YouSaid · the spoken record

Yuhki Yamashita

lines on the record: 72
first: 2025-05-16
most recent: 2025-05-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Consumer product right now that I love is Waymo, but it's more kind of the physical experience of it. I mean, part of it is obviously just how impressive it is in making you feel incredibly safe in something that didn't seem plausible. And all the little cues that they have in the product that kind of make you feel they are on top of it. And just even the attention to detail, like there's a biker coming by before you open the door or stuff like you leave your bag, you know, they'll let you know as you're walking away, right? Stuff that a driver could do too, but it just the default. And I think its ability to kind of like make the average experience the best experience almost because of that tension to detail is just really something.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still a very tribal knowledge. You kind of have to know this random nuance here, which is why this backstory, which is why we can't do this. And sometimes that prohibits some of the new people from being able to get to a better solution faster or know how their product affects other products. And I just wish that we did a better job codifying it some way so that everyone can understand or simplifying it so there aren't all these like strange dependencies.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of them is a mentor of mine who is now CEO of Grammarly, and he's the lead product at YouTube, Shashir. He's such an incredible systems thinker. He just knows how to run an organization and he obsesses over rituals and basically kind of designs, I think a lot of times, you know, you think about building a product and designing a product, but he also thinks about designing a culture very intentionally by designing very unique and interesting processes, meeting cadences, and everything is just so beautifully structured and intentional. And yeah, it's just really fun to be a part of and impressive.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tend to be not a very emotional person. And oftentimes I would get this feedback of, oh, you should use emotion as a lever more. Or, you know, it's hard to know what you're thinking because sometimes I'm just like processing without giving immediate visceral reaction. I think with every strength there's a shadow kind of thing. And I think that's an example of this. But I think there's a way in which I can be better as a leader to not just rally people around the intellectual interest of building products, but just the emotional part of it more.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He just really went back to the mission and how big it is. And he often likes to, you know, at least internally index on an original vision that he had for Figma, which is just going from imagination to reality. That's kind of where he started with before people were like, okay, well, maybe you should be more specific than that. But he's just like reminded everyone of this founding vision and how broad that was. And I think that was really important to show there's so much to do basically was kind of like the message first and foremost. And then the second thing was just a lot of it was really focused on our community, right? Like when all this is happening, there are so many people, so many of our users who are just really excited about our future and pointing everyone to that and saying, hey, like look at everyone who believes in us, who are excited for all the things that we're going to be doing, rallying everyone around our community and their excitement.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say probably, I mean, if I'm fully being honest, it was coming out of the breakup with Adobe and making sure that our community understood that we're business as usual. To the community that we have as much momentum as ever before. And we're excited about our path forward. And it was just a big moment.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the lesson was actually at the time there was huge pushback to doing this internally. The most profitable parts of the business at the time was our Uber black business. People were worried that when juxtaposed against the cheaper Uber X or Uber pool prices, that would take a hit, it wouldn't be profit maximizing, I guess, for the business. And given that the industry didn't have that precedent, it was kind of like, why are we forcing our own hand to do that? But at the time, Travis, a CEO at the time was just like, yeah, this is about principles. And he was very insistent that part of the magic is the transparency and we're going to go change the industry and everyone else is going to follow. So we might as well be the first ones to do it and learn from it. And he was absolutely right. But it was a very hard thing. Yeah.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we got called out a lot for New Year's Eve for that, you know? You know, and that's how taxis worked. So by far the biggest transformation to that experience was being able to enter your destination up front, show the price and time on our end, knowing your destination upfront before you get into the car was a huge win because we could optimize everything, optimize routes, we could do pricing based on your destination, all these kinds of things. So I think that was”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I would say that it was that transformation of helping Uber, believe it or not, it's hard to remember, but Uber worked very differently back then, where you would pick a car based on a type, get in the car, and then at the end get a receipt. And only until you get the receipt did you know how much you would pay, right? So support.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's discovery, but I think it's more, we think about it more as craft, which is that there's a sea of software, you know, everyone can make some product. And it's really about, well, what is going to help differentiate one product from the next? And we deeply believe it's great design, great craft. And that's not something that like you can rely on an AI to figure out by itself. Like you need human guidance to push it to think about the experience more deeply or think about something really unique. And that is the first problem to solve. Because like if you're just helping people discover mediocre software, that's not helping the world, right?”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the things philosophically that this time we focused on is before we prematurely say that everything has to be like very deeply connected, I mean, they still are very connected. You can copy-paste between things. It's all in one platform, so that's great. But I think that one of the reasons for that was, you know, we're trying out new use cases and we need to learn from that. And before we prematurely make everything work together, let's learn what's working, what's not. And each of those products great. And then it'll become more obvious how things fit together. So I think it's kind of by design to some extent, but I also want to recognize that for an end user, it might feel overwhelming if there's like a lot of products and not knowing where to start, for example.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. Oh, first caveat with it's not always the case that throwing more people or resources at a problem makes something go faster. And I say this because we just launched a bunch of new products and perhaps the hardest problem still is how do we make them connect better and making them connect better requires the systems thinking, seeing the whole picture that just throwing more people at that isn't going to necessarily solve. You need to solve, like throw the right people at that problem or give yourself the time to do that. So I'll kind of caveat it with that and maybe also add that my personal hope is to be able to, I know it's a little bit like high level, but make things connect better. And that's a problem I would want to solve a little bit more.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, you know, oftentimes there are small little bugs or small little, you know, I call them like microtragedies. That finally get addressed, so they're very much celebrated by our users”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perhaps not Perhaps not. Teams have their own hack week sometimes, or my favorite is actually quality week where people kind of step back from their roadmap and go back to, oh, I wish I could go polish that other thing that I didn't have time to do or fix that longstanding bug or, you know, something of this nature that again kind of pulls you out of your current project. In fact, some of our most popular launches are these small little things that we brand them as little big updates our users love it.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that certainly happened. Sometimes it can happen because you just have this very hard problem that you've been banging your head against the wall for such a long time that can be solved with a variety of different things. Maybe it's changed up the makeup of the team or revisit some constraints because something in there is maybe causing people to kind of think that they have to constrain their solution space in a particular way. But I think things like Maker Week are exactly that kind of rhythm to disrupt the everyday.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. I would say it's primarily bug today. Perhaps at times masquerading as a feature because I think designers are always designing ahead, right? So they're always thinking about V1, V2, V next. And so as a result of that, it is natural for the designs to always be a little bit better because they're thinking ahead and they're upstream. But that being said, I think too often designers are designing far too ahead and not sitting in the reality of how their product exists today, if that makes sense.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's still a strong disconnect between what people design and what ends up in users' hands. And for me, a thought experiment is next time a designer shares a portfolio with you. Are they sharing the designs that were beautiful mocks? Are they sharing the designs as screenshots from production? And chances are they're sharing the ones that were designed in a perfect environment with production.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As much as we celebrate or we talk about things in terms of products as units of accomplishment or something, at the end of the day, we have one thing we're trying to support our users in doing, which is building software or building digital products. For me, it's less about, oh, what other product do I need to build to help teams do that? And rather, where are all the gaps today that still exist that make that job hard? For us, that can manifest in features in an existing product or a stronger connection between products or things like that. So there's plenty of things where if you ask the average person, okay, well, what's hard about building products today, they'll list a thousand things that like make it difficult or take a lot of time. And those are the things that we need to go and build.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We take as long as we think is needed to get the product to a state we're proud of. Some of these are pretty sophisticated products and the kind of interesting thing about building a tool is a tool is very different from a typical consumer product where there's a funnel and you're trying to optimize the metric. Like you're building something so that other people can build other things. And so it's hard upfront to imagine all the ways in which someone will take your tool and build something, right? I mean, you definitely have some use cases in mind that you start with, but everyone always surprises you. And so I think there's some amount of humility you need to have as a toolmaker to let people's creations help you understand where to take the tool or where to double down or, you know, what's working, what's not. And as a result of that, we need to give people the time to create on our tool.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly, we don't launch with the assumption that we'll drop any, but at the same time, many of them are in beta and we fully expect to learn from that. And if there's an opportunity to kind of like...”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess time will tell. I mean, this is the first time we've tried something like this, and we'll learn a lot from it, but it's also indicative of the diversity of our user base at this point, right? There are plenty of people who are excited about a subset of these products, and there are different audiences that were beginning to reach. And so maybe to the average user, they might not kind of perceive it as for new products to learn necessarily because a couple of them really resonate and they're going to go explore those first.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would like our products to be even more closely integrated than they are today. We just recently went from four products to eight products, which is really exciting, but there's so much more room to make it so that it just feels like a cohesive experience where you can maybe start one product but fluidly move to another.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relationship with community is incredibly important, but you also have to learn how to talk to them. We're always motivated by what people ask of us, but we have to ask deeper questions than that. It's easy to just keep building what people ask, but we want to be like, well, why are you asking it for that feature? And they'll say, well, it's because I have this problem. But why do you have that problem in that first place? You know, at Figma, engineers have this ritual around the five whys, right? Why did this mistake happen? And you kind of get deeper and deeper to find the root cause. And I think that same exercise needs to be done with the community. And that's not to say the community is wrong. They're not always expressing their needs via problems. They might be talking about a feature that just comes to mind and so important is to build a deeper relationship with them to be able to ask. That's a great idea, but maybe help me understand like why you even want that. Maybe we can come up with something better.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly, a lot of things out there today that are fantastic demos that people all try out because they're talking about it and then it ends up not delivering on that. And then all of a sudden it's so much harder to win back those users and have them come back. I think the most important thing is finding some small cohort of people who just like freaking love your product, you know. And then like a thousand.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can build the most beautiful thing and it's not discovered, and Figma has been the place where I learned that the most because Dylan, our founder, from the beginning, was very much about the designer community and getting them talking about Figma. So one of the first things he did was he took design Twitter. He visualized it as a graph and then figured out which people designers are following the most and then went to those designers to get feedback on Figma and get them excited about Figma. And that was his strategy. And it worked, right? And design Twitter at the time, especially worked in that way where they were influencing each other's choices in this really profound way. And so how do you not have done that? I'm not sure we would have seen that acceleration and growth or that buy-in from the community. So that's not the way I think usually because I'm just all more focused internally on, okay, let's build something great. But I do think that matters.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Main product is one that's used five days a week deeply, for hours a day, right? Our first product, Figma Design, has always set the bar for what it means to be the kind of tool that people are deeply, deeply reliant on. That's kind of the golden standard, at least within Figma. We call it ND7s. Like how many days in a week that people are using your product, for example? Yeah, I mean, for a designers, it is their core job.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a very concrete trade off around learning so that you know which details to perfect versus just perfecting the details, right? So if you're perfecting the details for a critical part that it's going to help you understand how well this product is going to do in the market, then by all means. But if you're starting to kind of perfect these areas that are much more speculative or areas of the product that you're not sure are going to be used, I'd rather first know if we have general product market fit or just know what parts of the product people are drawn to to then like put more of attention on that.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the perennial question. I would say that it also depends on the culture. For example, at Figma, we have a culture of everyone wants to get the details right. So sometimes we have to encourage people to be comfortable getting something shipped.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Play shows the human behind the product, and it also shows the care to some extent. You know, I think the most exciting things I look back in my career are moments when someone decided to care so deeply, not because there was some OKR that they had to fulfill, but rather because they just were excited to think about the reaction that someone would have when they discover that little thing or that people would start talking about it, even though it wasn't in service of like a particular kind of metric in the funnel. And I think the pride in that, that pride in craftsmanship there is what, first of all, just makes product building fun at the end of the day where we're here because these are jobs, but also because we are designers, we are craftsmen, and that's what gives us joy. And so if you can't find those moments in your product, then it's quite sad.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it comes back to storytelling, and I'll give a specific example which is I think a PM is really great at motivating something incredibly boring as existential. And so whenever I'm interviewing PMs, you know, I just ask, okay, well, what are some projects you've led and whatever? And if they can't make it sound interesting to me, no matter the space, then I'm dubious of their abilities to rally a team. Because part of it is, yeah, like they have to make a case for why it's an important thing to do right now because otherwise there's plenty of other important things to be doing. You know, team has to be motivated around that. Like even if it's some really boring compliance project, a product manager can make it feel incredibly existential and so strategic and important and get everyone excited around it. And so that's a skill I look for.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this comes back though to the original thing I was talking about, which is that it can be hard for someone to push on both sides, right? One of the unique things about PMs is they're the ones facilitating the trade-offs between these different points of view. Engineering here saying what's feasible or what's not a designer saying what's right for the user, being able to kind of mediate that. And certainly the two sides can do that. But in a complex business, there are a lot of these kinds of points of view from different functions that need to be accounted for. And it's almost easier to, you know, tell a designer, an engineer to like really advocate for one aspect because that is what they're like deeply, you know, ingrained in. And product managers are uniquely good at being able to objectively look at all that information, think about the goals and the whys and decide, you know, what the best balance of things are. Like that kind of leadership, I think, is important.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I have a very biased view on that. I think that it could if our other functions step up to play that role. And there's certainly a lot of people in engineering and design that can play that role. But, you know, I don't think overnight you would be able to get there because we've built a function around being able to go deep in the why and, you know, really work deeply with our customers. And so that is time and skills that needs to be.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, there's like a cascading level of whys, right? And there is a very deep existential lie that a founder owns in a smaller company. They are the person who is doing all of that. And in fact, that smaller company shouldn't have PMs because the founder is playing that role. But you get to scale where you need.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm open to that idea, but I do think that the nature of the work is still very important. And one of the simplest ways I've heard PM explain before is that they're responsible for the why. Why are we doing this? Why is this a priority right now? Why this particular use case or user base or whatnot? Creating clarity on that allows everyone else to make really great decisions. I think that somebody does need to play that role. I don't think that it has to be someone call it a product manager, but certainly, you know, the best product managers are able to create that kind of clarity.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started my PM career at Microsoft, you know, and the first thing my manager said was basically you are a glorified secretary, that's how you should think about yourself. And you're here to unblock your developers. That's what your job is. That has been ingrained in me for a while in terms of there's a worldview where you say, hey, like, you don't have any hard skills, so you're just here to like fill in the gaps. And so that's been my philosophy forever. You know, they're talented designers and engineers who just have a command of their craft that I could never have. So I've never kind of resonated with the CEO type of language.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And I think that's also maybe, you know, we were having to retroactively do all this explanation. There was an opportunity to have in the product of named it something more clear be very clear that today, like if you take a screenshot of they go make, you see like, oh, it's being powered by Claude. And it's like, okay, like no questions. You know exactly where the code is being generated from. So I think those are some lessons that we could have applied, but you know, at the time, I think there was something about taking care of it for you without bothering you with the details that might have been a point of view that led us initially to be.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To replace the act of designing, you have to iterate from there. And we wanted to be more clear around what's going on underneath the hood. So we wrote an entire blog post that explained how it worked. And in our recent products too, we're now more transparent about, well, we use these models. And this is exactly how it works. So there's a little bit of like”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that, at least from a reception perspective, we had worked on some AI features the year before, which at the time we had called Make Design, where you can go from a prompt and it would generate some designs on the canvas. And it was a pretty simple feature. You write some prompts and then it would use some templates and some basic variables to make that template look a little bit more custom to your use case or fill it in with content that's a little bit more dynamic. But at the end of the day, it was just matching some prompts to some templates. But because it was called make design and because people didn't exactly know how it worked, Anchor community was very unclear as to our intentions. What are you trying to do with this feature? What is it actually being trained on? And there was a lot of backlash to it when in reality what we intended for it to be and we renamed this feature later was a first draft. And to get you going, it's not.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say it's fast to know that it's not working in terms of just putting on some users and see if it sticks, right? Like we often do some beta testing where we put it in front of a team and then we check in a week later and are they still using it? So that's like obvious. But then the difference between good and great can be more subtle and you have to let it play out a little bit sometimes. Or you have to kind of see it out in the real world or test it with a bunch of different kinds of users to know. So I would say it's very obvious for something that won't work at all. Maybe it takes more time to discern amazing from good.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think one thing I would say is a lot of our product philosophy earlier at Figma had been the power of the infinite canvas and the beauty of Figma was that you go into a space that feels conversely has no constraints in some ways, right? Like you can keep creating bigger and bigger things and expanding the canvas in both directions. And that's amazing for collaboration because you can keep building on top of each other without clobbering each other. Whereas, for example, in a doc, it's one-dimensional. So as you add stuff, you're pushing other things down and you have to contend with the space. And so Figma Design, FigGam, like that was like a big part of the beauty of that. But so you started building other products and realized an audiences, they were like, well, no, people are confused by a 2D canvas. They would prefer to be in more of a workflow where they can see one thing at a time. And so as we contemplated other types of users like developers or”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, or constraints give you inspiration to some extent. And the reality is sometimes constraints are arbitrary, right? We say, hey, we want to ship something by so-and-so timeline. And that's just an arbitrary constraint. But then it's really wild to see what people do with that. And so, yeah, I think there is importance in having constraints, but the wrong constraints can be really dangerous too. So for example, maybe you assume that a team assumes they can't change something about the way the product works, so has to build on top of what already exists. And that could be a bad constraint because it results in a subpar experience. And so being able to recognize those kinds of constraints is really important part of product thinking.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think everyone has a love hate relationship with constraints if you're in the creative world. Constraints create creativity. And without constraints, it's almost...”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always like to go back to our own framework of how AI helps with design, which is that it does both lower the floor and raise the ceiling, right? Which is that it makes, in our case, design, but in this case, coding more accessible and approachable to everyone. And so in that sense, welcomes more people, but does raise the ceiling in allowing the best designers, the best engineers to be more productive. And it's delivering on both ends. And I do think that's the reality of what we're seeing.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No mandate. I think we always just want to make sure that people are using the best tool possible. And as people discover differences, you know, there's always a conversation.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think we'll have fewer engineers than we have today. But I think we'll be able to do more than we're able to today as we expand more products. I don't expect the number of engineers, for example, to grow in proportion.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, you're in the business of making guesses like these. I would say that perhaps it would come down a little bit where more of each function or more of each consideration will be more equally represented because what is the point of leverage is really going to be figuring out what we're building, you know, figuring out the user experience. And that's where the concentration of human attention is going to be.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, today, you know, you typically see maybe like eight to ten engineers PM and a designer or two, right? That's kind of atypical pod. Depends on kind of the nature of your product.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's also possible. We're seeing more and more that a mock isn't sufficient to convince people. You actually need a realistic prototype. You need to vet your ideas in that way. You need to validate it. So yes, it's true that some form of building is going to be important for everyone.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone should be designing in some capacity. And whether that's happening today or whether that's happening in the future”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a business constraints or technical constraints to be changed or removed. And that tension is what I think advances the product, right? And so I think people have to push on these things, like advocate for the business, advocate for the user, advocate for technical feasibility. And they might not be expressed through these traditional roles like we know today. But I think those extremes are almost necessary to create the best product.”
2025-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source