Yamashita: Managing Designers Is Harder Than Managing Product Managers
Yuhki Yamashita · An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma) · Jan 8, 2023 · at 10:34
Yuhki Yamashita, Chief Product Officer at Figma, compares the management challenges of design teams versus product management teams.
0:00 / 0:04exact quote · 4.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I would say managing designers is harder than managing product managers.”
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
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?”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”