Insight certainty 3/5 debate potential 2/5

Yamashita: Dogfooding fails as quality control when building for external workflows

Yuhki Yamashita · An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma) · Jan 8, 2023 · at 34:21

Yuhki Yamashita, CPO of Figma, reflects on how Figma's product development must evolve as they build features for enterprise workflows Figma itself does not use.

0:00 / 0:25exact quote · 25.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And so I think as we're getting bigger, one of the things that I'm realizing is that we're starting to build a lot of features that are not necessarily for organizations like ours. And when we do that, we really need to be creative about how we understand how effective those are, because we've had such a strong culture of internal testing and dogs looting. And those are the things that really helped make sure the quality of our product was good enough.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Yuhki Yamashita

Opinion
Yamashita: Managing Designers Is Harder Than Managing Product Managers
“I would say managing designers is harder than managing product managers.”
Yuhki Yamashita Jan 8, 2023 ▶ 10:34 An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)
Insight
Yamashita: Engineers estimate half the time on ideas they advocate
“If you ask an engineer about how much time it'll cost to go and build something, and it's something that they came up with, or they're advocating for, it's almost always half the time as something that, like, you are asking for as a PM, right?”
Yuhki Yamashita Jan 8, 2023 ▶ 40:06 An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)
Disclosure
Yamashita: Deprecated formal OKRs at Figma in favor of qualitative headlines
“And so that was when I kind of deprecated it on, you know, and said, I just want to understand, like, your headline, like, what are you trying to do, like, philosophically? And just, like, don't stress about whether you can measure it or not. I just want to un…”
Yuhki Yamashita Jan 8, 2023 ▶ 43:40 An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)
Insight
Yamashita: Great PMs make seemingly boring problems feel existential and compelling.
“No matter how boring it sounds on the surface, like, I think a really great product manager kind of, like, cast something as like, well, this is why it's so existential to us, and this is why it's so interesting, and like, really rallying the truth.”
Yuhki Yamashita Nov 29, 2023 ▶ 9:38 My favorite interview questions from 100+ guests
Insight
Yamashita: Designers Must Suspend Feasibility Constraints to Push Vision
“As a PM, you're kind of in the center, facilitating all these different trade-offs. And when you go into design, you kind of have to ignore some of those other aspects to really be insistent on pushing on the best experience possible. Like, just kind of suspen…”
Yuhki Yamashita Jan 8, 2023 ▶ 9:34 An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)
Insight
Yamashita: PMs Succeed When Executives Organically Quote Their Insights
“There are certain insights, data insights, research insights that were memified to the point where, like, someone like Travis or Dara would just cite this insight in the middle of a meeting, and you know that you've really done your job as maybe a researcher o…”
Yuhki Yamashita Jan 8, 2023 ▶ 15:22 An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.