Mihika Kapoor: recommendation

Transcript context

…When you are spearheading an idea or a product, it's really on you to have a pulse on how everyone else is feeling about that product. And different products need different levels of excitement to make it out the door. If there is something that leadership has really strong conviction in, it's important for leadership to amp the whole company up behind that vision. On the flip side, if you yourself are pushing a zero to one idea from the bottoms up, the onus is even more on you to make sure that that project and that product is constantly propped up and that people are excited about it to make it out the door. And so one example is we've been talking about this product that I'm working on. And coming out of winter break this year, there's this sense, or at least I always suspect, that there's this sense of over winter break, everyone forgets what happened last year. It goes at the door because you were hopefully doing something that took your mind off work. And so at the same time, there's this sense of how do you create forward momentum inside of a company in January when people are slowly coming back into office, everyone's trickling back in at different dates because everyone to click slightly different PTO, how do you rally people in a certain direction? And so we have this thing at Figma called SKO or Sales Kickoff, which is every year the sales team comes together, and we have a keynote and a set of fireside chats and stuff like that, and we talk about what's coming for the year. And at this point, our product, it existed, but it was absolutely barely built. It was rough around the edges. It had bugs every day. Maybe 10 people in the company were using it and something like that outside of the team. Yeah, it was so important to me that this product got visibility in this forum because this was the first company-wide forum of the year where we were declaring priorities for the year. And so it was so important to me that this product had some sort of a moment, or speaking of show, don't tell, a demo in the context of this keynote. And so Kris, our CTO and Yuhki, our CPO, were giving this keynote on what does our year look like? And I really, really deeply insisted that we should include a demo. And I think what ended up happening is something like that, a demo that wasn't meant to be a demo or that people weren't expecting does so much in terms of driving that sense of hype and helping people see what you yourself see in the future. And what's really interesting is I think that hype is something that... You can't really create hype for something you don't believe in my opinion. The only way to create hype is to get people to see what you see. And so I think that it's incredibly important to leverage very large forums like that Maker Week, like Sales Kickoff. e in my opinion. The only way to create hype is to get people to see what you see. And so I think that it's incredibly important to leverage very large forums like that Maker Week, like Sales Kickoff. We have CONFIG, which is our annual showcase to the world of what we're working on in order to get everyone to see what you're seeing and to be really scrappy about it and to really be the person who's pushing your product to its limits in the right moments. And I think what you find is that if you push your product to get visibility, maybe even beyond what the current stage of product development merits is that you have really incredible learnings because the more that you can put your product in front of people and get them to use it, the more signal you get on how it's trending. And so what ended up happening was something that could have originally been perceived as a distraction to the team actually ended up being something that added so much fuel to the fire in terms of, one, giving us product insights to inform our next steps. And two, getting the entire company to feel truly, deeply feel excited about getting this thing out the door. And this pitch and product you're describing is the one that's going to be launching this mysterious new product, right?…

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