Figma's CPO: How Stories, Not Metrics, Build Love

"If this is the future of design, I'm changing careers." That was the visceral reaction from designers when Figma first launched in 2016. Fast forward eight years, and the same tool that sparked career-change threats has become the design industry's backbone—powering everything from early-stage startups to billion-dollar companies preparing for IPO.

Yuhki Yamashita, Figma's Chief Product Officer, has been at the epicenter of this transformation. From his early days building products at Microsoft and Google to revolutionizing transportation at Uber, Yamashita has consistently found himself at companies that didn't just build products—they rewrote entire industries.

In this candid conversation, Yamashita reveals the counterintuitive principles behind Figma's meteoric rise, why the best product decisions often feel terrifying, and how great products are born not from perfect metrics, but from engineers and designers who simply want to build something they're proud to show their friends.

Yuhki: I've always talked about the importance of storytelling, especially for product management, and I think it's important for a couple of different reasons. The first is, as a product manager, you're often not the person building the final product directly. You're not necessarily writing the code. Oftentimes you're not really designing directly either. You're operating in a slightly removed way.

And so your core job is to motivate everyone to be focused on the right thing or to be motivated to solve a particular kind of problem. If you can't actually motivate people in that way, then you're not going to be able to get people to build and design the most compelling products, solve the problems in the best way. People understanding what problem they're solving, people feeling really excited to work on it, those are only possible with really great stories, with really great storytelling.

The second thing is, when you think about how you're talking to customers, you're also communicating through stories too. You're not saying, hey, I'm just launching feature ABC. You're saying, hey, imagine this world now that you can do all these different things and how your life is so much easier or in Figma's case how much more expressive and creative you can be, how much faster you can do those things. And so those are the kind of stories around value and what it means to users that we have to be able to tell.

Yuhki: My name is Yuki Yamashida, and I'm the chief product officer here at Figma. Figma is a product that teams all around the world use to build digital products, so it's a design collaboration platform, and you can go all the way from brainstorming an idea in FigJam, which is our whiteboarding and brainstorming tool, bringing life to them in Figma by making mocks and interactive prototypes and then actually turning them into final products via a new thing we have called dev mode. So we really think about the end to end product development process.

I grew up in different parts of Asia, spent half my childhood in Tokyo, and that's where I'm from, and other parts in Southeast Asia like Singapore and the Philippines, and through all of that, I spent a lot of time just doing design and specifically graphic design and publication design, working on newspapers and magazines and things like that. So that was always a passion of mine.

When you saw people's reactions when they're impressed with what you created and also when you see what you designed and it's like printed 1000 times, there's something really satisfying about it and really delightful about it. And I think that was when I really was like this ability to create something that so many people see was really just something that I fell in love with.

I think building products was even a better version of that which is not only are you designing, creating something that is actually gonna make someone's life better. In college I studied computer science and I think when I started learning programming and started building websites and little apps and things like that and seeing people use it and somehow saving them 5 minutes of time or making them smile, like those are the kind of things that are really motivating I think and still remain sources of motivation for me.

Yuhki: Well, honestly, I was still very new to the idea of what is product management. And the reason I chose it was mostly because I didn't really know what to do. I didn't consider myself a really great engineer. I didn't know that being a designer was a real profession at the time. And so it felt like a role that would let me understand all the different parts of the business. And so that's why I chose that kind of job and Microsoft seemed like a really great place to learn from a lot of amazing people. I grew up on a lot of Microsoft products as well.

Google is interesting. It's a chapter in my life because I moved from Microsoft to Google. And when I was doing that, I suddenly became responsible for a very large app, YouTube app on iOS. At Microsoft, I was figuring out every single detail and how something should work, writing out specs for everything. And at Google, I couldn't possibly by myself figure out all those details and instead I had to figure out how to make sure everyone understood the problem that we're trying to solve so that everyone can make the best decisions by themselves.

And so that's something that's really core to how I think today which is how do you define the problem really well, how do you do the storytelling to make sure that people are motivated to solve that problem so they can make the best decisions themselves.

Yuhki: Uber was at a really interesting time. It was back in 2014, 2015. It was one of many startups that were really exploring the intersection of the physical and digital world, especially as mobile was taking off. And Uber was one of these companies, Airbnb was another one of those companies, and how do you take technology and apply it to really hard real world problems?

I think probably the hardest decision, product decision I've been a part of is actually at Uber when we had decided to change our model so that instead of having you enter the car not knowing how much you're gonna pay, we're gonna tell you first and in order to tell you first, we'll first ask you where are you going, we'll give you a price and then you can go into the car.

And that was a scary decision at the time because there was an understanding within the company that a lot of people used Uber, not really thinking too much about the price and then once they got the receipt later they're like, oh, that was expensive but that was already done. And so what would it look like if people knew the price up front, would they be scared away?

But I think one of the things that we realize is that when you think about the end user benefit, when you think about Uber's vision around making transportation accessible to everyone, we felt good about the fact that, OK, well, users should know what they're paying and our job is to make that as cheap as possible. And so it's easier to take that bet, but it was still scary because there was already a huge business at that time and we didn't understand the implications.

Yuhki: Later in my Uber career, I decided to switch from product to design and I decided to do it for a space called micromobility, so our efforts around things like bikes and scooters and overseeing the design efforts there. One of the reasons I did that was throughout my career I've always felt that there was this unnecessary division between design and PM and even as a product manager, I always wanted to get into the designs or help out in some kind of way.

I've also noticed that designers want to talk about the strategy and why we're working on something and so I always had the worldview that the boundary is much more blurred and so as a result, I wanted to experiment what it would look like to be on the other side and try to promote a stronger collaboration where these worlds are more overlapped.

While I was at Uber actually we were starting to experiment with different kinds of products for how to do our design and specifically we're trying to solve the problem where people felt that in the company they didn't really understand what was happening in the design world and so we wanted to find a tool that would make it easier to be transparent with the rest of the company and to share in the design process.

So we discovered Figma back in 2017 and started using it and we immediately saw how it changed the way we worked. People like myself were inside the product, able to help and collaborate on designs. We were able to send designs to all sorts of people, including lawyers in the company and other people in the business side, and they could add comments and participate that way too.

Yuhki: We kind of became really avid customers of Figma and as part of that, I got to know the team as well and one of the things I love about Figma is that it really fits my worldview, which is that design is for everyone. These boundaries between disciplines are blurred. That's what the tool is promoting and because it was so aligned with how I thought about design, how I wanted to be a part of design, I wanted to be part of that mission.

When I moved from Uber to Figma, I felt it was less about moving back from design to product, but rather being part of an organization that brought all these things together. And so today in my role design is part of my organization, product management is part of my organization so it was kind of the best of both worlds, but most of all here at Figma we really believe that there are in fact a lot of things that are overlapped and some designers do PM's jobs and some PMs do designers' jobs and that's OK and I think that's how I see the world evolving a little bit as well.

Yuhki: Sometimes you can look at my career and say, oh wow, you made the perfect moves at the perfect time. But really, all I was doing was pursuing my interests and what I was really passionate about because at the end of the day, I work on something that I'm excited about in terms of maybe a change to the world or a change to the way design is approached and it fails, at least I still got to work on something that I was excited about and learned from it.

I think some people are trying to over optimize their career, but really, if you follow the things that you're really excited about, then it's more likely that you'll want to put more effort into it. You'll put more effort into making it a reality. So that's the first thing.

I think the second thing is, I often think about storytelling for my own career as well. What is the narrative that I get excited about? What is the narrative I wanna tell maybe my kids or grandkids way in the future about what it is I did, why did I do it? Why did I find it exciting? And sometimes those are ways that I can say, hey, I'm really excited about this story. How can I make that possibility?

Yuhki: Back in 2019, we were still super small. There were some early adopters like Uber or even Microsoft and Airbnb, but not everyone has believed in the power of Figma yet. There wasn't a designer asking to solve this problem around collaboration at the time. And in fact, in 2016 when Figma first launched, this was the common reaction, right? People saying, if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers. People were really scared of collaboration back then.

But fast forward 6 years and multiplayer collaborative editing of design is considered an industry standard, a necessity. So both this example at Figma and at Uber show that some of the best products actually do start and are born from an intuition around an idea, a particular solution.

When I talk about listening, it means listening very deeply, and sometimes what people are telling you in the surface is not enough. And one of the things that the engineering team does that I really love is called the five whys. Why is the customer saying that? Why do they feel that way? Well, because they have this problem. Why do they have that problem? Keep going deeper and deeper and deeper, and that's when you get to the real truth.

Sometimes this takes place in the form of customers telling you they want feature X. One way of listening is to just build feature X, but a better way of listening is saying, why do you want feature X? What problem is there? Why do you have that problem in the first place. There's something better that we can build.

Yuhki: In order to build something that people love, you have to love it yourself, and you have to be really proud of it. One of the things I've always observed in my career is sometimes the best things that get built aren't built because there was this perfect metric that we wanted to move or because there was this perfect business objective, and it was just simply because maybe an engineer and designer really were passionate and really wanted to build something that they were proud of and that they wanted to show their friends or other customers or people in the community.

And that's the kind of excitement that it's hard to create but if that exists naturally it starts to show up in your product because no longer are you trying to fight for adding all this delight and magic into the product or rather it's just happening naturally because it's really part of the culture.

I think one of the most important things in a startup in a company is to be aligned around the story we're telling. Why should people be excited about Figma? Where is it going? Why is that exciting? And aligning everyone around it, because in a startup, you just don't have that many resources. And so you need everyone prioritized on the right focused on the right things. And in order to do that we need to rally around a story internally and then externally, a lot of people are using your product not just because they like the product in front of them, but because they believe in your vision and your philosophy.

Yuhki: I don't know what I wanna build in the future just yet. I think we're in the middle of a huge transformational change for the world where creativity became accessible to so many more people. There's a lot of talk about AI and how that will change design or change designers' jobs, and I have a few thoughts on this.

The first is that I actually think designers' jobs are already changing a lot, which is that even as product design has matured more and more people are working with these Lego blocks like design components. I like to talk about it as moving up the stack, which is kind of like in engineering where no longer working in the zeros and ones, you're working on using libraries that people have built so you don't even have to understand the technologies. And with design too, using a lot of things that people have built already so that you can design much faster and at a higher altitude.

And I think because of that the designers' jobs have changed more and more to think about not just these small execution details, but rather solving the bigger problems and just being able to solve them more rapidly. So I think that change has already been happening and it's because of this that I actually also believe that design and PM are starting to converge a little bit too because PMs have been thinking about the problem and working at this altitude, and designers have naturally gone up and think about that altitude as well.

And I think AI does this as well, where creating something takes way less time now or it's much more efficient or more people can take part in the creation process. As a result of that, more people are liberated to just solve more and more problems and be creative about problem solving because of that versus focusing on all the execution details.

At Config, our head of design talked about a metaphor that I really like which really resonates with me is that the floor is lowered and the ceiling is raised so more people can partake in the creation process, but also people who have already been doing this for years and years are gonna be able to produce more and higher quality stuff. So that's what I'm excited about. That might be helping create more things, helping people create more things, but those are the things that I really get excited about. It's more like helping builders build.