Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product, Figma)

... I asked on Twitter (keyboard clicking) , "Who's the best product manager you've worked with?" (music) You were the most mentioned.

My take is that your scope is the world. Nothing should ever perceive as being out of bounds.

VP of product at Figma told me, "Mahika is really great at creating a vision and getting people to see what she sees."

We lean heavily into designing and prototyping even before a project gets a green light. If you and your team do your job correctly, what does the world look like?

Say somebody wants to make their culture more entrepreneurial. What does it take?

We have this concept called Maker Week, which is our internal hackathon, giving people the breathing space to, like, see ahead into the horizon and be wildly ambitious.

(intro music) Today my guest is Mahika Kapur. Mahika is a design engineering PM hybrid at Figma, where she was an early PM on FigJam and is now spearheading development of a new product that the company is going to launch in June. She's known as the go-to person at Figma for leading new zero to one products, and as you'll hear in our conversation, is beloved by everybody that works with her. Prior to Figma, Mahika founded Design Nation, a national nonprofit that democratizes undergraduate student access to a design education, and led several products and launches at Meta focused on commerce and creators. On this podcast, I bring on a lot of amazing senior product leaders, but there's so much we can learn from stellar on-the-ground product managers like Mahika. In our conversation, we drill into many of the skills that Mahika has cultivated that have contributed to her success, including how to develop a compelling vision, get buy-in for your ideas, how to develop conviction, empathy, the importance of culture and how to create a culture on your team and within the company, and also how to deal with the constant change that happens within successful organizations. We also spent a bunch of time on how to effectively bring new ideas in your company from zero to one to launch, including getting into a bunch of the stories behind some of Figma's most successful products and features and how many of them began at hackathons and Maker Weeks. Mahika is a truly special product manager and leader, and I feel fortunate to have had this chance to learn from her. We went quite long on this conversation, but honestly, this could have gone for another two hours. With that, I bring you Mahika Kapur after a short word from our sponsors. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. This episode is brought to you by Paragon, the embedded integration platform for B2B SaaS product development teams. Are your users constantly requesting new integrations with other SaaS platforms that they use? Unfortunately, native product integrations take months of engineering to build, and the maintenance never ends. Paragon enables your engineering team to ship integrations seven times faster than building in-house by removing the complexities around authentication, messy third-party APIs, and debugging integration errors. Engineering teams at companies like Copy.ai, Cinch, tldv, and over 100 other SaaS companies are using Paragon so they can focus their efforts on core product features, not integrations. The result? They're shipping integrations on demand, which has led to higher product usage, better retention, and more customer upsells. Visit useparagon.com/lenny to see how Paragon can help you go to market faster with integrations today. That's use P-A-R-A-G-O-N.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Lenny's Job Board. As many of you may or may not know, for the past couple of years, I've been running a recruiting service. I've introduced over 30 companies to their next hire and helped build a candidate pipeline for tons more. I've been fortunate to work with companies like Ramp, Figma, Shopify, many more, plus a bunch of exciting young startups, connecting each to extremely talented engineers, designers, and product leaders that make up my community. Because of its success and the value that it's driven to companies and to people looking for jobs, we're ramping up the service in a big way and beta testing a bespoke headhunting style service, and I'm opening up a handful of slots. We work with a select group of companies each month. If you need to make a key product hire or quickly expand your team, I'd love to see if I can help. Head to hennysjobs.com/talent and hit Meet Candidates to get started. That's hennysjobs.com/talent. Mahika, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.