Figma CPO Yuhki Yamashita discusses the memification of insights, reflecting on his time under Travis Kalanick and Dara Khosrowshahi at Uber.
Opinion
Yamashita: Managing Designers Is Harder Than Managing Product Managers
“I would say managing designers is harder than managing product managers.”
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?”
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…”
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.”
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…”
Opinion
Yamashita: Dylan Field Needs to See End Implementations to Buy In
“For Dylan, I think it's very hard for him to really kind of like fully get bought in until he kind of sees like the end implementation to this really feel like if this is a good solution or not.”