Lenny's Podcast

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

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. — Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/an-inside-look-at-how-figma-builds — Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting this podcast: • Notion—One workspace. Every team: https://www.notion.com/lennyspod • Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny • Flatfile—A CSV importer that says yes instead of error: mismatch: https://www.flatfile.com/lenny — Where to find Yuhki Yamashita: • Twitter: https://twitter.com/yuhkiyam • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuhki/ • Website: https://www.figma.com/@yuhki — Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ — Referenced: • Yuhki’s guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-figma-builds-product • Shishir Mehrotra on Lenny’s Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rituals-of-great-teams-shishir-mehrotra-of/id1627920305?i=1000576021672 • Five Why’s template: https://www.figma.com/templates/5-whys-template/ • Dylan Field on Twitter: https://twitter.com/zoink • Jeff Holden on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeffholden • Figma: https://www.figma.com/ • Friends of Figma: https://friends.figma.com/ • Camille Ricketts on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-notion-leveraged-community-to-build-a-10b-business-camille-ricketts-notion-first-round-capital/ • Adobe Illustrator: https://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator/campaign/pricing.html • Adobe Photoshop: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/ • Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard: https://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752/ • The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber: https://www.amazon.com/Story-Stone-Dream-Chamber-Vol/dp/0140442936 • Serial podcast: https://serialpodcast.org/ • The Good Nurse on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81260083 • FigJam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/ • Asana: https://asana.com/ • Slack: https://slack.com/ • Notion: https://www.notion.so/ • Dropbox Paper: https://www.dropbox.com/paper/start • Figma’s Alignment Scale: https://www.figma.com/community/widget/1030848035996871692 — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Yuhki’s background (09:05) What Yuhki learned from being on a design team (10:29) Why managing designers is more difficult than managing product teams (12:20) Why storytelling is important for product managers (16:35) How to improve your storytelling skills (18:51) Why PMs need to know the “why” of the product they are managing (22:34) The importance of developing a community and strong customer relationships (26:13) How to use different types of feedback (28:11) Working with Dylan Field (32:44) Testing at Figma and the branching emerging feature (34:54) Why your entire company should be using your product (36:50) The importance of having personal accountability (38:48) Why Yuhki likes to stay out of the way of engineers fixing their own bugs (40:50) Yuhki’s thoughts on OKRs and how they are used at Figma (48:40) Figma’s interview process (51:45) How Figma’s sales team works by creating human connections and empowering designers (54:57) How Figma built community and created organic growth (56:36) Advice for founders (58:57) The potential acquisition by Adobe and the future possibilities for Figma (1:01:42) Closing thoughts (1:03:44) Lightning round — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.

Yuhki YamashitaguestLenny Rachitskyhost

Jan 8, 20231h 8mWatch on YouTube ↗

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Inside Figma’s Playbook: Storytelling, Community, And Product-Led Growth

In this episode, Figma CPO Yuhki Yamashita walks through his career from Microsoft, Google/YouTube, and Uber to Figma, and how those experiences shaped his product philosophy. He emphasizes storytelling, ownership of the “why,” and deep proximity to customers as core PM superpowers. Yuhki describes how Figma builds consistently high-quality products through obsessive dogfooding, tight feedback loops with a passionate design community, and a distinct approach to OKRs and goal-setting. He also explains Figma’s flavor of product-led, community-led growth and reflects on working with CEO Dylan Field and the potential future with Adobe.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Great product managers are great storytellers and synthesizers.

Yuhki sees PM work as narrative-building: distilling many inputs into a clear thesis, making insights memorable (even “memefied”), and crafting stories that drive concrete action across distracted stakeholders.

PMs must uniquely own the “why,” not necessarily the ideas or the “what.”

Ideas can come from designers, engineers, or customers, but PMs are accountable for articulating why something matters, what problem it solves, and giving everyone enough context to make good local decisions at scale.

Proximity to customers must be continuous, multi-channel, and champion-led.

Figma leans heavily on Twitter/X, user feedback, support tickets, sales conversations, and programs like Friends of Figma, while recognizing the need to balance loud voices with research and data to avoid blind spots.

Internal dogfooding creates personal accountability and drives quality.

By forcing more of the company to work inside Figma/FigJam (e.g., switching from memos to decks, running performance calibrations in FigJam), problems become impossible to ignore and builders feel personally responsible to fix them.

OKRs are only useful if they’re legible, actionable, and authentic.

Figma has iterated through several goal-setting approaches, struggling with metrics that either don’t truly matter or that teams can’t realistically move; they now focus more on clear “headlines” and honest reflections than rigid metrics theater.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

I actually think that a lot of being a great product manager is being a great storyteller.

— Yuhki Yamashita

The PM doesn’t have to come up with the idea, but they must own the why.

— Yuhki Yamashita

There has to be this almost irrational, emotional response to your product—this love for it.

— Yuhki Yamashita

It’s really easy to listen to some of these podcasts and feel like these people have everything figured out. The reality is, we haven’t.

— Yuhki Yamashita

If this is the future of design, I’m quitting… I’m changing careers.

— Yuhki Yamashita (quoting an early Figma user reaction)

Yuhki’s career journey across Microsoft, YouTube, Uber, and FigmaStorytelling, synthesis, and owning the “why” as core PM skillsStaying close to customers and building community-led growthDogfooding, quality, and internal use of Figma/FigJamChallenges with OKRs, goal-setting, and how Figma experiments with themHiring and what Figma looks for in product managersFigma’s relationship with sales, product-led growth, and potential Adobe acquisition

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