Building 0 to 1 Products and the Inside Story of Figma Slides | Mihika Kapoor (Figma)

anyone can do this it doesn't need to be a PM an engineer so one and don't let your own skill set or your own perceptions of what you are good at get in the way of your Ambitions be ready for like a decent amount of emotional Whiplash and what I mean by this is I think that every single high on this journey was followed by a low because I think it's very natural to think that once you hit a high The Next Step will be up to the right and it almost never is like for example when we did the hackathon and we the zoom chat blew up I was on like such a high I was like this is incredible everyone's aligned we can just build this thing this is amazing and then it was like no you need to like prove yourself and build a vision so it was like step backwards then when we presented the vision it was incredibly well received I was like okay amazing so now we can like go forward and then it was like again like no now you do your like Eng prototyping and so high was immediately followed by a it wasn't as good as what I thought in my head and so I think just being ready for that not now doesn't mean a know so just have that persistence all right well my guest today is Mika kapor probia figma Mika and team built figma slides from just an idea to be a feature product at figma config this year and I'm excited to dig into your advice on how anyone can build Z to one products inside large companies which is like one of the hardest things to do not to mention I think Mika does this without writing any prds so welcome thank you for having me Peter really St to be here yeah so why don't we uh dig right in let's start with uh when figma slides or fides was

just an idea right so let's go back to I think August 2022 when you first pitched figma slides at a PM offsite like why did you want to build his product yeah the Journey of figma slides started even earlier than that I would say just like two or three months after I joined the company and the context there is that IID actually joined figma as the second pm on fig jam and so I was working on scaling up fig jam and what's pretty interesting is that for most folks who work at figma you kind of get this asked this question of hey like what's it like to build figma inside of figma and is it like trippy is it weird you know what's that like and I think the reality is we actually used bigm muck quite similarly to most other companies uh however use of fig Jam is like out of this world and totally on steroids and so internally not only do we use fig Jam for brainstorms Retros Etc but we use it for our presentations for our product reviews for our all hands for our qbrs and more and sort of the reason that we do this and lean into this is because it really democratizes the conversation and so normally these high visibility high stakes forums you normally have one person talking at a time it's either the loudest or the most senior person in the room and we found that bigram was really effective at really democratizing that conversation and allowing you know 20 sticky threads to be happening at the same time and so you know we yeah we were using fig Jam internally for presentations and I would go and I would try and evangelize this way of working to other folks who were in Tech and I would basically pitch them on like hey y'all should also do your presentations inside a fig jam and I think there was some like early adopters that were down to try but I would say the majority of folks that I talked to sort of recoiled a little bit and they were like no like when I present to my leadership or to my executive team or to my stakeholders like I really crave this sense of Polish and I think that you know fig dram is this place where you don't want the users to think about what is it looking like right you just want people to like be spitballing ideas not be constrainted not be thinking about form factors Etc and so that's really where I kind of got this idea of like okay we need to have a tool that potentially marries the interactive feedback mechanisms of fig jam with the visual Fidelity of figma because we had seen so many people also using figma for presentations got it so you actually kind of experienced this pain yourself right like try to convince some other PMS to do this and they wouldn't do it yeah exactly got it and how did you

build more conviction that this is something that you want to kind of like build a team around and just make it h happen yeah definitely I think that's where actually looking at the figma side of the equation really helped as you mentioned we had this PM offsite in August of 2022 where we had this discussion about what are the future strategies or bets that we should be taking as a company and I was really bullish on forcing this conversation around presentations which was like Hey like we internally have seen this kind of unlock by leaning into to a collaborative presentation with fig Jam at the same time we know that people love using figma for presentations right you got a tweet a month or so which kind of goes viral of people saying like hey figma please just like build a slides tool right and so there was kind of this question of like okay do we build a tool on top of fig Jam figma or do we build this Standalone product and I think like really pushing that in that forum and getting visibility across all PMS led to a lot of insights coming together in a really helpful way I would say probably the most helpful insight was from the prototyping team and there was basically another person on the product team of Ana who raised this stat about a really high percentage of Oregon ENT files actually being presentations and when we launched slides at config we actually spoke about how in the last year over 3. 5 million presentations inside of figma had been created in the last year and so Not only was this was there this sort of bet in terms of differentiator value prop and vision but there was also this like data backing in terms of seeing how so many users were hacking when of our product Sigma in this way yeah I love that that's like one of the most short fied ways to actually build them people want like it just like if they're already hacking something to make it happen already and just make it easier for them like chances of success are much higher you know yeah definitely so you guys had a big PM off site and then a lot of people like liked your sticky on the presentations how do you keep the momentum going like what did you try to do next after this PM off site yeah so I think at figma we really

have a very SE to believe culture so as soon as I really build conviction in this idea and like early stage conviction but I think enough that I felt comfortable internally pushing for it even before the offsite I would talk to like anyone and everyone about how I thought that we should build slides and I think reality is like just talking to people literally got me nowhere like I would talk to various execs and I would be like we should build this tool you know visual Fidelity of figma interactive feedback mechanisms of fig and I would hear like a h maybe in the future like you know just sort of the idea would get thrown into the abyss sort of and I think that it was very clear to me that in order to really generate an almost like irrationally emotional connection and desire to invest in the product I needed more than words I needed to like really put something in front of folks and so we have this concept called maker week which is our biannual hackathon and this is a week where the entire company not just the enge org not just the tech org but like literally the entire company across like sales Finance bizdev marketing more go on pause and basically just hack on things and what I was intent on doing was leveraging this maker week to build something that I actually hoped people could use inside of the company to similarly build conviction around this idea and so in Fall of 2022 we had our maker week and it was this funny maker week where I was both hosting the maker week and also trying to like build a net new product and so I was like walking around the New York office basically begging anyone to work on this idea and there was an engineer on the big editor team named Dorothy who was like yeah I'm down to help and what's really magical is I think once you get one person on board it becomes a lot easier to gain momentum and to gain traction and so once Dorothy was on board her whole team and her whole pod the editor experience pod inside of New York jumped on board and along with several others worked on flushing out this idea and I think that when you're thinking about how to pitch something in a hackathon I think a lot of people generally get constrained by okay what can I do in a week or like in this case it's really like what can I do in three days because the first day is coordination and the last day is demo day and I think like my advice for anyone who is going into a hackathon with an idea that they're trying to pitch to their company is don't be at all constrained about what's possible in 3 days instead just be like ruthlessly Scrappy about what you can reuse and so like our initial prototype inside of the maker week actually we took the figma editor and we like added a carousel to the side so that it would feel more slidy and then our presentation mode because we were trying to show the interactive feedback mechanisms of fig Jam was actually fig Jam so you hit play and your presentation got ported into fig Jam where people could add stickies and vote and like respond and interact with the presentation in a really Dynamic way and so it was like a far cry obviously from what the actual product ended up being but it was enough to lean into like specifically the two differentiators that we were trying to push for which was that you know visual Fidelity of figma interactive feedback mechanisms of figjam and it's also you know where the name flies grew to prominence we had this little part of the demo towards the end which was what should we call this thing and we had a name storm and there was fides and there was slma and there was Fe and there were all of these very let I say creative names that got thrown around which were really fun as well okay so the Prototype was basically like a bunch of smoke and mirrors to try to show these two value props that you had in mind right yeah I we could call it I think it's just creative repurposing but yeah I really think like more team should build prototypes first like usually what happens to these companies is like you go off you want to build a Zer to one product and you go off and write like a six pager or like you make like a fancy deck right like with the div vision and all that stuff I we talk about that more but like yeah just like why don't they just freaking build prototypes and bring a to life so people can actually play with it and then once you play with it you kind of inly know why is valuable

it's pretty interesting I think once figma slides went out the door I config I actually got approached by a lot of designers who asked this question of if there is a thing that I believe in how do I get my pm on board like to prioritize the things that I think are really going to make a difference but might not you know bubble up to be a P0 on the road map and I think my advice for those situations is exactly what you said which is just you know prototype it design it build it and take the afternoon to really invest in showing your idea in the best light and I think often when folks disagree about what should be built or what direction to go in it's generally either because they have like different assumptions in their head or it's because those different assumptions are leading them to have a different solution in their head and so you end up disagreeing without even realizing that you're talking about different things and I think what a prototype does or what a design or a mock does is it grounds the conversation in something real and is much more effective at like driving alignment and getting people to agree like okay yes we're excited about this or okay no and this is why rather than like shooting down the idea in abstract yeah exactly cuz otherwise you have like a you know vague vision statement and like some other descriptive lines and like you know is kind of like up in The Ether what this thing actually is let's keep going so like you got the Prototype did you present it to Dylan and the EXA team how was the reaction of this thing yeah so it was pretty interesting we have at the end of maker week we have like a 2hour demo day where a bunch of presentations and a bunch of the hacks are basically presented to the entire company and so there's Dolan there's the entire executive team but there's also the literal entire company on a zoom chat or in the offices Etc and what happened when we presented slides at the time was the chat like exploded and everyone who had never seen the idea was stoked everyone who had thought that we should build a slides product because there are many people inside the company who had faith that we should build a slides product right they were stoked and the thing that shocked me was everyone who was skeptical in that moment was also stoked and I think it was like a Confluence of things I think one was the fact that people were excited about the Prototype but two I think there was also an aspect of a level of ambition of building a net new product or at least framing that so-called smoke and mirrors as a net new product was really I think emblematic of what we hope that people do inside of maker week which is take these big bets and push the envelope on something that you couldn't do in your dayto day right so we try to cover that space for people like dream big and do what you could do in that time and so I think that what was really powerful about the Prototype was it was no longer just me pushing on this idea but it was this entire company now who would every now and then only had all hands and stuff like that be like so like what happened to flies like what's going on there and you create this internal momentum that I think about it as like if you're trying to push an idea through a company like you want to make it bigger than yourself right if it's just one person pushing on something it's never going to get anywhere and so I think what was really cool was now there are a bunch of evangelists across the company I think there was also like a little bit of a hard part or almost like a something that was surprising to me in the moment was when the chat exploded and went wild I was like okay great so we're like building this right and then the answer was no you know like you can't just build a prototype and you know get headcount to spin up a team but what it did do was it was not a green light for the project but it was next step and so you know we had this meeting with Dylan where we presented you know we are better than XYZ other players in the space on visual Fidelity we're better than XYZ players in the space on collaboration you know like put that together and we think we can like win in this space and I think Dylan's reaction to that was you know you can't just invest in a space because you think you can outdo your competitors you need like a very tangible perspective on if you are successful how does the way that people are working or you know going about their lives really change and so subsequently after the maker week project we did like a one month Vision Sprint on really figuring out if this product was successful what kind of change would that look like in the workplace and otherwise and so this was sort of like a one month Sprint in January of 2023 it was me a designer Ken a researcher Gus and an engineer Alex and we basically came together and I

think sort of like violated all the rules of how you're supposed to do product development because we just had a month to put this thing together and so instead of doing the typical I think cycle of what normally informs like a vision which is you know first you know do a couple weeks of research then a few weeks of design then build and basically have this like waterfall process what we actually did was we stacked research design and Engineering all on top of each other and we started designing immediately with our best guess at what people wanted and we started researching people's like core needs and we basically changed the questions and research like almost every day as we like learned new things and wanted to dig into more aspects and what my day would look like was like I had a daily 1hour sync with Ken and then I would spend the rest of the day in research sessions with Gus and we would make sure that there was like a constant cross-pollination of like research insights informing the designs and then the new designs helping to inform new questions on the research side and so we were able to cover like a lot of ground in a quite short period of time and put together this Vision deck that you know again to your point was not just words but I would say like 90% of the deck were these like design prototypes about specifically what we thought would be like the inflection points or the differentiators in the product and in terms of where we like netted out I think that something that's pretty interesting or one of my most interesting takeaways from doing the Vision Sprint is talking to users about their foundational needs will often take you in a pretty different direction than having them react to mocks and prototypes so on the research side we kind of divided it into two parts we had the first half being like very foundational research not anchored in designs because we didn't have the designs as yet and then the second of the month was focused on like concept testing and we had this hypothesis going in which was basically that while creation and deck creation is part of the presentation that people you know slave over and spend a million hours on the actual problem that people were facing was that they left presentations frustrated because they would present a bunch of things and leave without an outcome or they would leave with like a bunch of people on Zoom disagreeing or something like that and you know we would talk to folks we would ask them their goals of a presentation and we would they were frustrated when they couldn't achieve those goals and what we generally speaking heard from users was people being like Oh yeah that's definitely a problem that I have but I don't expect this tool to solve it for me like most people when they fail to drive to an outcome in the context of a presentation they take it on themselves they're like I did not structure the conversation appropriately I did not past the presentation appropriately they take a lot of this like trouble on themselves and it kind of reminded me of if you've read the Design of Everyday Things there's this part where the author basically talks about how you know most people pull push doors and push pull doors and they take it on themselves when they do it wrong probably there's like some design flaw there and so I think we had like a similar hypothesis with like the fact that most people who went into a presentation were actually unable to get the outcomes that they wanted which was that they weren't having the most effective conversations fast forward to when we started presenting some of our Concepts to users we were presenting things like polls and Alignment scales and like that and there was this unlock moment of folks feeling like wow this can help me get you know signal from my entire engineering team not just the tech lead like this can help me concentrate the conversation not just on like maybe the loudest people who already agree with me but like the quieter person who might have some insight the rest of us aren't thinking about and what was really cool was to see that like change in people feeling like the burden was on themselves to people starting to see like oh maybe this tool can help me solve my problems in this way so it's kind of like personally like I don't like presentations where it's just like a PM or designer trying to get buying for something like the best product reviews are like someone in the room actually has a good idea that changes your mind or something like what's the point of presenting other not having a discussion so is that kind of what you found yeah you know for example I would say like I don't know how familiar you are with the alignment scale but it's a tool that we religiously use internally it's basically the Spectrum where you can pose a question and people can either strongly disagree at the red end of the spectrum or strongly agree at the green end of the spectrum and it's a very simple Paradigm but what actually happens is that the way that we use this tool is everyone will vote and you get the Spectrum and then what we do is we ask the person who's most to the right and most to the left to like voice why they think what they think and like have it out and at that moment you're able to kind of get the extremes perspectives focalized and the center of the discussion because other times you can have people like very much like agreeing without even realizing they're agreeing or disagreeing without even realizing what they're disagreeing on and I think that having those kinds of visualizations of where people stand are really great at to your point like eliciting the ideas that maybe the you know working team hasn't even thought about or something like that what kind of users do you talk to like is it designers or PMS or question we talk to one3 designers one3 PMS one3 other like miscellaneous non-designers so that would be like videv sales Etc got it I think you talked about how you broke all the rules but I think what you did is actually what most startup people would do right they're not going to do research for like a month and then make a design for a month like the company will die by then totally so like the fact that you can go through this Loop in of loop as fast as possible is kind of what should be done I think in most companies I hope so okay so you did for a month did you get buying from like

people like Yuki and show along the way or did you kind of like do thing for a month and then go for this big presentation to Dylan no I would say like Yuki who's our CPO and show who's a VP of product with the company and one of the honorary co-founders were very instrumental along the way and helping package the insights and so I think that what's pretty interesting is before I came to figma I was kind of taught and this works a lot of companies but I was kind of taught that the shorter the deck the better right so to the extent that you can make a like seven slide Vision deck or strategy deck and put that in front of someone like that is the gold standard and when I joined figma it was really interesting I would see these like 60 70 slide decks I would be like whoa like the executive team is going through all of this like this is so much content and I think it's really tied to what I was saying before which is pigma has this very like SE to believe culture and a bunch of bullet points about what we wanted to do will do almost nothing to drive alignment versus a bunch of prototypes with you know user quotes of what we heard in our research sessions is basically one both like aligning and being very explicit about what we have in our head as the target end state but also gives us the ability to show the proof points and so Yuki gave a lot of really helpful advice about how to help the audience feel like an emotional connection and so you know you can say something along the lines of this is like a feature that we had in mind that hasn't shipped yet but might ship in the future we think that users should be allowed to emote when someone else is presenting so that they can express their enthusiasm about the idea at hand and you can say like the problem is that you know people get bored during a presentation right and so you can kind of like say that I think something like that you can like nod your head too or something like that and what I really you know tried to do at the push of Yuki in this presentation was to really put the listeners of the presentation in the shoes of the person who's like undergoing like extr embarrassment so like one of the starting points of the presentation was kind of like you're presenting you're up on stage or in a zoom call like delivering this thing that you've slaved over and you present your thoughts and there's like silence right and like everyone has been there right where you're like this is my thing and like this is what I want to do and like you have no idea people care or agree or disagree and you know the on the audience side of the equation you don't feel the pain you're just kind of like oh if no one else is talking I'm not going to talk Etc but as a presenter you're like an Agony right and so it's kind of like how can you constantly just show the points of Agony throughout the presentation process and anchor the solutions around those and so it was sort of this like six-part presentation where it was like okay first like you are the presenter and then like went through all the pain points that you were facing all the solutions we had all the proof points we heard from users then it was like you missed the presentation and you're trying to catch up and all of those then it was like go back in time you're building the presentation we went through all the creation paint points and it was this like constant immersion of the user and The Listener in the user shoes and building up from there and I think that was really powerful I think a piece of advice that I got from show that was really powerful was to kind of like use marketing language there's sort of this internally we sometimes say like Dylan thinks in tweets and I think that has sort of like rubbed off on a lot of the company in terms of thinking about like thinking in tweets is basically a another way of saying like think how you can talk directly to the user as concisely as possible that's like kind of how I think about the translation of thinking and tweets it's like we're not talking to the figma executive team when we're presenting The Vision Sprint we're talking to like the user that has just stumbled into this new feature on Twitter or on product hunt or LinkedIn what have you from their coworker Etc and framing the presentation in terms of that being like really moving and then I think the last piece of advice that I really got from uh this was both from Yuki and Chris our CTO was in the like days before the actual presentation I did like a dry run with each of them walking them through the deck and both of them were kind of like yeah like this is looking great like super stoked but just you know like Dylan is going to stop paying attention and this wasn't a byproduct of how long the deck was as I said before this was a byproduct of like how much time you spend setting context before getting into what you're building and I think that to the extent that you can just minimize that to like be maybe like two minutes maximum before you get into the like those pain points that I was talking about that's more likely to you know have an Engaged audience when you say in the context you mean like why are we doing this how we ling up to overall strategy that kind of stuff yeah so it actually changed many times over the course of flushing this deck out so I would say like the early versions of it were something similar to that which is like you know we're seeing these problems this is what we heard in research and it's like bunch of slides up front setting context and like this is what we're seeing in the data so on and so forth what it ended up turning into was a very small number of slides on what we thought was the biggest overlooked area of presentations which was the presentation itself for example we were kind of talking about how when slide tools came out like decades ago it was revolutionary right it was like the first time that you had a basically a design tool even though we don't call it a design tool to put together these like ducks that were this like gold standard of communication inside of any organization and if you talk to people about like what is the most painful part of presentations as was saying they'll tell you like okay the amount of time it takes to make a presentation and we care about like so much more than that as a user who's putting together a presentation we care about like facilitating our goals like why does someone do a presentation it's to get sign off it's to inspire an audience it's to get by and it's to do all of these things it's to you know gather a bunch of ideas and most players in the space have kind of talked to users heard the pain points around creation and said we're going to take creation we're going to make it better and there is this overlooked part which is the presentation that was really where we wanted to get in on and I think that piece was just like communicated succinctly upfront as like this overlooked part and this wasn't the only part like if you use the tool like you know that we care so much about creation right this is where we lean into like the figma of figma slides but I think just kind of highlighting this is the thing that no one else is talking about was really what we wanted to get across in the like upfront section of the present ation got it so the up front is like you know kind of like what's the key differentiator is and then the most of the deck is like you know put yourself in the shoes of the presenter this is kind of like a painful moment and here's kind of like our designer protype showing the solution and maybe here's some quotes about what people said from the feedback sessions D does seem to come off like someone who's like very customer focused and that kind M focused yeah I just put myself in shoes of D and some of the execs did

you also try to Lad it up this product to an overall company objective because you know just putting myself in the shoes of like one of the exacts they probably have like an annual plan or something like with like you know three priorities and then here's M got coming to pitch this new product so did you try to be like okay this actually helps figma expend to other customer segments or something like that yeah definitely so I think that if there's an idea that you're passionate about the only World in which it makes sense to pursue it in the company where you are already at is if it lines into a business outcome I think like at figma we have many focuses but in my mind it can kind of be distilled into two one is like and this is most companies honestly it's like funnel broadening and funnel deepening is how can you take existing offerings make them more valuable Etc and then funnel broadening is how can you get more people into your Suite such that you can start cross-pollinating the products against each other and I think historically figma has been branded as sort of a company for designers which is really interesting because that is no longer how we see ourselves internally and when we look at the most figma like fanatic companies we don't see that at all right we see you know not only designers in this tool we see PMS in the tool engineers in the tool marketers and the tool sales books and the tool Etc and figma slides was basically so exciting as a concept to me because it was a known visual communication tool but at the same time it was also known for non-designers and so it was basically like in my mind our best shot at making it clear that we think about the entire product development cycle if not literally everyone as a member of the audience that we care about yeah like I think a lot more people make slides than make you know product design so definitely broaden the adjustable

Market okay so let's talk about like the sausage making of actually making a product right first of all like you were still a PM of fig Jam right now then is like okay now go sping up a pod so was it kind of awkward like how did you talk to your manager about this like was it weird to be like okay I'm going to work on fig my slides now and try to recruit people from other teams how did that work yeah good question so I think fortunately following the hackathon there was General agreement that we could spin up a vision pod around it and so as of the Vision Sprint like me he and Gus and Alex like went full-time on it and okay we actually incubated the figma slides team from fig jam and so the designer he and who worked with on slides was the same designer I had worked with on fig Jam he built like the Fig Jam toolbar amongst other things and so I think that what I mean I think what's really nice about figmas in general I don't think there's like much territorialism I think that fig Jam was born out of figma D mode is built on top of figma slides was incepted out of fig Jam so on and so forth and so I don't think that there's that much territorialism but I do think that at the same time when you're building a team there are a lot of other important things to keep in mind I think that probably the most important is screening for passion I would say I heard of this concept in college which was this concept of like a first follower and it's basically saying that you know if you have someone who like goes into the street and starts dancing on their own in the middle of the street everyone's going to kind of be like what is that person doing and you know you would kind of walk by and you feel like oh like think I'm going to like stay away from that person like what are they doing but then the second that a second person comes and starts Like Dancing in the Street next to that person you're like oh interesting like there's really like something there and then maybe what that second person joining leads to is like a flash mob in the middle of the street and you know you go viral or something like that right that's like an extreme version but I think that like s moral of the story is that it's not just the person who first walks onto the street that's like responsible for creating something it's the first person that decides oh yeah I you know too believe in that thing and I want to shape it in my own way and then the third person and the fourth person and that kind of like compounding and so like I think that like the earliest you know Engineers designers researchers Etc that join your team should have that first follower mentality of like they're not there because their manager told them to join you actually like almost don't want that you want them to be there because they believe in it and so what's pretty interesting is that like our first or like longest 10e engineer on the team John who's like basically the tech lead for figma slides was begging his manager for over a month before he actually joined the team as to could he join the team and it was kind of hard to move him because you know he was working on a bunch of important initiatives and things like that it was unclear if bigma slides was even like becoming a thing when he joined it was still unclear if it was becoming a thing but he like followed up every single day with his manager and he was like I want to join this thing and then I would push his maner manager and be like I think John should join this thing and then what ended up happening in the end was not only did John join as the first engineer but a few months later his manager Alice joined and became the engineering manager on bigma slides and so you get this kind of like really excellent domino effect of you know great people attract great people so it's kind of just like uh organically right like you did a good job promoting a product internally and you know people were aware of it and then organically I guess people just want to to join and you kind of encourage that behavior you need to put your product in front of folks in order for them to know it even exists right so I think that like maker week was one example of that where it when in front of the entire company peaked some interest I think the second example was in fact the vision deck where like after we presented to Dylan and the rest of the executive team the deck sort of went viral I don't know how it got posted literally nowhere but there were like 20 plus people in it at all times like constantly like cycling through throughout the day and so that was like a second that time and then third is just like once you have Engineers on the team who are like really excited about the direction and the vision and also forming that direction and vision in their own way and like to the extent that they can talk about it with other Engineers designers Etc that they know what the company that's kind of how you're able to like Galvanize that interest so now

after this Vision presentation I think you had like 15 months or something to try to deliver this product at config what was like the hardest thing about from the vision to config you know is it like I think you mentioned that people doubt that you came even ship this thing or wasn't the hard things that you had to overcome so it's really interesting like it did you know to your point end up being 15 months from Vision Sprint to launch but I think the thing that most people would not have expected was that we entered this year with figma slides actually not on what we internally refer to as config path and so it was not internally perceived as something that would be ready to go the door when it did and so I think it's kind of interesting because it's like there wasn't a leadership enforced deadline for figma slides there was like a self enforced let's move as fast as we possibly can in order to build a product that the rest of the company and eventually our Alpha users and eventually the entire world is excited to use and so I think that the challenge Alles are many I would say like if I had to distill a few of the most challenging moments during the process I think first would be I think just sort of like there's a little bit of uh mental toll on folks not necessarily thinking that this is going out the door and I think that ideally you can take any sort of like mental toll like that and turn it into a challenge and so what we actually ended up doing for figma slides was in the context of this year we entered the year with a sort of product keynote by Yuki and Chris our CPO and CTO where they were going to speak to the entire company about the three top initiatives inside of the company that we were rallying behind and we had three top initiatives and figma slides was not one of those three which was pretty tough but at the same time I in my head and like several folks on the teams in their heads wanted to push for this thing to go out in a sort of config time frame and so what I actually pushed for along with Yuki was how can we actually do this presentation of the Year this opening inside of figma slides and in the end reveal that the entire presentation was built inside of figma slides now if you watch the keynote that's actually exactly what Dylan did at the keynote at config which was we built the entire thing inside of figma slides we didn't announce figma slides until the very end when Dylan though at the time Yuki fake ended and was like oh actually one more thing this was made inside of figma slides and so I think like what that was really effective at was a few things one was that it just sort of totally strengthened conviction in the state of the product and I think that as a PM building zero to one products or it's funny someone recently ped me that if you're Building inside of a company you can call it like something to one but you always need to be like selling ahead way more optimistic than everyone around you in order for them to get like a little bit closer to where you want them to end up bigma slides in January of this year was barely a functional product speaker notes were supposed to come in the week after this presentation was taking place and of course they needed speaker notes because this was a presentation to the entire company about our 2024 strategy we were stretching the product to its limits there was a chance that it would crash at the end the entire team went on two weeks of pause of what they were normally doing in order to make this thing possible and it was pretty interesting because at the time that was like perceived as a sacrifice against like development velocity but in reality it actually ended up tremendously accelerating the development of the product because what's better than like having people brute force test your product to its limits right and so the things that we found were actually like the things that were at the edges and ended up being like really important for us in the long run and so we like put all this effort in launched and did the presentation inside of figma slides through some miracle it worked perfectly and a few weeks after that we decided that we would in fact announce bigma slides at config that was kind of like this skepticism turned champ moment which is really exciting it's kind of the same theme of like making it real like you said you have to promote this stuff internally just as much as you promote externally after you launch you have these like four really good pieces of advice let's kind of take a step back four good pieces of advice for anyone who wants to build Zer to one inside a company I love that you mention anyone because a lot of times people think like you know the PM used to ideas do you want to just briefly capture these four pieces of advice yeah definitely so the

first is kind of related to what I was saying before about John joining the team and the entire team building up from folks who were like really excited but the first is find your people I think everyone works differently right and you can have two totally exceptional people who don't necessarily work well together because they have different styles and so I think like as Style Match on working style is just like absolutely necessary for sprinting because if you're able to find someone who works in a similar style to you or Works in a complimentary style to you you'll find that you'll just be like running always I think like an example of this one was like the example that I said in terms of always screening for people who want to join your team I think two is to be like as inclusive of other folks during your development process and what I mean by this is like I think it's pretty dangerous to kind of treat your product as a Wald Garden you want to instead have like as many people feeding in as possible and so for example one engineer at the company Carl who was like the longest tenured engineer actually decided to join the figma slides team after you know we looped him in for a random Jam during an offsite and just originally wanted to get his advice he had so much fun that he asked if he could join the team and so you really want to like create those opportunities to get the product in front of folks who it might resonate with but I think that anyone you need to like really bend over backwards to convince they might not be the right person two is around building a brand and so I think that rewinding a few weeks to config something I honestly never thought would happen was the term flies going viral on Twitter it was just absolutely not in my bingo card for 2024 but basically I think that every company is different culturally I think figma has this very kind of like fun cookie culture in a sense right like the fact that we launched a product named fig Jam I think speaks to that in a really nice way but flies as a term I think was so absurd of a term that it couldn't not get attention inside of the company right and if I really believe that if we called this product figma slides internally we would not have had the reach or the attention that we did like I think with the name like flies someone hears it and they're like what is that and like how can I learn more about that right and so to the extent that you can build a brand either through the name or through other things I think you really should because you want to be that product that idea that initiative that like when a person joins the company they're like hey what's that and how can I learn more about it right you want to open up the funnel for that find your people a piece third is to really be delusional I think that generally speaking this goes to the sell forward point but you always want to be the most optimistic person in your company about this product if you are going to push it Forward because if you think you're going to ship it in two months and everyone else thinks you'll ship it in like two years you're going to end up with something in between and if you don't have that like insanely literally tional level of optimism I might not ever show just having that like fortitude to really believe in that is very important and then the fourth piece is I always say don't manifest which I think sounds kind of strange because this I know in a lot of ways sounds like a project that was manifested out of an idea but I think that the term manifesting has really taken off it's become very trendy and I think that the way that it is taken off and what it encourages from a behavior perspective is actually kind of dumb or potentially harmful which is that I think manifesting kind of says like if you really want something to happen just like say it enough times wish it enough times and then it'll come to be and I think that is like in a sense far too passive and I would say like if you want something to get done go out there find the engineers recruit the team pitch it in company forums if you're you know building a startup like pitch it in like worldwide forums and go out and like do the things that to be done in order to get it out the door and build the product that you believe in yeah I think the last two really come together like you can be delusional you don't take any action not going to work out for you got to be delal and take action last few questions now that you launched there was a big moment at config I think a 0 to one product is like very fragile do they expect figma Sid to scale to millions of users in like a few months how do you manage expectations so that you can keep investing in this and like keep making traction it's a good question this is

actually where historical precedent does help so actually what we did for figma slides was we decided that when we went out the door we were not going to have a Target goal we were going to have like an exhaustive dashboard that gave us like all kinds of Cuts Like weekly active editors weekly active users designers non-designers who are our Champions who are our collaborators so on and so forth like we have an exhaustive dashboard but our goal for the first few weeks after launch was simply learning and understanding like where are we seeing traction where do we have faith where you know where maybe are we seeing like slower than ideal growth and then what we did was we basically used the initial few weeks of data to inform what our Q3 and eventually H2 projections should be and to make those ambitious but to only do so once we have an idea of like what the levers are that we can move and so I think that like in a lot of ways the launch exceeded a lot of the metrics that we didn't think that it would and I think that like seeing where it's spiking and where it's not is actually like the most informative piece in terms of like building a strategy and setting real goals and I think that blind goal setting is actually really tough because if you set a goal without knowing your levers then you might be gold on something that's outside of your control yeah that's like a really dangerous spot to be right I think you're right you should have a goto learn basically that's kind what you should have but in the past when have built zero to one you have the CFO coming in like oh you know if we're going to invest 10 engineers in this thing let's get to x million dollars by year or two or something and they just kind of like pull out a thing a and then you have like this crazy expectations that you can't meet yeah for what it's worth I do think that like once you hit the like six Monon Mark you should have very ambitious and concrete goals I just think in the like immediate aftermath you need to be learning like where you're seeing traction so then you know where to apply pressure where to let it do its thing so on and so forth yeah exactly all right well any kind of closing words of advice for people who want to push for something inside these large companies like I know you have four pieces of viice but like any inspiration to leave us with I say a few things one is I agree wholeheartedly with what you said like anyone can do this it doesn't need to be a PM an engineer I studied CS back in the day but the engineers around me at figma are so much more talented than me and I was not on my own capable of spinning up a prototype for this thing and so I think understand where you're strong but also understand where you need to partner with folks and be very real about that but also be very like ambitious about what you as a team need and set out to get that so one is don't let your own skill set or your own perceptions of what you are good at get in the way of your Ambitions that's one and I think two is be ready for like a decent amount of emotional Whiplash and what I mean by this is I think that every single high on this journey was followed by a low because I think it's very natural to think that once you hit a high The Next Step will be up and to the right and it almost never is I think like the journey is kind of like up down and you're incrementally and I'll give you examples of this like for example when we did the hackathon and we the zoom chat blew up I was on like such a high I was like this is incredible everyone's aligned we can just build this thing this is amazing and then it was like no you need to like prove yourself and build a vision so it was like step backwards then when we presented the vision it was incredibly well received I was like okay amazing so now we can like go forward and then it was like again like no now you do your like and prototyping you know and like again when we like hit you know we did the sales kickoff you know product Vision pitch at the beginning of this year and that was built inside of slides again that was like a high and I was like amazing so we'll launch a config and initially it was like yeah we'll announce that config but like still TBD if it'll be like a closed beta or an open Beta And so every high was immediately followed by a oh it wasn't as good as what I thought in my head and so I think just being ready for that and not now doesn't mean a no so just have that persistence yeah you're like basically like a startup founder inside a company right that's basically you got to go through the you know it's so over we're so back uh back and forth all the time that is accurate all right so uh mik we for to cover one thing the most important thing which is

how do you do your job without writing prds it's a really good question so my take on prds is that they're not very useful during the actual development process it is possible that they useful post-development as documentation I believe this cuz I have never in my life seen a PRD that is not out of date I think some prds are better at staying in date than others my prds are always out of date and so that begs a question of like okay what do you do instead designs on the other hand as a function of being like the literal thing that developers build off of are always up to dat and so I have like a pretty I would say like unique relationship with hean who's the primary designer on figma slides we used to meet every single day for an hour now it's like every other day and so what we what our process is basically like jamming together either inside of a figma file or a fig Jam file on like various specifications turning that into designs and then reviewing the designs and adding all context next to the designs and so designs basically become the source of Truth for the project rather than a PRD and then that's complemented by like a set of strategy Bo which span multiple products not just a single product okay so you basically just write the words next to the design like if there's some Edge case or something you have to capture you just write it next to design yeah I also think that like prds are often times like incredibly prescriptive which I think doesn't work if you have like a very product minded designer or engineer like you might have something like there is a button that does this but then like a designer reading that might be like why is it a button why isn't it this like other form factor that I thought of that's actually like a way better solution to this space you know and so like either you end up with like a PRD that is so vague in specifications that someone reading it doesn't really know what it is or you end up with something that's too prescriptive on top of it like almost always being out of date and so like I generally recommend like it's really important to have like anchoring strategy docs for like q1 Q2 H1 H2 2024 so on and so forth but then beyond that I think that designs should be the source of truth that everyone is going off of I love that I think you just gave me um permission to try that for my next product I highly recommend cool so where can people find you online Mika I'm on Twitter Mika it's like my first name last name put together and I'm on LinkedIn as well but I'm definitely more active on Twitter and I have been trying to spend as much time as possible like engaging with user feedback and so to the extent that you've tried out the product and have thoughts either about figma SL or anything else in our product sweet like I would genuinely love to hear from you DMS are open awesome I think you should build a 0 to1 product next where it's like FMA specs so like I don't have to write specs anymore in Google Docs cu no one looks on my specs just look at the design anyway so what's the point yeah but yeah cool all right thanks so much M thanks Peter see you bye