Mihika Kapoor: recommendation

Transcript context

…Okay, cool. Okay, so I'll save the stuff you think you're bad at for later. Let's start with the stuff you're basic at. Okay. So, the first is vision. So, Sho Kuwamoto, VP of product at Figma told me that, "Mahika is really great at creating a vision and getting people to see what she sees. She's working on a new project now and put together one of the best pitches I've ever seen internally at what it could become, why it'd be differentiated, et cetera. And like every new project, this had up and downs, but she's incredibly driven to keep the flame alive throughout these ups and downs." Can you just talk about what you've learned about doing this well, creating a compelling vision, getting people excited, getting buy-in for big ideas? Yeah, absolutely. So, my take is that vision is everything. It is really important to create a vision that you believe in, that your team believes in and that your company believes in. Because the reality of the product development cycle is that it's so messy, it's so chaotic. You're going to have extreme highs and extreme lows. You're going to march in a certain direction only to hear from your users that it might just be the wrong direction, and totally pivot. And in order to ensure that moments that are not discouraging, but rather, learning opportunities for your team team, it's so important to be anchored on that singular vision because then any step along the way feels like forward progress. So, first, just want to underscore the importance of having that vision and that perspective on if you and your team do your job correctly what does the world look like? In terms of crafting a compelling vision, I think that there's sort of a few aspects. The first is that you cannot go into a vacuum and come out with a compelling vision that does not exist. You have to be fundamentally inseparable from your users, and also, fundamentally inseparable from your team. And so, I think that there is sort of this important cross-pollination of functions that is really important in crafting a compelling vision. You want to always ensure that there are research insights that help you feel what a user is feeling. You want to ensure that there are beautiful designs and prototypes that help communicate what this future world looks like, and you also want to root it in engineering and feasibility. And you want to be constantly, even in the vision phase, assuring that what you're marching after is something that is achievable and something that you can work towards. And so, I think a lot of folks when they think about visioning, they kind of think about, "Okay, how do we start from scratch and learn about the user and then translate that into designs and then translate that into engineering?" And it becomes this very almost linear process. And I think that to the extent that you can have this cross-pollination of ideas and people working together, that leads to a really strong vision. And there's this book that I love called The Medici Effect, which basically talks about how when people come from different places and you have that confluence of ideas, that leads to innovation at the end of the day. The second piece is, okay, once you have your vision, once you have talked to your users and built up your perspective and things like that, it's like how do you communicate it internally and how do you help everyone around you see what you're seeing? And I think something that's really unique about Figma is that it is a fundamentally very, very detail-oriented culture. And it's also a company that very much practices what it preaches in terms of the future being visual communication. And so, I've found that words will only get you so far. ry detail-oriented culture. And it's also a company that very much practices what it preaches in terms of the future being visual communication. And so, I've found that words will only get you so far. So, when I put together a vision with my team at Figma, it's all about not just your traditional, "Okay, here are pain points. And then, here are solutions. And then, here is the timeline and costing." But rather how can you bring all of those things together and how can a vision pitch effectively be pain point, solution, proof point, pain point solution proof point? Because at the end of the day, simply describing a product idea in words is not as compelling as seeing a testimonial from a user on top of a prototype or a mock, and really feeling the pain points.…

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