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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“It's a good question. Certainly, because of the blurring of boundaries, it's easy to imagine that they might collapse a little bit more into kind of generalist product building role with a few specialists always who can go deeper and go higher craft in their respective disciplines. But that being said, I will say that there is always something very healthy about a group of people who are pushing on different extremes. And so, for example, I'm remembering there was this time when we had an intern at Figma who was a design intern, but wanted to try out PM and so we're like, oh yeah, great, go PM and design this project. And they had a lot of difficulty because as soon as they put the PM hat on, they're just constraining themselves, getting super pragmatic and capping their ability to dream to some extent. And sometimes designers are just so focused on the end user and doing what's right for them over anything else. And they are the ones pushing.”
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
“True that naturally all these disciplines are, I don't know if converging is the word, but certainly kind of all moving up in some ways in terms of abstraction.”
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
“This blurring of lines has been happening even before AI. Like designers learning how to code or PMs learning a little bit of design. One of the reasons I joined Figma was precisely because the boundaries were being blurred. And I was always frustrated by that kind of arbitrary line that was drawn between, say, a designer and PM where I've played both roles before. And a lot of this has been happening because, you know, people are being pushed up the stack, right? Like engineers don't have to understand everything that's happening underneath the hood anymore. They're just using a bunch of powerful libraries and APIs and still being very productive. Designers, they're very rarely pushing pixels anymore. They're compositing things that already exist in their design systems and putting it together. And so you're operating at these higher and higher level abstractions. And as a result of that, you're kind of being all pushed towards a similar area where you can focus on the most strategic things, which is solving the problem or solving the user problem. And so I think it is.”
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 it really comes down to what our users want. And in our case, our customers want the ability to be unconstrained by the tool that they're using. And having the power of any medium to express themselves. And that's why I think our definition of design has almost expanded in the last couple years, last year or so, where we say, hey, like design you might think of as that thing of visual manipulation on a canvas drawing some mock. But actually just as valid is a bunch of iterations via prompting or just as valid is writing some code because maybe designing via coding is faster. And so if you start to take that worldview where we should allow you to design in any medium, any input method at any point in the product development process, it starts to make sense that we have to introduce those capabilities into our platform.”
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 think the biggest thing there was, for example, in Figma make, source of truth is code. And we figure out how to take your design, translate it into code, and then let you iterate via code because code is so expressive and LLMs are fantastic at writing code. I think that was a big shift for us to some extent, just because, you know, to date, the source of truth had been a representation of our design. And now the two things aren't completely different, right? They're quite related. But I think that anchoring, especially for the Figma Make product, felt different to us.”
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, while it's definitely the case that Figma has traditionally been a little bit more professional, certainly our aspiration is that anyone can arrive to Figma and feel like they can get started. One of the motivations for building a product like Figma Make, for example, was allowing someone who just has a concept with words to get started and then iterate whether with the help of their teammates or by themselves on that output.”
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
“Future has to be one where there are many entry points because building a product is just necessarily this very complex multifaceted thing. And, you know, we like to talk about kind of our North Stars, how do we go from an idea to a final product in users' hands as quickly as possible? And in some cases, people have only conceptualized the idea as a phrase. And so by all means, start there, right? But for many others, they've already started sketching it out in some way because words aren't sufficient to convey the concept or there's something about the essence of the design that they want to communicate or convey first. Designers are very visual people. There are people who, these are the people who go to a whiteboard and start drawing before writing a single word down. And then there are developers who might have an existing code base and they have an idea based off of that and you want to allow them to design a”
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
“Thinking to a recent one we introduced this feature called code layers. And at the time the internal product name was called living designs. And it was this idea that you could have the static design that you just drew and then hit a button. It transforms it into code and you can start kind of augmenting it with code via prompts. In that moment, I remember it was a Maker Week project. Everyone's like, wow, all of a sudden all these things that were impossible to do within Figma design became possible via the power of code. But based off of the design that you just drew it, so it's almost as if the design came alive. That was like a big Zoom chat moment of like everyone's like, whoa.”
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, every product has some magic to it, right? Every company talks about magic in some kind of way. I think there's a visceral reaction when you see something that feels special, that feels unique. That's usually a very good indication that something is right here. And if that doesn't exist to kind of keep pushing on that until it does or maybe say not now, but that's something that I very much 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 would say that for your audience, there should be some moment where you're kind of, you look at it, you're like, oh my gosh, that's amazing, right? And, you know, as I said, it could be a gift or something that's, if you need a few condensed steps into it. But if there's a moment where you have to say, hey, let me stop and explain or let me do like three tool tips to explain. It's a little bit suspect, I would say.”
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
“Best stories, you know, you can kind of look at something and it instantly tells its own story. So, for example, I like to think about the screenshot test, which is you have one screenshot. Maybe it can be allowed to be a GIF, maybe, but where without any caption, you just understand immediately the value of it back from Uber, I was working on the redesign of our writer app, going into upfront pricing. So the fact that there's times and real prices on like the home screen, that was very self-evident what this whole redesign was about. And I think all too often people end up kind of having to walk people through, okay, this tutorial of like, let me just explain to you why this product is better. And to me, that's not just a story. It's also kind of like a constraint in a design. Like you're maybe not pushing it hard enough for it to be self evident how to use it or why it could be valuable.”
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
“Think about it as in our product teams, for example, one of the things that we like to do with goals is do what we call KPI trees. So KPI trees is something that I learned actually at Uber, where you say, okay, you have this metric, but what does it ladder up to? And sometimes it ladders up via math. And other times it ladders up via assumptions. So for example, you might be a team focused on customer satisfaction. And there's an assumption that eventually it ladders up to engagement in their four-weekly active users, right? But like at the end of the day, at Uber at the very top was trips. Everything cascaded from there. So I think that while it's possible for everyone to be indexed on a different kind of part of that tree, someone should be doing the thinking to make sure that it's all laddering up.”
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
“So, you know, things of that form, I think, are probably outdated even at Microsoft at this point. But a centralized place where you're like, this is the goal or this is what we're trying to do or some source of truth where people can go back and say, well, I'm trying to make a decision right here. And I want to know whether I'm making the right decision. Something that articulates that North Star is still important to ground 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
“They are in the form that you might be imagining, could be dead, which is this very dense speck that's intended to be implemented. I remember when I was just out of college in Microsoft, our PRDs would be 20 pages long with tables of edge cases. And if there was a mistake in the PRD, there's a whole process called a design change request that you had to make as kind of like a punishment. It feels like an advert for grammar.”
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, usually there is kind of a moment where there's a pitch, right? A product review of sorts. Oftentimes it's nice to pair it with, okay, well, what makes it differentiated? What is the messaging that will go alongside it? How do we tell the story around it? Because, okay, is it any old slides product or is there something special about it or why is it uniquely figma is a big part of that? And then the second is laddering up to our goals, right? And in our case, we're in the business of helping teams build products. Even something like slides, there are a lot of use cases around that for product teams. And like, how do we bring those to life and why is that better than another slide? 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
“Well, I think it's really important right now for every product team to think about how to prototype and play with new capabilities because everything is so fast moving. So programs like MakerWeek Help, but I think it's a core capability that we all need to learn”
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 in the case of some of these products we just talked about, there's usually a group of people inside Figma. We call them figmates who just get super passionate about it. And maybe they wait for our Maker Week, which is an equivalent of a hacker week, essentially, to build out proof of concept to make a pitch. And I think, you know, at least in our culture, building something tangible that people can use convinces people more that this idea is tenable. It's actually simpler than we imagined. And that usually is what kind of propels that project into getting on the roadmap or, you know, at least being considered.”
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, one of my product mentors, his name is Shiva Rajamaran. He was my manager at YouTube and has gone on to do a lot of amazing things. And he talks about how it's important to observe how people hack your product, you know, use that as inspiration because that's real signal, right? They're going out of their way to demonstrate to you that they have a need, even though you're not delivering on it. And so for us, a lot of our new products are a function of that, you know, back in the pandemic people were using Figma design as a space to hang out during quarantine and that motivated us to think about. Building a space for them, which is Fig Jam or brainstorming tool. And slides too, before our slides product, three and a half million decks are being”
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
“So, design mode is a feature within our product, so Figma Buzz is one of our new products for marketers. Figma slides also has design mode. It looks like any other slides product regularly, but you can flip on design mode and get access to all the features that you expect from Figma design.”
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, it's really hard. I think very few products have been able to evolve in that way to some extent. I think at Figma, we try to think about it in terms of offering people different modalities, allowing them to be in the same artifact together while using different lenses. So for example, we have a product that we just launched, Figma Buzz, you know, that has design mode, which is kind of like expert mode, hard mode, and has all the things that designers know about like layouts and variables and design systems, things that are a little bit foreign to non-designers. But then we have just the regular mode where people can come in and it's just a very simple editor where they can edit content in ways that they expect. And having kind of that duality and giving people different lenses into the same surface has been one way for us to preserve that. Simplicity for one side, but the need for power on the other.”
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 see. That's a good one. Dylan does always say simple is better. So there is truth to that. But simplicity is a perception since it's not necessarily a reality. You know, if you take simple is always better to an extreme, you might not add new features. You might not add new capabilities. And I don't think that's always the right thing to do.”
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 think moving a lot in retrospect caused me to, as a young kid, you just want to fit in, right? And you make a lot of friends, but you have to abandon your friends and move to a new place, learn a new culture. And as part of that, I felt like I needed to just abandon all of my kind of assumptions about how things work, like some basics like in Singapore. You know, you hold the spoon and fork differently from the Philippines or something, you know, and just those little things. And so it causes you to just question every assumption you have to some extent. And I think that helped me with putting myself in other people's shoes, you know, building some basic user empathy. I think those are core tenets of design.”
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