Mihika Kapoor: preference

Transcript context

…I love both of these points and pieces of advice. I feel like I always say that if a PM has a designer partner that can just help them with a deck or help them with ideas, that you're such a superpower, everything just looks so much more interesting when you have a designer helping you craft your idea. And the way you describe it is pretty simple. Just go ask people for help because you're probably going to find someone that's going to help you out. You mentioned conviction, so that's a great segue to else where I wanted to go next. So, I asked Yuhki, chief product officer at Figma, about your strengths. And he told me that you get extremely strong conviction extremely quickly. He said that this strong conviction allows you to navigate the messy journey from zero to one and rally your team in a really powerful way. He actually wanted me to ask you this very question, how do you get to this strong conviction? And how much of it is to true deep conviction, versus there's an inkling of instinct that this is going to work and then you profit on the sense of conviction to get people rallying behind you and to kind of take this leap of faith? 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.…

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