Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's so important that you're using your own products. And I think we're in a very lucky position where all of us can get creative around using Figma in some way. And obviously, designers are the, internally within Figma, are the most vocal and the ones who are in the product six hours a day, essentially. But even for PMs, one of the first things I did when I arrived was we were a little bit more of a memo culture, and I was like, you know what? We should be a deck culture because we can build those decks in Figma, and just that act alone allows you to encounter a lot of issues and for you to get familiar with it. And so I think there are ways in which, sometimes, you have to get creative to enable your company, your entire company to use a product more. Or as an example, recently, we just did calibrations for performance reviews in FigJam, and our Head of Design, Noah, came up with this amazing template and we distributed it through HR and that was another reason for everyone to use FigJam. And so that's the biggest thing. The more hours people are spending inside your product, internally, I think, just naturally becomes better. Because a lot of times, it's not just about people raising their hands and saying this is the problem, it's more about you just want to make your own workflows, your own day-to-day better, and derive satisfaction from improving that. So the takeaway there is get your product teams to use the product as often as possible. That is a really clever way of doing that at Figma. I know you mentioned in our newsletter interview that you switch from memos to decks. Usually, it goes the other way around, and now I get the second order effects of that where people are building their decks in Figma. That is very clever, and not everyone's building collaboration software, but that is a really clever idea. And I think there's probably a bit of trickle down from Dylan's obsession with the product in making it, just continuing to just be obsessed with making a great experience combined with that, people using the product and this trickle down of we really need to make this as awesome as possible. There are other companies, for example, when I was at Uber, especially working on the driver's side, of course we went out and driving, and that speaks to some aspects of it. But one of the things that I've realized is when you are logging a bug and you add some engineers to it, to have them look into it, the degree of motivation is so different if that engineer has, somehow, experienced a problem in some way. So for example, everyone at Uber would take Ubers into work, and if an engineer working a driver app saw a driver struggling with something, they would find it embarrassing and feel personally accountable to go and fix that. And when you can create that sense of personal accountability, then all these crazy things happen and all this progress happens. So I think for us, as getting creative at Uber about, okay, well how do we increase those interaction points at the point where, if someone building feels like they have some kind of personal relationship with the end user, and this is what happens, at Figma, too, where a lot of our designers feel personally accountable, in a way, because all their customers are people they already know in the community on Twitter and all those kinds of things, so they feel like they have to put something out there that's defensible or that they're really proud of. So I think that personal accountability can really make a difference.…

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