How Figma's CPO thinks about product, design, and building things people love

Executive overview

Most product teams treat design and product management as separate disciplines. Yuhki Yamashita, Figma's CPO, argues the boundary is artificial — and that blurring it produces better products.

The real job of a PM is storytelling: aligning teams around a problem so they can make good decisions independently. Listening to users means going five levels deep, not just building the feature they asked for.

Great products come from teams who love what they're building, not from optimising toward a metric.

Storytelling as the core PM skill

• A PM is rarely writing code or designing directly — the job is motivating others to solve the right problem.
• Teams can only make great independent decisions if they deeply understand the problem.
• Externally, users adopt products because they believe in the vision, not just the current feature set.
• A compelling story makes users more forgiving when the product isn't yet complete.

Listening deeply: the five whys

• Surface-level feedback ("I want feature X") is a starting point, not an answer.
• Ask why five times to reach the real pain point beneath what users articulate.
• The real insight is often a problem users don't know is solvable.
• Great products imagine solutions users couldn't have thought of themselves.

One-way doors vs two-way doors

• Not every decision needs to be perfect — categorise decisions before spending time on them.
• One-way doors (irreversible) warrant deep analysis.
• Two-way doors can be shipped, observed, and reversed — experiment and learn.
• This framing removes the pressure of false certainty.

Building from intuition, not just demand

• Figma launched in 2016 to resistance: designers feared collaboration, not welcomed it.
• Six years later, multiplayer design editing is an industry standard.
• The best products are sometimes born from a conviction about where the world should go, not from an existing user request.
• Customer insights still matter — but they surface pain points, not the solution.

Design and PM are converging

• The division between design and PM is unnecessary and increasingly artificial.
• Designers naturally gravitate toward strategy; PMs toward design decisions.
• Figma's internal structure reflects this: design and product management sit within the same org.
• AI is accelerating the convergence — creation takes less time, so both roles move up to higher-level problem solving.

Building products people love

• The best products are often built because a team was genuinely proud of what they made, not because a metric demanded it.
• Delight and craft emerge naturally when the culture values them — they can't be mandated.
• Deep relationships with customers (texting them, not just surveying them) build the intuition needed to prioritise well.
• Internal alignment on the story — why this product, why now — is how small teams stay focused with limited resources.

Career: follow passion over optimisation

• Pursuing genuine interest leads to more effort, which leads to better outcomes — not the other way around.
• Over-optimising a career path is less reliable than following what's actually exciting.
• Storytelling applies to a career too: what narrative do you want to tell about why you did this work?