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Mentions personal use of Figma. Mentions personal use of FigJam.

21 Apr 2024 Lenny's Podcast Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma)

“How do you guys use Figma as a company?" And it's kind of interesting because I feel like we use Figma the way that everyone uses Figma, but we use FigJam on steroids.”

— Mihika Kapoor

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Speaker
Mihika Kapoor
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
recommendation
Recorded
21 Apr 2024
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…Is there an example that we could talk about? I know you can't talk about the product you're working on yet, but from the past of a vision that you crafted maybe to share what the vision was or how you came to that to make this even more real? So, before I was working on the new product, I was working on the FigJam team, and I was an early member of the FigJam team. And whiteboarding was something that really took off during the pandemic because it was the first time that people were not together in office, couldn't jam together, couldn't just throw up a whiteboard behind them physically. And so, there was kind of this question of, okay, how do you combat these disparate teammates and pull them together into a common space? And I think that when we think about FigJam and what success might look like for FigJam, a part of it that I was really invested in was the meetings experience. And specifically, what the world would look like if we were successful at bringing people together into a common space? And one of the early insights was, okay, what is the most common meeting that takes place in a FigJam file? It's a brainstorm, right? It's like you have a bunch of people, you've coming together and they're dropping a bunch of stickies and stuff like that. And so, you have this proof point of an activity that works really well inside of a FigJam file. But then, at the same time, something that's really interesting about FigJam, people often ask, "Oh, you guys are Figma. How do you guys use Figma as a company?" And it's kind of interesting because I feel like we use Figma the way that everyone uses Figma, but we use FigJam on steroids. Every single activity in this company is done in FigJam. Our product reviews are in there, our Gantt charts are in there, our bug bashes are in there. Every single thing is in FigJam. And there was this gap between the way that we were using FigJam as a company and the way that the rest of the world was using it, but brainstorms were working. And so, you kind of think, "Okay, what's unique about a brainstorm?" And you talk to your users and you're like, "Why does a brainstorm make so much more sense in a FigJam file than anything else?" And what it comes down to is brainstorms are this incredibly democratizing process. It's this process where ideas can come from anywhere, where it's not the loudest or the most important person in the room who's doing the talking, but it's everyone altogether. And you're able to elicit reactions from people who are more quiet in a meeting or people who may prefer to ideate on their own before coming out to everyone and things like that. And so, we started with the seed of brainstorms being this highly democratic process. And what you see is that in most other scenarios, meetings are very one way. You have one person talking, and everyone else reacting. This is true of a team kickoff. This is true of an all-hands. This is true of basically every sort of scenario. And so, what we fundamentally started marching towards was how can we create this world where the generative nature of a brainstorm is basically the norm in other kinds of meetings. sort of scenario. And so, what we fundamentally started marching towards was how can we create this world where the generative nature of a brainstorm is basically the norm in other kinds of meetings. Where a team kickoff is not just a PM and a designer handing mocks to an engineer, but it's everyone leaving stickies and everyone commenting at the same time, or everyone leaving... We have this ritual called Kudos Boards inside of FigJam, where everyone will shower each other with love and just kind call out their teammates for what they've done over the last week or so. And so how can we ensure that those kind of rituals are in our templates and that we're teaching people how to take any meeting and make it more democratic? And then, you anchor on this vision around, okay, what does a more democratic workplace look like and how can we get people to anchor around that and how can we get people to get into the flow? So, then we started launching features like music, like voting, that really help you get into flow when you're in that pile together.…

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