Mihika Kapoor: recommendation

Transcript context

…I think that one of the most important things for a PM to create for their team is momentum. You have to constantly be creating forward progress, probably towards that vision that we were just talking about. But I'm a huge proponent of Jeff Bezos's one-way doors, two-way doors framework. And I think that especially in a software company, most things are two-way doors. You can come back. And so, it's so important to have an opinion and use that opinion to anchor people around and have people react to. So, I used to work at Meta before I worked at Figma, and Meta basically distilled the product role into two core capabilities. One was product sense and one was execution. And when you think about product sense, it's like, okay, what is product sense? It's like a really abstract term. And at the end of the day, I think product sense is just having good intuition. And so, there's this question about, okay, how do you build up intuition? And I think that it's just by having this insatiable curiosity and talking to users at every chance you get. So, I would go to dinners and grill the people around me on how they use Figma and how they use FigJam. And I think when you have a conversation with someone, it's so much more powerful in terms of getting those anecdotes to stick in your head. And what actually happens is once you start having enough conversations, let's say you start with conversations ABC, then you progress to conversations DEF, over time you build this almost repository or library of conversations that you can draw from as you're making product decisions. And so, I think that that's a really powerful thing to lean into as you're thinking about, "Okay, which path do we go down?" Now, there's the question of in the absence of any external signal, what can you do? And I think that a very common thing, especially for PMs who are younger in their career, is to think that your opinion isn't right or might not be reflective of what the user thinks. So, you think, "Okay, I believe this," and at the end of the day, everyone has an opinion, right? So, "I think this, but what do I know compared to these people who've been in my company for 10 years?" Or, "What do I know compared to my users who are using the product?" And so, then I think what might happen in those instances is you kind of start from nothing, you start from zero and you're like, "Okay, I'm going to build up from zero and gather all of these insights to get to a good place." And I think my take is that putting out an idea, even if it's totally wrong, is a much better catalyst for getting to a good solution because people are much more likely to react to an idea than to nothing. So, if it's the right idea, then they'll be like, "Oh my God, yes, let's totally do that." And if it's wrong, then it's like, okay, then they will take you in a different direction and you end up with something that's probably much more opinionated than if you hadn't put anything out there. And if it's wrong, then it's like, okay, then they will take you in a different direction and you end up with something that's probably much more opinionated than if you hadn't put anything out there. And so, it was funny, one piece of advice that I got from Yuhki when I was working on my vision sprint was like, "Okay, when you go into research, you want to go in with something that's at least an A- idea, or you think is at least an A- idea. Because if you talk to users and you learn something about it, that's awesome. Get to an A+. If not, at least you're not at a B. " And so, I think that having- If not, at least you're not at a B. And so I think that having that early conviction, being willing to communicate it, being willing to get feedback from other folks in your team, have them react to it, then get users to react to it, is so important, but then also something that's equally important when you have "high conviction", quote, unquote, is to be willing to kill your darlings if you hear something that tells you otherwise. You need to be so sort of strong opinions weekly held. And if you get external signal that's telling you something different, you should be ready to pivot and have that agility to do so. There's a lot of PMs that kind of worry about having too strong of an opinion and being like, "Here's what we're doing," because then there's this like, "Oh, okay, they just want us to do the thing they want us to do, and we don't have a voice. We don't have a chance to influence." It seems like you find a really magical balance of strong opinion of like, "Here's what we should be doing," but people still love working with you and don't feel like... I haven't heard like, "Oh, she just tells us what to bill." What advice do you have there of just finding that balance and making it clear? It's just my idea. We can change it.…

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