YouSaid · the spoken record

Mihika Kapoor

lines on the record: 108
first: 2024-04-21
most recent: 2024-04-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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. Different reasons why you would do each, right? Like the reasons why you would found inside of an existing company is if you think that 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 like a reality, which is like, you know, it's slightly less risk. So, you know, depending on what your risk tolerance is, you can figure out what makes sense. There are things that are harder inside of an existing company, right? It's like harder to take an executive decision. You actually cannot take an executive decision. You need to receive buy-in on every single decision that you make. Sometimes it's like harder to move faster. And then sometimes there are things that are just like different when you're starting inside of an existing company versus starting something outright. So the things that are different is like building a team is quite different. Like the way that you recruit and the like set of folks that you can.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first piece of advice would be to. Not just think about the scope of what you are working on as the thing that happens to be in flight at any given moment. But to if you're working in a company, like take a step back, understand the vision of that company and understand your users and understand if there's like anything in that space that you are passionate about. I think it's quite easy to believe that the project that you're working on is your scope. My take is that your scope is the world. And to the extent that you can figure out, does the idea that you're passionate about fall within your company versus fall outside of your company, that should kind of like guide the next steps in your career? And so I think that, you know, potentially like common misconception is that”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should do X versus we should do Y. And so it's kind of like, okay, how does this relate to what you were just asking about feeling deeply and caring about what you're building? I think that it's really important to not just build a roadmap because it's handed to you or not just build an idea because it's handed to you. I think that you need to understand in the event that it's like, you know, a top-down strategy, what are the assumptions that led to folks believing that that is the right idea? And then if it is you pushing something bottoms up, you need to be able to ensure that everyone else has the same assumptions that you have in your head that leads them to believe deeply or not believe deeply. And I think what's really important is that people can, you know, to Carl's point, like gauge how passionate someone is about a project. And my take is that the more”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I started out my product career, I actually joined as a RPM or rotational product manager at Meta, which is effectively a program that brought together Newgrad PMs, so people who had like 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 Zu, who was the first ever intern at Meta and the VP of Design. And she was giving us feedback and advice about, you know, how to draft compelling product strategy, et cetera. And something she said that has stuck with me throughout my entire product career is that when two people disagree about product strategy, it is because they have different assumptions. Because if you have The same assumptions, like there is no reason why.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 like any piece of feedback that comes in from sales or from the rest of the company gets turned into a task in your backlog and you do like a weekly grooming of that.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 ways. The first is having it inform, like the prioritization of your product roadmap. And then the second is what like ideally creating artifacts that the sales team can use to evangelize the things that you are seeing and the stepping stones to that vision that you are creating. And then the last thing is that sometimes”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I sort of set up like a recurring cadence with the folks in our sales team in order to understand like, okay, like what are you guys hearing? And then I would share what was coming. And then I would use their input as signal as to like what should be prioritized or deprioritized on the roadmap. And they would use my signal to understand what were the various use cases that they could be 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 Big Jam. In this meeting, this is how I use Big Jam. And this meeting, this is how I use Fake Jam. And what that resulted in was I actually made like a Loom video walking through my like weekend fig jam that our sales team later distributed to a bunch of companies to inspire them as to like, hey, not only can you use FigGim for this, you can use FigGem for like X, Y, Z. You can use it for your like your team pick.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Insights get operationalized in a number of ways. So, first is continue using Figham as an example. I think, you know, like I mentioned, Figma as a company uses FigCham for everything, like multiple FigJam files are made per day, per meeting, etc. We had this initial situation where people outside of the company were mostly using FigTam for brainstorms. And so as we were scaling our FigGam sales team,”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need to be the one going out there and having conversations with your users and just literally looking up your users through whatever channel is necessary and like figuring out how you can connect with them. I think this is also why founder market fit at startups is so important is because like to the extent that you can use yourself as a litmus test for what 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 like sales team is really important. And basically just like being on sales calls because”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then Figma, of course, is kind of like it's in this prosumer space where it's like, you know, you talk to anyone in tech and maybe they're your top total addressable market. But then there are like some products I know that people work on, which are like very removed from the average person, right? Like you have infra products, security products and things like that where you can't just like walk up to someone and have a conversation with them about like, you know, why aren't they using your product because that conversation might not make any sense. And so in those instances, I think that what's really important is it depends on the stage of company that you're at. If you're at an early stage company,”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so having those conversations about like, you know, I remember having an early conversation with folks from my previous team about, hey, why aren't you like, are you guys using Fig Jam? And they would be like, maybe sometimes, and I'd be like, well, why aren't you using Big Jam? It's like literally built for you, right? And then that led to like 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 like placeholder experience that.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, DevMode, et cetera, our audience exploded. And we already saw latent behavior inside of Figma, but now it's even more clear how wide reaching the product is. And so something that I find incredibly useful is to not just ask users of your product what they think about your product, but to ask non-users about your product why they are not using your product. And actually, I think that those are the most insightful conversations because I think that having a product shine and having a product do well and have great adoption isn't just about like the product being great. It's also about like the marketing and the perceptions that surround the product and potentially like the hype that surrounds that.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 like immersing yourself in those circles where your users are is really important. So for me, it's like, you know, anytime that I'm like catching up with a friend who like mildly works in tech or a tech adjacent field, like I will generally be asking them about like figma. And I think what's really great is that, you know,”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be like this really, really like 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 like leaning into a product's brand in order to figure out what is the optimal way to generate hype with your audience and form that connection is something that's really important.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did we like Easter egg them through the product? And each sort of product that we were releasing inside of Fig Jam. Was hidden under this little birthday present. And throughout the day, we sent all of our users on an Easter egg hunt of presents inside of Fig Jam. And so not only was it Fig Jam getting the presents, but it was our users getting the presents. And so I think that hype as well is like really tied to emotion. So 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, like not to advance the company's goals or anything like that, but like to make me feel special, to make me feel happy. I think that's a really key instrument in driving hype as well. And I think that something that's quite interesting about hype and getting your users to feel strongly about your product is that like every product has their own brand of delight or excitement or energy. So hype for fig jam is incredibly different than hype from figma, where hype for figma.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the one year fig jam anniversary in April. And Project anniversaries, a product anniversary. There are quite an exciting milestone within the company, right? You like 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. What we were really thinking like, okay, like, you know, Big Jam is like awesome. Like Big Jam isn't just any product. Fig Jam has a personality. Fig Jam is like cheeky. Figjam is fun. FigJam is like, has this cute skewomorphism going on where you feel like, you know, it's your friend. And so, okay, how would you like celebrate that moment for a friend? Like you wouldn't really have like an anniversary party. Like you would throw it like a full-on birthday party. And so what we basically did was at the one year anniversary of Big Jam, I worked with the marketing team and our engineering team in order to basically like kick off many launch inside of the product of a bunch of new features.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my mind, there is like internal hype, which is how do you get buy-in and like everyone inside of the company to be like banging 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 they're like milestone occasions for your product or milestone launches and for them to be celebrating with you? And one of the things that I love the most when I joined the company was Figma and design Twitter have had this very symbiotic relationship where like each has grown with the other over time. And what really happens is like anytime we launch something, you have like all design Twitter celebrating with us. And one other moment when I thought it was very fun to drive hype was when I worked on Fig Jam in 2020.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What ended up happening was like something that could have originally been perceived as a distraction to the team actually ended up being something that added so much fuel to the fire in terms of one giving us like product insights to inform our next steps and two getting the entire company to feel truly deeply feel excited about getting this thing out the door.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't really create hype for something you don't believe in, in my opinion. The only way to create hype is to get people to see what you see. And so I think that it's incredibly important to leverage very large forums like that, like Make or Week, like sales kickoff. Like 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”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so it was like so important to me that this product had some sort of a moment or, you know, speaking of like show, don't tell, like a demo in the context of this keynote. And so, you know, Chris, our CTO and UK, our CPO, were giving this keynote on like, what does our year look like? I like really, really deeply insisted that we should include a demo. And I think what ended up happening is Something like that, like a demo that wasn't meant to be a demo or that people weren't expecting, does so much in terms of like driving that sense of hype and helping people see what you yourself see in the future. And what's really interesting is like I think that Hype is something that”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In at different dates because everyone took like slightly different PTO. How do you kind of rally people in a certain direction? And so we have this thing at Figmaq called SKO or Sales Kickoff, which is like every year the sales team comes together and we have like a keynote and set of fireside chats and stuff like that. And we talk about like what's coming for the year. At this point, our product existed, but it was absolutely barely built. It was rough around the edges. It had bugs every day, maybe like 10 people in the company were using it and, you know, something like that outside of the team. Yeah, it was so important to me that this product got visibility in this forum because this was the first company-wide forum of the year where we were like declaring priorities for the year.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's important for leadership to amp the whole company up, you know, like behind that vision. On the flip side, if you yourself are pushing a zero to one idea from the bottoms up, the onus is even more on you to make sure that that project and that product is constantly propped up and that people are excited about it for it to make it out the door. And so one example is like, you know, we've been talking about this product that I'm working on. Coming out of winter break this year, there's kind of this sense, or at least I always suspect that there's the sense of like over winter break, everyone forgets what happened last year. You know, it's like goes out the door because you were hopefully doing, you know, something that took your mind off work. And so at the same time, there's kind of this like sense of like, how do you create forward momentum inside of a company in January, right? When people are kind of like slowly, you know, coming back into office, everyone's like trickling back.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you are spearheading an idea or a product. It's really on you to have a pulse on how everyone else is feeling about that product, right? And, you know, different products need different levels of excitement to make it out the door, right? If there is something that, you know, leadership has really strong conviction in.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then feedback, in my opinion, is something that you should always act on, right? So then to the extent that you can, as soon as possible, put that into effect and be like, okay, I'm hearing this. I'm going to do X, Y, Z in order to combat that, I think then that incentivizes the other person to do the same”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why is the other person not responding to my feedback? And then the other person will be like, Why am I the only one getting so much feedback? You know, men are where I used to work had this phrase feedback is a gift. And I so deeply believe in this. And in order to really lean into that phrase and really embody it, I think it's really 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 like direct communication, constant feedback is if you have feedback to give someone else, I think you can start by asking, hey, do you have feedback from me and kind of taking the feedback first? So then that person feels like, okay, like maybe I have my way of seeing this situation. Like, let me communicate that and get off my chest. And then when you give your feedback, it sort of even.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 like in their own head, the person being direct”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will never sugarcoat anything. I will never say, I like something if I don't like something, if I'm in a meeting and someone tells me they don't agree with me, I will tell them I don't agree with them back. In return, I really like it when people are very direct with me. And so I think that whenever I join a team or whenever I start working with a new person, I'm always like, I always let them know. I'm always like, I am very direct. And if you disagree with me, I want to know that. Because I think sometimes what can happen is really strongly-minded PMs can go into a conversation and can be like, oh, I think we should do X, even though they actually feel of medium confidence about X. And then the rest of the room is like, oh my God, that PM feels so strongly about like doing X that I'm not going to say anything because they clearly have 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 love.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physically work together like this. But he also told me that when I joined the company, he was like, Who's this girl and why does she have so many opinions? And so I think that something that I have learned to do over time, and I think that's something that's like a good sort of thing to lean into if you are a PM who has strong opinions, is to be very direct about how much you care about your opinions. So like now I'll do this thing where I'll be like, oh, I think we should do this. But I feel like medium confidence on it. So if you feel stronger, like I defer to you and always being like very, very, very explicit about like I feel really strongly about this or like this is my hypothesis or I do not have an opinion here. I defer to you. I think the second thing that I would mention is that it's really important in order to do this correctly is so I have like a very direct communications style.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, like literally for most of last year we had like an hour-long one-on-one every single day and still that wasn't enough meeting time. Yes, like we like.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Awesome, get to an A. If not, at least you're not at a B. And so I think that having that early conviction, willing to being willing to communicate it, being willing to get feedback from other folks in your team, have them react to it, then get users to react to it is so important. But then also something that's equally important when you have high conviction, 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 weakly held and if you get external signal that's telling you something different, you should be ready to pivot and have that agility to do so.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, you start from zero and you're like, okay, I'm going to build up from zero and like 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 like the right idea, then they'll be like, oh my God, yes, like let's totally do that, right? And if it's wrong, then it's like, okay, then they will like take you in a different direction and you end up with something that's probably much more opinionated than if you hadn't put anything out there. And so it was funny, like one piece of advice that I got from UQ when I was like working on my vision sprint was like, okay, when you go into research, you want to go in with something that's like at least an A minus idea or you think is at least an A minus idea. Because if you talk to users and you learn something about it,”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This, like, almost repository or library of conversations that you can draw from as you're making product decisions. And so I think that that's a really powerful thing to lean into as you're thinking about like, okay, which path do we go down? Now there's kind of the question of like, okay, in the absence of any external signal, right? Like what can you do? And I think that a very common thing, especially for PMs who are younger in their career, is to think that your opinion isn't right or might not be reflective of what the user thinks. So you think like, okay, I believe this. And at the end of the day, like everyone has an opinion, right? So I think this, but like, what do I know compared to these people who vent at my company for like 10 years? Or like, what do I know compared to like my users who are using the product? And so then I think what might happen in those instances is you kind of like start from nothing.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to work at Meta before I worked at Figma, and Meta basically distilled the product role into two core capabilities. One was product sense and one was execution. And when you think about product sense, it's kind of like, okay, what is product sense? It's like a really abstract term. And at the end of the day, I think product sense is just like having good intuition. And so there's kind of this question about like, okay, how do you build up intuition? And I think that it's just by like having this insatiable curiosity and talking to users at every chance you get. So I will like go to dinners and girl the people around me on like how they use figma and how they use Fig Jam. And I think when you have a conversation with someone, it's so much more powerful in terms of getting those anecdotes to stick in your head. And what actually happens is once you start having enough conversations, let's say you start with conversations A, B, C, then you progress to conversations DEF. Over time, you build”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that 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' 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.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like 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.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like go around and ask people. And so, for example, for the project that I'm currently working on, I used a hackathon to pitch it. And basically I built conviction in the idea like many months before the hackathon. And I was kind of verbally pitching it and it was kind of like, yeah, like maybe at some point in the future we would make an investment like this. But what actually ended up happening was like we have this concept called Maker Week, which is our internal hackathon where the entire company goes on pause for a week. And I think that most people think that like, oh, hackathons are only a time for engineers to build. And I think that that's one of the biggest mistakes ever. I think that anyone can have an idea and can literally what I did was like walk around the New York office asking every single person like, will you work on this thing with me? And eventually someone says yes. And then you can use that to.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Designer co founder, right? Where you can kind of like go in and use it to start bringing things into existence. So I think one is like, yeah, I do think that we're just trending in a direction. And this was not true a year ago where the floor to building something is just like so much lower. So that's like, that's one piece. I think the second piece is”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of weeks ago, cognition launched, which for those who don't know is a startup that made this AI agent called Devon, which can code anything for you, supposedly. It definitely took Twitter by Storm and got me super stoked. And so I think something that's interesting about the current AI revolution is that it's very much lowering the floor to starting out and to building something, right? And so recently I was doing a chat with David Huang from Replet, and he's the head of marketing and design at Replet. And he was basically talking about how if Replet does their job right, you kind of start seeing it as your technical co-founder. And I think conversely, like at Figma, we kind of think about if we're doing our job, right, like maybe in the future people will think about Figma as their.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. So we often make our DEX in Figma. And I think that we lean heavily into designing and prototyping even before a project gets a green light. So I think that's something that's really unique about Figma is normally you will like talk about the market space or the opportunity or the sizing and then decide to invest versus Figma is very much a like C to believe and see to feel that like emotional pull towards this is something worth investing in.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely. I think that when you're actually presenting a vision, one of the most important things is that there is like a single artifact that the team is creating together. So I think a common occurrence is to kind of have like the research readout followed by the design crit, followed by the product review. And that's fine. That works in a lot of instances, but then you kind of have every team member thinking that their own deliverables, like what they need to pour all their energy into. And what you actually want is like for everyone to feel incredible ownership and incredible passion about this combined deliverable so that it's like a unified team who believes in a singular set of insights.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Workplace look like, and how can we get people to like anchor around that? And how can we get people to get into the flow? So then we started launching features like music, like voting that really help you get into flow when you're in that file together”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's everyone all together, and you are able to elicit reactions from people who are more quiet in a meeting or people who may prefer to ideate on their own before coming out to everyone and things like that. And so we kind of started with the seed of like, Being this like highly democratic process. And what you see is that in most other scenarios, meetings are a very one way, right? Like you kind of have one person talking and everyone else reacting. This is true of like a team kickoff. This is true of like an all hands. This is true of basically every sort of scenario. And so what we fundamentally like started marching towards was how can we create this world where the generative nature of a brainstorm is basically the norm.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then at the same time, something that's really interesting about fake gem, people often ask, Oh, you guys are Figma, like, how do you guys use Figma as a company? And it's kind of interesting because I feel like we use Figma the way that everyone uses Figma, but we use FigJam on steroids. Every single activity in this company is done in FigJam. It's like our product reviews are in there, our Gantt charts are in there, our bug bashes are in there. Every single thing is in FigJam. And there was this gap between the way that we were using FigJam as a company and the way that the rest of the world was using it. But brainstorms were working, right? And so you kind of think like, okay, like what's unique about a brainstorm? And you talk to your user and you're like, why does a brainstorm make so much more sense in a FigJam file than like anything else? And what it comes down to is brainstorms are this incredibly democratizing process, right? It's this process where ideas can come from anywhere, where it's not the loudest or the most important person in the room who's doing the talking.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Successful at bringing people together into a common space. And one of the early insights was, okay, what is like the most common meeting that takes place in a Fig Jam file? It's a brainstorm, right? It's like you have a bunch of people you've coming together and they're like dropping a bunch of stickies and stuff like that. And so you have this proof point of an activity that works really well inside of a FigJam file.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So before I was working on the new product, I was working on the Fig Jam team. And I was an early member of the Fig Jam team. And whiteboarding was sort of something that really took off during the pandemic because it was the first time that people were not together in office, couldn't like jam together, couldn't just like throw up a whiteboard behind them physically. And so there was kind of this question of like, okay, how do you combat these disparate teammates and pull them together into a common space? And I think that when we think about Fig Jam and what success might look like for FigJam, a part of it that I was really invested in was the meetings experience. And specifically like what the world would look like if we were.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A vision pitch effectively be like pain point solution, proof point, pain point, solution, proof point, because at the end of the day, Simply describing a product idea in words is not as compelling as seeing a testimonial from a user on top of a prototype or a mock and like really feeling the pain points.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second piece is okay once you have your vision, like once you have talked to your users and built up your perspective and things like that, it's like, how do you communicate it internally and how do you help everyone around you see what you're seeing? And I think something that's really unique about Figma is that it is a fundamentally very, very detail-oriented culture. And it's also a company that very much practices what it preaches in terms of the future being visual communication. And so, you know, you kind of find that, or I've found that words will only get you so far. So when I put together a vision with my team at Figma, it's all about like not just your traditional like, okay, here are pain points and then here are solutions. And then here is the timeline and costing, but rather how can you bring all of those things together and how can”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that to the extent that you can have this like cross-pollination of ideas and people working together 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.”
2024-04-21 · Lenny's Podcast · Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source