Yuhki Yamashata
Yuhki Yamashita is Chief Product Officer at Figma. Prior to Figma, he was Head of Design of Uber’s New Mobility efforts, and before that a product manager at Google and Microsoft. Adding to his impressive resume, Yuhki also taught introductory computer science at Harvard. Yuhki also shares why he thinks storytelling is key to being a great product manager, owning the "why," and the potential impact of Adobe's acquisition of Figma.
Career Skills
Switching between product and design roles builds deep cross-functional empathy and allows you to approach product challenges from multiple perspectives.
"I think that it's, first of all, a really great empathy building exercise of understanding that point of view, and also pushing yourself to push on the product from a different angle. Because I think..."
Engineering Skills
High product quality is driven by forcing the entire organization to use the product for daily tasks, creating personal accountability for bugs.
"It's so important that you're using your own products. And I think we're in a very lucky position where all of us can get creative around using Figma in some way... one of the first things I did when..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Use questions about controversial decisions to evaluate a candidate's ability to synthesize multiple perspectives and tell a compelling narrative.
"one of my favorite interview questions is asking, 'describe to me a time when you're part of controversial product decision, and what did you do,' and all those things. And I think it's really reveali..."
Leadership Skills
When working with an intuition-led founder, the CPO's role is to provide the logical framework and 'logic streak' that translates that intuition into scalable strategy.
"Dylan is very based on intuition and instinct... part of my job is to build out that logic streak for him of how did you arrive at that conclusion so that people can understand that at scale, in a way..."
Product and Sales should collaborate to turn internal users into 'superheroes' who can effectively evangelize the product within their own companies.
"I really see it as this partnership to enable that much as possible. And I think that's what, to me, product growth looks like at Figma, is that. ...the face of Figma is not the sales team, but in fac..."
Marketing Skills
Effective storytelling involves 'memifying' insights so they are easily remembered and cited by leadership to drive action.
"I often talk about memification, which is this idea that I found this out most at Uber, I feel, where there's certain insights, data insights, research insights that were memmified to the point where..."
Successful community-led growth comes from equipping users with a 'revolution' or a new philosophy of work, not just a tool.
"there's something controversial about this idea that everyone can see what you're doing... that is signal that you're part of this revolution and you're trying to change something. And when it equips..."
Product Management Skills
OKRs should prioritize legibility, actionability, and authenticity over performative metrics that teams don't actually use to make daily decisions.
"I think that, for me, there are three things that really matter about the good OKR, and one is legibility. People look at it and understand what it is, and it's not some weird obfuscated metric that d..."
PMs should own the 'why' by using techniques like the 'Five Whys' to uncover the root cause of a customer's request rather than just building the requested feature.
"A customer is asking for a feature, but then you would say, okay, why are they asking for it, and back up the problem. But I think there's one more step you can take, which is, why do they have that p..."
High-quality product development requires monitoring low-signal feedback (like single-digit like tweets) as 'canaries in the coal mine' for larger issues.
"We created this new channel, private channel called Concerning Tweets, and it just, we're this small group of us that Dylan can drop us in. And these are tweets that aren't going viral, by any means...."