Lessons in Product Scaling and Storytelling from Figma’s CPO

Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

Yuhki Yamashita, Figma’s CPO, shares insights on product scaling and storytelling, emphasizing the importance of understanding diverse user personas. Figma has successfully expanded its offerings beyond designers to include non-designers, using storytelling to launch new products effectively. Yamashita highlights the value of internal debate and collaboration in creating products that meet various user needs.

Key Takeaways:

1. Engage a wide range of user personas to inform product development.
2. Utilize storytelling to create excitement and clarity during product launches.
3. Encourage internal discussions to challenge assumptions and improve product offerings.

Highlights from Article

In this exclusive interview, Yamashita walks through his three-phased approach to building and launching new products.

Figma spent its first five years refining its core product for one primary audience: designers. Then over the next four years, the company was able to broaden its user profile, adding more product managers and engineers into the design file — both by launching new products, but also because the app was open and web-based. Interestingly, one-third of its users were developers before the company even launched Dev Mode.

• Focus on a specific user (not use case!) before expanding

“We were playing catch up. There were a lot of great players. Speed seemed of the essence,” says Yamashita. But speed comes at a cost. If you’re building quickly, it’s difficult to fully grasp how a second product might fit into the bigger picture. “The more we create divergence, the more difficult it becomes to unify later on,” he says.

• Developing the product for the longhaul to know how to bring it together.

That was the case for Kapoor’s initiative to get Figma Slides onto the product roadmap — it was just her (a PM), an engineer, and a handful of other team members who she successfully pitched to work on a Maker Week demo.

• Maker Week hackathon as a way to surface great new ideas.

Nothing gets a community talking like controversy. “Every good narrative has a little bit of tension,” says Yamashita.

• Good storytelling has tension

Yamashita has a simple litmus test to gauge the effectiveness of a product’s story: Can its value be distilled into one single, self-evident screenshot?

• Good stories should also be simple at their core.

But watching children use the tool for social studies was a stark reminder for Yamashita that every new user today needs to find Figma products just as intuitive as the Figma that launched almost a decade ago. “Simplicity shouldn’t be equated with fewer features. It’s about mental models. When you look at a really complicated product, you’re like, ‘I’m trying to do this thing. I know it’s somewhere, but I have no idea how to get there.”

• The tenets for great product launch storytelling include creating tension to spark conversation and utilizing simplicity to ensure the product’s value can be distilled into a single, self-explanatory screenshot. These elements help generate excitement and clarity, allowing the audience to quickly grasp the product’s core benefits and engage with the narrative.

Make products simple enough a third grader can use them

All material owns to the authors, of course. If I’m highlighting or writing notes on this, I mostly likely recommend reading the original article, of course.

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