Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)

January 8, 2023

AI Summary

5 min read

Yuhki Yamashita, Figma's Chief Product Officer, discusses the company's product practices, drawing from his experience at Microsoft, YouTube, Uber, and Figma. He emphasizes PMs owning the "why" behind features, relentless customer proximity, internal product usage for quality, and ongoing experiments with planning tools like OKRs.

Storytelling as a Core PM Skill

Yamashita identifies storytelling—particularly synthesis and "memification"—as the habit most responsible for his career success and a key PM strength. PMs distill disparate ideas, opinions, and data into memorable theses or frameworks that drive action amid distractions, much like literary analysis or teaching complex concepts from scratch. He coaches PMs to reset context, escaping the curse of knowledge, to explain problems accessibly. In reviews, he probes storytelling by asking candidates to describe controversial decisions, checking if they rally interest even in mundane problems.

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What you'll learn

1 **(00:05:22) Yuhki's Career Arc**
2 **(00:12:45) Storytelling as Core PM Skill**
3 **(00:19:17) PMs Own the "Why"**
4 **(00:23:07) Extreme Customer Proximity**
5 **(00:28:32) Working with Dylan Field**
6 **(00:35:27) Building High-Quality Software**
7 **(00:39:21) OKRs/Commitments Evolution**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Yuhki Yamashita is Chief Product Officer at Figma. Prior to Figma, he was Head of Design of Uber’s New Mobility efforts, and before that a product manager at Google and Microsoft. Adding to his impressive resume, Yuhki also taught introductory computer science at Harvard. In today's episode, we talk about operationalizing quality, the case against OKRs, and how Figma isn't just known for product-led growth, but also for building a community of empowered users. Yuhki also shares why he thinks storytelling is key to being a great product manager, owning the "why," and the potential impact of Adobe's acquisition of Figma.

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Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/an-inside-look-at-how-figma-builds

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Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting this podcast:

• Notion—One workspace. Every team: https://www.notion.com/lennyspod

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Where to find Yuhki Yamashita:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/yuhkiyam

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuhki/

• Website: https://www.figma.com/@yuhki