels so strongly about doing X that I’m not going to say anything because they clearly have 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 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 and 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, because I think people hear this, they’re like, “Oh yeah, I’m going to be direct. I’m going to be so direct, it’s going to be great,” and then it’s so hard to actually do, so is there maybe an example that comes to mind of here’s something you did recently of like, “Oh, wow. Okay, I see what she’s talking about”?

Mihika Kapoor: So I think that directness only works if it’s two-way. If it is one person being really direct with another person and then 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 in their own head. The person being direct will be like, “Why is the other person not responding to my feedback?” And then the other person will be like, “Why am I the only one getting so much feedback?” Meta, 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. 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, let me quickly summarize what we’ve gone through so far in our archaeological study, and then I’m going to drill into a specific trait. So one is just having a really powerful vision that people get really excited about. And the way you described it is kind of find an insight about how you think people could be, 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 that you find it to be most effective. Also, just getting to strong conviction, whether it’s real or not, but it sounds like it’s actually very genuine about an idea and making it clear. You’re 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 candor as some people describe it. First of all, is there anything else I missed specifically before I drill into one of these?

Mihika Kapoor: That sounds right.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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 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 Karl Jiang, who is on your team maybe, he said, “I feel no PM has ever got me so hyped about a feature.” And Yuhki said that you overcome people’s doubts by building hype and hacking hype is the way described it. Talk about this and why do you think it’s important and how you actually go about doing this.

Mihika Kapoor: 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. And different products need different levels of excitement to make it out the door. 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 to make it out the door. And so 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 this sense, or at least I always suspect, that there’s this 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 this sense of how do you create forward momentum inside of a company in January when people are slowly coming back into office, everyone’s trickling back in at different dates because everyone to click slightly different PTO, how do you rally people in a certain direction? And so we have this thing at Figma called SKO or Sales Kickoff, which is every year the sales team comes together, and we have a keynote and a set of fireside chats and stuff like that, and we talk about what’s coming for the year. And at this point, our product, it existed, but it was absolutely barely built. It was rough around the edges. It had bugs every day. Maybe 10 people in the company were using it and something like that outside of the team.

Yeah, 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 declaring priorities for the year. And so it was so important to me that this product had some sort of a moment, or speaking of show, don’t tell, a demo in the context of this keynote. And so Kris, our CTO and Yuhki, our CPO, were giving this keynote on what does our year look like? And I really, really deeply insisted that we should include a demo. And I think what ended up happening is something like that, 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 my opinion. The only way to create hype is to get people to see what you see.

Mihika Kapoor: And so I think that it’s incredibly important to leverage very large forums like that Maker Week, like Sales Kickoff. 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: And this pitch and product you’re describing is the one that’s going to be launching this mysterious new product, right?

Mihika Kapoor: Yes.

Lenny Rachitsky: I feel like we’re going to build so much hype for this thing when it ever comes out. I’m so excited to learn what it is. Coming back to the point, so what I’m hearing essentially is you find it’s important to take responsibility for this thing to become a thing at a company. A lot of people have an idea, they build a prototype, they build a hackathon project, and then they’re like, “God, 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, what I’m feeling is 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 hyped about it in a emotional, visceral way and basically find opportunities to do that is kind of a lesson here.

Mihika Kapoor: In my mind, there is internal hype, which is how do you get buy-in and everyone inside of the company to be fanging their fist on the table for a product to get built, but there’s also external hype, which is like how do you get your users hyped about your product? How do you get them to really be so stoked when there are milestone occasions for your product or milestone launches and for them to be celebrating with you? And one of the things that I loved the most when I joined the company was Figma and design Twitter have had this very symbiotic relationship where each has grown with the other over time. 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 like, “Okay, FigJam is awesome, but FigJam isn’t just any product. Figjam has a personality. FigJam is cheeky. FigJam is fun. FigJam has this cute skeuomorphism going on where you feel like it’s your friend. And so okay, how would you celebrate that moment for a friend?” You wouldn’t really have an anniversary party. You would throw it a full on birthday party.

And so what we basically did was at the one year anniversary of FigJam, I worked with the marketing team and our engineering team in order to basically kick off a mini launch inside of the 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 presents inside of FigJam. And so not only was a FigJam getting the presents, but it was our users getting the presents. 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 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 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 like the world’s best unboxing experience or something like that. And so 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: I love that example. Something else I’m finding as a thread throughout all of 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 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? 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, et cetera. 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, 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 multi product company with FigJam, dev mode, etc, 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’re 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, right?

And so having those conversations about… I remember having an early conversation with folks from my previous team about, “Hey, are you guys using FigJam?” And they would be like, “Maybe sometimes.” And I’d be like, “Well, why aren’t you using FigJam? It’s literally built for you.” 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 pro-sumer space where it’s like you talk to anyone in tech and maybe they’re your top total addressable market.

But then there are some products I know that people work on which are very removed from the average person, you have infra products, security products and things like that, where you can’t just walk up to someone and have a conversation with them about 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 literally looking up your users through whatever channels necessary and figuring out how you can connect with them. I think this is also why founder market fit at startups is so important is because to the extent that you can use yourself as a limits test for what 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 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 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Let’s go actually one layer deeper here. So you’re talking to people all the time about FigJam, “Aren’t you using FigJam? What do you think of Figma? What do 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… Do you just put in your head and sticks in your head and rolls around and comes up, things emerge? Do you have a place you put these insights, you’re learning? Are you putting post-its in FigJam, for example. And then on the sales side, do you have a cadence where 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?

Mihika Kapoor: The insights get operationalized in a number of ways. So first is… So yeah, let’s continue using FigJam 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. 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, what are you guys hearing?” And then I would share what was coming, and then I would use their input as signal as to 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 FigJam. In this meeting, this is how I use FigJam. In this meeting, this is how I use FigJam, blah, blah, blah. And what that resulted in was I actually made a Loom video walking through my weekend 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 Fig Jam for X, Y, Z. 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 planning your all hands. You can use it for sketching out the contents of what’s going to go into your next deck,” so on and so forth. And so it basically manifests in two way, the first is having it inform the prioritization of your product roadmap.

And then the second is what ideally creating artifacts that the sales team can use to evangelize the things that you are seeing and the stepping stones to that vision that you creating. And then the last thing is that sometimes the conversations aren’t immediately actionable, right? Sometimes the sales team has an insight or has a request that is just objectively not feasible because the team has too much on its plate. Conversely, sometimes the team might have a suggestion for something that might be pitched to sales folks that’s too early given the stage of the conversation. And for that, we basically have… We store it in Asana basically. We have this integration, which many companies might have, which is like 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 then you do a weekly grooming of that.

Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Cool. Very tactical and useful.

Lenny Rachitsky:

Another thread that I’ve noticed, and I wasn’t planning to go in this direction, but you just care so deeply about the things you work on. 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 of this quote from your colleague Karl, they shared that, “It feels like you care deeply, which makes me care deeply. Who wants to be led by someone who doesn’t care about what they’re building?” It 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-

Lenny Rachitsky: … About that.

Mihika Kapoor: When I started out my product career, I actually joined as a RPM, or rotational product manager, at Meta, which was effectively a program that brought together new grad PMs, so people who had zero PM experience and taught them how to be PMs. And, in the beginning of this program, we had a series of conversations with leaders across the company. 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, etc. And, something she said that has stuck with me throughout my entire product career is that when two people disagree about product strategy, it is because they have different assumptions. Because, if you have the same assumptions, there is no reason why a person should think, “We should do X versus we should do Y.” And so, it’s like, “Okay, how does this relate to what you were just asking about feeling deeply and caring about what you’re building?”

I think that it’s really important to not just build a roadmap because it’s handed to you, or not just build an idea because it’s handed to you. I think that you need to understand in the event that it’s 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 believe deeply or not believe deeply. And I think what’s really important is that people can, to Carl’s point, gauge 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. I don’t work at Figma. I don’t have the best of most amazing products.” Maybe it’s hard to get excited about stuff. Is there anything you could share there? Just say you’re working on something that you’re not so passionate about, is it a fine thing, keep searching, or is it just figure out something you’re excited about? Any advice there for someone in that boat?

Mihika Kapoor: 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, if you’re working in a company, 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. 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 guide the next steps in your career. And so, I think that potentially common misconception is that founding something is just for capital F founders, but I think that anyone can found something. You can found something inside of an existing company, you can found something from scratch. And, there are different reasons why you would do each, right?

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 it’s slightly less risk. So, 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 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 harder to move faster. And then sometimes, there are things that are just different when you’re starting inside of an existing company, versus starting something outright.

So the things that are different is building a team is quite different. 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 outright. 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: I love this as a 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 a project that accompanies little flame that you’re growing over time, building momentum around. So you’ve hinted at this whole idea of starting zero to one and building new products within larger companies, which I want to get to. We’ve gone really deep on a bunch of awesome stuff and I’m really happy we did. There’s four more skills of things you’re amazing at. 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 does that sound?

Mihika Kapoor: Perfect.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. So, from folks that you work with, the four other skills, things you’re amazing at, and I still want to hear the things you think you’re not amazing at. One is creativity, that 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. Sho tells me you’re the culture carrier at Figma, which is amazing, because the culture there from what I hear 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?

Mihika Kapoor: Maybe we can do the latter two, because they’re a little bit different than the other things we’ve been discussing. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Sounds great. So, I guess culture. Let me start there. Okay, so yeah, Sho called you the culture carrier 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?

Mihika Kapoor: Yeah, I can definitely talk about those two things. So, hot seat is actually a tradition I started at our first PM offsite post-pandemic. So this was March of 2022. The PM team was 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, one is it goes a long way in terms of the product, but two, speaking about passion, 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, as a side note, our PM team is obsessed with personality tests.

Lenny Rachitsky: Which personality test, by the way?

Mihika Kapoor: We to this day say the best one was the one that we did at this offsite, which is the Strengths Finder test. And, what had basically happened was over the course of that morning, we had all dug into… We were saying, “What are our strengths? What are our weaknesses?” Etc. And we had this really fun foundation to build on during the game of hot 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, 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 being able to understand what motivates a person is so important when you’re working with them, and also just in building a connection with them. And so, that was this moment that really brought the whole team together.

Something that I was really gratified to hear after is that, since then, hot seat has become a tradition within the company. And so, all the PMs went on to play it with their own teams. Yuki and Sho went on to play it with the exec team, so on and so forth. And so, it’s become this thing that now anytime that someone joins the team, okay, you put them in the hot seat. And then, if you’re meeting someone’s significant other, you put them in the hot seat. And it’s this thing that is just 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 an Oscar style awards ceremony that was 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 SKO, there’s this award ceremony, where they appreciate all of the incredible work that has taken place in the sales and marketing org. And I saw this and I was like, “This is incredible. We should absolutely be celebrating the product team as well when we’re together.” And so, what I did was I basically took our Figma boardroom, which is called Bigma, and worked with another PM Elan to deck it out, and a red carpet, gold curtains, etc. And we bought little Oscar trophies for everyone, and got their names written on it, and voted people in for all of these absurd categories, like most likely to name their child Figma, most likely to go their career without writing a PRD. Blah, blah, blah.

And, of course, forced everyone to give some acceptance speech. But, I think that making people feel appreciated for even just 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 learn, “Okay, beyond them 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 a huge believer in this remote first role that we live in, you also want to take advantage of those times when you’re able to get together and do things that make the team feel geographically close, even when they’re geographically spread out.

Lenny Rachitsky: Oh man, it’s so fun. And I love that it’s just like, you did this, right? It’s not like Dylan is adding all these rituals to the team. It’s very bottom up. And, in theory, any PM on the team could have done this.

Mihika Kapoor: It’s interesting, something that I had heard, Vishal Shah, who was the former head of product at Instagram say, is that, often in companies culture is set top down, and then the innovation that comes out of that is bottoms up. And so, I think in the first place, having a value like play does a lot in order to make folks feel like these things are celebrated and time should be carved out for them.

Lenny Rachitsky: To come back to your original point of just culture is everything, a lot of PMs are like, “I have so much work to do. 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 actually earlier you were asking about passion and what makes someone feel passionate about work. And I think realistically, that passion breaks down into two things. One is, 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 like when you have a crush on someone. And, I think that having that emotional connection to your team is fun. And I think that emotional connection comes from investing in culture.

Lenny Rachitsky: And again, it’s like, you did it. You made it happen, right? It’s not like, “Oh, this sucks. My team’s no fun.” It’s like, you can make it more fun. And I think the two examples you shared are awesome, because one is a high-end version where there’s a lot of work. And the hot seat, it’s just a quick idea that takes no work, just an idea, and then you just ask to do it, and it’s there.

Mihika Kapoor: Okay, so actually, I want to combat the perception that the Figgy’s was a high production, high cost thing. It was very low cost. I ordered everything on Amazon and assembled it in an hour. And so, there are ways to be scrappy in making things come together. And so, I would say, don’t be intimidated by any idea of being too large to take on. Just go for it.

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s an awesome correction. Okay, final trait you’re great at. Somebody shared that you pivot with grace and enthusiasm when things change and priorities change, projects are killed, projects are spun up. There’s something that a lot of people at companies just get so sad about, “Oh my God, things keep changing. My project’s killed. Oh, this priority changed.” It 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?

Mihika Kapoor: 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. So, companies like Airbnb and Pinterest were leading an industry and they were leading not just because they built technology and made it accessible, but because they were really using the interface layer to differentiate. So there was this point where software had reached a certain level of saturation, 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 nothing that resembled product design in our curriculum. And this was baffling to me, because I was like, “There is such clear momentum…” Speaking about momentum in industry about this being a profession that is so important and so influential in building the next generation of companies. Yet, the groundwork to make that happen wasn’t really there. And then, I interned at Facebook, and I realized that my entire class of 25 interns had very similar experiences, where they too were self-taught product designers. And so, that summer, I actually watched a documentary that was coincidentally produced by Envision that featured folks like John Maeda, amongst others, and 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 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 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 make this a reality. And then, what actually ended up happening was 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 building something in a situation where I thought finances, expenditures, connections, et cetera, were totally taken care of, to having none of that and needing to build it from the ground up.

And, it was funny, one of the best pieces of advice I got in college was, don’t underestimate the power for .edu email address. And I just went 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 Burke, Jamie [inaudible 01:10:46], et cetera, were folks who would be like, “Oh my God, this was such a problem when I was in college. Of course I’ll help you solve it. I can’t believe it hasn’t been solved yet.”

And so, ultimately, it grew into this conference that lasted many years, brought together folks from originally around the country, then more recently around the world. And ultimately, did live under that broader organization. But I think, having the ability to, in the absence of formal backing or something, still 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. 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, Mahika, in our archeological study, which has come up a bunch, and I’m just putting my finger on it, is just high agency. It feels like you’re just consistently just like, “I’ll 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, Design Nation for folks that want to explore that, how do they find that? And it’s still going, right?

Mihika Kapoor: Yeah. So, you can Google Design Nation.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay.

Mihika Kapoor: And, we have a Instagram page amongst other things. 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. And then, who is it for? It’s for students? People in college that want to learn to be designers?

Mihika Kapoor: 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 capital D designers, but design driven students. So, we also took engineers who are very design minded and marketers who are very design minded, et cetera, because of that core belief that the most innovative solutions will come out of people that are operating at this intersectionality.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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? 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.

Mihika Kapoor: So it’s interesting, because I think that there are many things that we talked about that are actually a double-edged sword in practice. So, let’s start with the conviction piece. I think that the good thing about being high conviction is that you’re able to 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 constantly be highlighting user proof points.

I think, the second is scrappiness. So, I think I have a very high ability to thrive in ambiguity and to pull things together last minute. So, for example, it’s very common that I am editing a product review deck minutes before we are about to present, or that I haven’t started until the night before and stay up until 3:00 AM to do it. And this is somewhat fine. But then, I think that other people don’t always love it, because they’re like, “Hey, maybe let’s start earlier next time.” 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Thanks for sharing all that. This touches on something that came up in a previous podcast episode. Nikhil from Meta had this really interesting metaphor, where every superpower has a shadow. Basically, everything you’re amazing at, there’s something that’ll be a problem, a liability basically for you. And so, I think, what you’re pointing out is you’re amazing at some of these things, but there’s downsides. 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’ll 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.

Mihika Kapoor: Also, 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 hire for that. Because, you want individuals to be spiky and you want team to be well-rounded.

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s a great segue to talking about building completely new things at large companies. So, what I hear is you’re 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?

Mihika Kapoor: In order for a company to stay competitive, a company needs to stay entrepreneurial. 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. 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 just sprint off in a direction that is seen not as a distraction, but rather a manifestation of the company’s values.

And so, at the company, some of our most monumental launches have come out of hackathons and have come out of bottoms up projects. So recently, this week we had a launch of Multi-edit, which was a long clamored for a feature where folks can edit things across multiple frames at the same time. That was a multi-year, multi-product long initiative. We have things like Jambot, which is an AI plugin inside of FigJam that has come out of an AI hackathon that we had last year. Our entire widgets platform was originally a hackathon project. And so, there’s this culture of celebrating things-

… project. And so there’s this culture of celebrating things that have been pushed 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 a culture that you constantly want to be facilitating and leading into.

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. And clearly, Figma is very good at this. 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 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?

Mihika Kapoor: I think that there’s this 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.

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 idea as being the 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 like wildfire and can build that level of hype you need for an entire company or an entire set of people to be clamoring for something to get built.

And so 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, right? 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 the company and they’re like, “Oh, what is that flame burning there? And how can I learn more about that?”

Lenny Rachitsky: Coming up with a great idea, getting buy-in for your idea, and then spreading it within the organization, what have you learned about how to actually come up with an idea that is actually a good idea?

Mihika Kapoor: 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 kind of 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. It’s not enough to have a perspective on how well you are competing in the market, but you also need to know, like understand a person’s full end-to-end tooling usage.

And then, the second thing is you need to ensure that what you’re kind of working towards ladders into a company goal. And so something that’s very top of mind at Figma or something that has been very top of mind at Figma has been 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 PMs 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 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, or here’s 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, because 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?

Mihika Kapoor: I think the key to being successful at zero-to-one is to honestly have optimism that borders on delusion. You need to have 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. What basically happened was kind of like both conviction, 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 off-site where we were talking about strategy for the next year. And I, again, pitch this, and it got 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 working with our VP of design, Noah, in order to 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, right? So you’re constantly thinking about like, “Okay, how can you hype up the whole company, right? 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 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.

And 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. And what basically happened was that 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: And this kind of leads into the next bullet point you shared of spreading the idea across the company. It feels like this is part of it just getting it spread in a big powerful way initially. But what else have you learned about just getting this to spread across the company? It gets kind of like this flame spreading throughout the organization.

Mihika Kapoor: I think something that’s very unique about Figma as compared to other companies is we have a multi-month plus long staging or dogfooding 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 a problem. We built it. We put something on staging, and I was kind of like, “Okay, cool, it’s been on staging a week, now we can launch, right?” And I was greeted with like, “No, we can’t launch.”

And I think that leaning into that willingness to being vulnerable about your product and this acknowledgement that 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.

Mihika Kapoor: But the other benefit about putting something on staging early is that it makes people invested in your product. So if you think about why are 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 X, Y, Z parts of the product, I think that’s really powerful, because, then, you kind of are ensuring that there’s this constant feedback loop, and there’s this constant investment in thinking about how can we collectively drive towards success, because at the end of the day, product development is a team sport, right? It takes everyone to make something successful. And so I just think about putting things early on staging and getting people involved in the cycle as 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 a very exciting lightning round?

Mihika Kapoor: If you have an insight that only you have, I think on one hand, you can kind of believe, “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 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, et cetera, and different people want to be involved in the kind of product visioning phase to a different extent. There’s 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: Such a cool point. It comes back to the personality tests that you spoke of earlier. Is that the best way to figure this out? Is it more just watch people and try to guess at what they’re most excited about [inaudible 01:31:21]-

Mihika Kapoor: Oh, I think you have to directly ask them. So anytime someone joins my team, 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. And even if the decision is something along the lines of like, “Okay, we have four options,” and you can go in with a leading point of view, but giving everyone the opportunity to voice their perspective and push back, if they want to, I think that that’s very powerful.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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 some day. With that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Mihika Kapoor: I am ready.

Lenny Rachitsky: Mihika, first question, what are two or three books that you recommended most to other people?

Mihika Kapoor: Yeah, I’ll start by saying that I am immediately skeptical of anyone who has not read Harry Potter. So, if you’re one of those people, go read Harry Potter. Maybe, it contributes to creativity. I don’t know.

Lenny Rachitsky: Now, we’re talking about every book in the series, or at least the one book?

Mihika Kapoor: 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.” 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 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 businessy book perspective, which is maybe more what you’re getting at, I think that I honestly 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 as the ugly baby metaphor, which feels like so tied to the way you think and operate. And I won’t get into it. By the way, have you read The Overstory?

Mihika Kapoor: I have not. I’ll add that to my list.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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.

Mihika Kapoor: Okay.

Lenny Rachitsky: There you go.

Mihika Kapoor: I’ll go order it.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. Favorite recent movie or TV show?

Mihika Kapoor: Favorite recent TV show would definitely be Severance.

Lenny Rachitsky: Movie, or shall we move on?

Mihika Kapoor: Oh, movie, I recently watched Dune 2 and Dune 1 in the span of a week. It was really fun. I watched Dune 2, because someone asked me to co-host a premiere of Dune 2 with them, and I was like, “Okay, sounds good, sounds cool, but I need to watch Dune 1.”

Lenny Rachitsky: Good choice. I just watched Dune 2. I don’t know if a more epic movie can be made. I was just gripped.

Mihika Kapoor: The visuals were stunning.

Lenny Rachitsky: Like not breathing.

Mihika Kapoor: Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: It’s out of control. I watched it IMAX. I think that was a good call, but it was stressful. Favorite interview question they like to ask folks when you’re hiring.

Mihika Kapoor: 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’s no go-to hot seat question. And I almost feel the same way about interview questions.

Lenny Rachitsky: Favorite product you recently discovered that you love?

Mihika Kapoor: Speaking about hype, I am kind of obsessed with the browser company, Arc onboarding flow, specifically the onboarding flow. I think that they do such a good job of amping you up for not only the larger change that they’re trying to make in terms of personal operating system, but of showing you to what extent their team thinks about the details of the product, where a lot of other products might cut corners. And I think their ability to communicate the ethos of their product through that is really powerful. So that’s one.

And then I think the second is in the AI space. I’m really excited by 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 or optimized for the tweet, right? And it’s basically this situation where I think about it as, in my mind, one of the biggest goals of AI right now is the black boxification of AI, because it’s not really useful to enter a prompt and get an output that you can’t interact with, because then it’s like, if something’s a little bit off, what are you going to do? You’re kind of stuck. But I think Pika is doing a really great job of not just investing in the foundational video models, but also giving you the ability to manipulate the output. And so I’m excited about that approach, and I hope that more companies take you from that.

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome, good choices on Arc. Whenever anyone ask me for a great onboarding follow, that’s the one I point people to. And we had Josh Miller on the podcast in the past, and I was proud that he pinned our interview as 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?

Mihika Kapoor: 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. 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: I love that tip. I recently learned the same piece of advice from Kevin Kelly’s recent book where it’s just a book of little tidbits of advice that he’s learned over his life, 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 Figgy’s. You mentioned there’s an award for PM least likely to write a PRD. Was that you won the award for chance?

Mihika Kapoor: I think it was me and Sho tied.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, great. I guessed correctly. Amazing. Mihika, you’re… Everything, I hope you’d be on this podcast, I feel like, we could have talked for, I keep saying this, but at least two more hours maybe, we’ll have a follow-up.

Mihika Kapoor: I’d love that.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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?

Mihika Kapoor: Yeah, you can find me on Twitter. I’m @mihikapoor. 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 on the lookout for cool new products. I like to be someone who tries things out early, so to the extent that you see things, send them my way.

Lenny Rachitsky: There’s going to be so many people anticipating this new product.

Mihika Kapoor: Oh, no, yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: There’s going to be like-

Mihika Kapoor: We should-

Lenny Rachitsky: … holy moly.

Mihika Kapoor: Please have low expectations.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. And the way we’ll know is are you pitching and presenting it, or how do we know this is going to be your product once we see it?

Mihika Kapoor: It’ll probably be in the 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: We’ll be watching. I will be at Config.

Mihika Kapoor: Can’t wait to see you there.

Lenny Rachitsky: Potentially on stage. Can’t reveal yet what’s happening exactly, but I think it’s going to be awesome. Anyway, Mihika, thank you again so much for being here.

Mihika Kapoor: Thank you for having me, Lenny. This was such a fun conversation. It was such an honor and a privilege to be on the podcast. So, really, thank you so much for having me.

Lenny Rachitsky: The honor was mine. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

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