Yuhki Yamashata

Yuhki Yamashita is Chief Product Officer at Figma, with prior product and design leadership roles at Uber, YouTube, Google and Microsoft. The conversation covers his career path, storytelling and synthesis as core PM skills, Figma's customer-proximity and community-led growth, and how the team approaches OKRs, hiring and the potential Adobe acquisition.

01Key learnings

• Storytelling is a core PM skill; Yamashita suggests resetting your context and retelling the situation as if the listener knows nothing, to escape the curse of knowledge.
• Own the 'why' of a product: when teams can't have detailed specs, a shared understanding of the problem lets people make good local decisions at scale.
• Use the 'five whys' on problems, asking not just why a customer wants a feature but why they have the underlying problem in the first place.
• Stay close to customers by reading feedback across multiple sources, since vocal social posts are canaries rather than the full picture, and balance them against support tickets and sales conversations.
• Encourage teams to use their own product heavily; Figma has teams build decks, performance calibrations and reviews in FigJam to deepen internal familiarity.
• Engineers and designers who build fixes they proposed tend to invest far more effort than when handed a PM request, so cultivate their buy-in on problems.
• Treat OKRs skeptically: judge them for legibility, actionability and authenticity, and avoid metrics that are either unmovable or don't truly matter to the business.
• In hiring, probe storytelling through questions about controversial decisions, and look for PMs who can move fluidly between altitudes and imagine experiment outcomes before building.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.