Pod Insights Lenny's Podcast How To Do The Product Review Right (By Doing It Wrong) | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024 About this episode Mihika Kapoor (Product Lead) and Yuhki Yamashita (Chief Product Officer) of Figma share their unconventional approach to product reviews. They challenge common advice and reveal strategies that may seem counterintuitive but lead to more effective and impactful product reviews.
Recorded live at Lenny and Friends Summit on October 24th in San Francisco
Slides: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1431158360648248243
Transcript 0:06 Speaker 0 Hello, LennyCon. Woo! I'm Mehika, I'm a product lead at Figma and the founding PM for Figma Slides.
0:19 Speaker 1 And I'm Yuki, and I lead the product team at Figma.
0:23 Speaker 0 And today we are so excited to be chatting with you about how to do the product review right by actually doing it a little bit wrong. Specifically, we're super excited to take you behind the scenes and give you both the ICPM as well as the CPO perspective as folks go ahead and navigate this favorite ritual.
0:45 Speaker 1 Alright, so I want to set a little bit of background and context on product reviews.
0:57 Speaker 0 Next.
0:58 Speaker 1 Uh-uh, okay. So over time they became digital, and as part of that, uh visual aids like slides and projectors came
1:08 Speaker 0 next. Next, next, next, next, and scene.
1:18 Speaker 1 That was an act, don't worry. I saw some people in the audience get real uncomfortable for a second. Uh but it was all inspired by my own experience in one of my first ever product reviews with Travis uh when I was back at Uber. And as you might imagine, these reviews were quite intense, and you can get a sense of the vibes from that photo that someone had the audacity to take uh during such one such review. Um in my very first review with him, he just kind of took over, and the product review just basically became me flipping through the deck for him from one side to the next. At one point he just said, I'll just read it myself. And I was kind of his real control, and needless to say, I didn't feel this was a particularly successful product review.
2:07 Speaker 1 And sure, Travis probably got what he needed, but I felt like I lost control of the narrative. And I had trouble directing him to the areas where I needed him to pay attention. And in talking to a bunch of PMs and being on the other side as well, I've come to realize that there are a lot of product reviews that feel this way, where they feel somewhat broken in some way. And Mehik and I believe that this may be because PMs are often given advice about how to run product reviews that sound right in theory, but in practice are very wrong.
2:44 Speaker 0 Most PM thinks that product reviews are for making decisions. That they're this forum where you need to choose between radical choice A and radical choice B the only time that you could possibly get a green light to move something forward. Well, we disagree with this. We actually think that the most important outcome that can come out of our product review is not just making a decision, but building trust and winning over your key stakeholders. And today, we are so excited to walk you through a little bit about why the things that you have probably been coached to do or are coaching your team to do ever since they started out as a PM might actually be wrong.
3:31 Speaker 0 And why some of the things that have traditionally been considered taboo might actually lead you down a path to success. And so let's start by taking the typical half an hour product review. I mean the typical 25 minute product review. Now at Figma, we use product reviews in the form of slide decks most of the time, so that's gonna be a lot of what we're talking about here. But we really believe that the takeaways are applicable to any forum and any conversation, be it walking through a deck or even an informal conversation huddled over a computer or in the hallway. So a few minutes into a review, normally the PM is setting the context.
4:17 Speaker 0 When I gave my first product review at Figma, I started screen sharing and was immediately surprised to get a ping from Dylan. Does anyone have the link? So as I started kicking off the conversation, talking about why we were so excited about voting in Fig Jam and why we believed that this bet was really the one taking. I kind of paused because when I was looking through the file, what I saw was Dylan scrolling all the way to the end of the deck, totally ignoring what I was saying. And so hopefully most of you are familiar with Google Translate. Today we're gonna be walking you through something new. Exec translate. And we're gonna be translating exec speak into English.
5:06 Speaker 0 And over time I came to learn that when Dylan was actually asking me, does anyone have the link? This was code for what's the actual recommendation.
5:18 Speaker 1 Now, having set some context, maybe a few minutes later, the PM often checks in with their attendees. And one common thing you might do is say, hey, I've been spending a lot of time talking, I'm gonna kinda pause now, and I want to see if we're aligned in an agreement on the problems, the goals, the principles, right? Something that you hear a lot. And often that's met with this really awkward silence, right? All the time. Exactly. And the silence can mean a lot of things. Many of you in the audience have probably been there as reviewers. You're likely tuned out because the initial context didn't seem all that important, or more likely, if you're like me, you're probably multitasking and doing Slack on the side. Um or often it's just really too early to be able to say we're aligned because I'm just wondering, is this a trap?
6:06 Speaker 1 Because we're not entirely sure what it means to agree at this point in the uh in the review. It could sound like great framing, but still lead to the wrong recommendations. So instead of abstractly agreeing, I kind of want to cheat. I want to cheat and look ahead to see if I agree with the final recommendation before saying we agree at this stage of the review. And so why does this awkwardness happen in a meeting? Well, we think it's because PMs are told that they should be spending some time really setting up these great setup slides, making sure everyone has all the background and context uh before uh before entering the uh before entering the review. And so uh one of the things you know people are often told is well, build up context, right? And so what ends up happening is you know, you see templates like this.
6:52 Speaker 1 You'll see an agenda, and it'll say, okay, here's the background, the problems we're trying to solve, the goals, the principles, and then the solutions and the recommendation, right? Seems like a really good template. But the problem, of course, is that the spicy proposal is often buried at the very end. So you spend all this time in the meeting building up context that most people are kind of tuning out, right? Or they don't know exactly how to react to, or kind of mildly agreeing to. And it's only the last few minutes that you get to the good stuff, right? You get these interesting reactions, whether good or bad. And it's also possible, of course, that the framing and problems and goals are themselves spicy, but it's hard to discern that before you actually know the recommendation. And so that's why we think that this advice is wrong or often misunderstood.
7:42 Speaker 1 And so, as much as it feels wrong from a storytelling perspective, in a review, we really believe you should start with the punchline, not to build up context and all the suspense, but rather go quickly to the part that is feels controversial, the thing that'll cause everyone to pay attention and actually engage in the conversation. And so in other words, instead of this gradual build-up towards the interesting part of the content, starting as early as possible with the stuff that motivates everyone to pay attention. That might mean you get a violent reaction, but that's a good thing. So, how do you actually do that? So, this is the bird's eye view of one of the uh Figma slides vision decks and the spicy stuff or the bits that are good and interesting are the yellow and pink slides.
8:27 Speaker 1 These are the ones that go into key concepts as well as the great product thinking and thinking around differentiation. So one of the things that I like to do is think of it as the stack, right? And say, okay, when do you actually get to the good stuff? Is it within the first 20% of the deck or the first five minutes of a review? That's a gut check I like to do. And I like I do I like to ask my PMs to do it, and this sounds really simple, but you'd be surprised how many decks actually are far more top-heavy with the context in the background, which ends up setting this meeting up for failure. There are other subtle ways to do this as well. Uh take, for example, this typical title card, right? Uh that grounds you in where you are in the deck. It might say something like audience, or maybe more dramatically, who is our audience, right?
9:14 Speaker 1 But it's so much nicer if they can just cut to the chase and again get to the punchline because people don't like having to guess. And having title cards with a point of view means that people pay attention up front. And if you're like me, right, and you get distracted, you can quickly scan and glean the important parts and immediately engage in a discussion. And sometimes though, you don't know what's spicy. You don't know where you should be spending the time having the discussion. And so one ritual that we like to do in Figma is actually have what we call this alignment widget where we solicit uh everyone's uh opinions and see where the misalignment might be so that a PM is spending the time honing in on the areas where there's the most disconnect so that we can discuss there. So that's our first tip, which is to tell your PMs not to spend so much time building up context because you're going to bore everyone.
10:07 Speaker 1 Because even though it's the right thing to do, actually a lot of people just don't even care. So rather tell your PMs to get to the punchline first to get the violent reactions early.
10:19 Speaker 0 The next thing that PMs often try and do is to cover all of their bases. When they're pulling together a deck or a doc, they're thinking about how can they ensure that each section is chalk full of new information. But at the end of the day, if you're saying everything, chances are what everyone else is hearing is kind of nothing. And so we think that rather than covering all your bases, what you should actually be coaching PMs to do is to make a meme and go internally viral within the company. So let's talk a little bit about what this looks like. The original Figma Slides Vision Deck had two memes. The first was in the title itself.
11:24 Speaker 0 But rather, in order to create a groundswell for this bottoms-up initiative in order to put an entirely net new product on our roadmap, it was really important to me that someone across the company, regardless of if they were a very tenured engineer or a new hire on their first day of work, heard this term and immediately wanted to learn more. The term took off like wildfire within the company. The animation sync became the flanimation sync, the layout work stream became the flay out work stream, and when folks would hop onto Zoom on a Friday afternoon, they would promptly wish everyone a happy fly day.
12:18 Speaker 0 When we actually went to market in June, Twitter blew up. And even though we went to market with a pretty normal product, this almost emotional and irrational attachment that folks felt to this very quirky word meant that Twitter was blowing up. There were thousands of impressions of people who were stoked to try this product because of this like kind of kooky name. And so as you're thinking about how to build a meme and go internally viral with your idea, think about how you can create an internal brand and something that folks can really latch on to.
14:22 Speaker 1 Alright, so at some point later in the meeting, let's say 17 minutes in, someone will ask a question that's unexpected. And despite the PM asking that they like to field all questions at the end, of course, people like me chime in anyway and ask a question that about something I'm wondering about. And a classic PM response is to acknowledge the great question and then the ab absence of an immediate answer to say they'll circle back, right? You'll take an action item. And here too, there's some pretty subtle ways that trust can get degraded. While it's nice to be told that it's a great question, it can always be disappointing to hear that maybe it's the first time you're you've thought about this very basic question. Or often people promise to circle back at a later time frame, right?
15:08 Speaker 1 And as an exec, my immediate thought is to want that answer faster. Waiting a week to get an answer feels extremely slow and frustrating. And so the advice here is instead of always just circling back and following up later, which is probably what a lot of PMs do, tell your PMs that they should be unafraid to at least share their gut. And so often, you know, we live in a world where people don't have the perfect information and therefore they don't share their assumptions during a meeting, right? And so we end up waiting until a week after only to find out that we had very different assumptions in mind, and now you burned a week and you're back to square one. So if instead during the meeting you at least shared a rough idea of your thinking, even if it's imperfect, you can get a rough sense of where everyone is at, whether people are on the same page, and knowing that early uh is helpful because you can immediately get to the bottom of the misalignment versus waiting a week.
16:06 Speaker 1 Now, when I was at Uber, our chief product officer at the time, Jeff Holden called this cutting out the white space. He viewed the executive job to remove all this arbitrary amounts of time that people had to wait for others to make progress. And now I know that often it's really hard to coax an answer like that out of uh people sometimes. Right? A PM might want to first run an experiment, a study or a sprint before giving an answer. And Jeff had a trick uh which I really like where he posed it more as a thought experiment. He'd tell us to fast forward to that day when the experiment is over, when that sprint is done. And he asked what we thought we'd see at that point. And I like that framing a lot because it kind of lowers the stakes. We all know we're guessing, and uh it created much more of a safe space to share some rough thinking as part of that, knowing and get us aligned much faster.
16:58 Speaker 1 So, in short, instead of telling your PMs to circle back, take the action item if they're unsure, encourage them to share their gut, even if the rough thinking is rough to save everyone so much time and ultimately build alignment much faster.
17:15 Speaker 0 Now, as a PM gets towards the end of their presentation and only has a few minutes on the clock, a common tactic that folks employ is to only talk about the really positive things. Only talk about all the reasons that this would be an exciting investment, like this outdoes all the others and more. But chances are if you're trying to go ahead and only talk about the good things, you might actually have an executive who either asks you or in their head is thinking, what are the downsides. And in Exec speak, they're actually wondering if you've thought about this deeply, or worse, are you hiding something?
18:04 Speaker 0 The trust kind of breaks. And so while it's really important to treat these forums as a place where you're making a big bold pitch, perhaps even more important is to treat your idea with a little bit of skepticism. So the official Flides Vision pitch, which happened in Febru last year, was actually preceded by two other product review like forums. The first was Maker Week, which is our internal hackathon at Figma. This was the forum where I initially tried to get buy-in for the idea.
18:53 Speaker 0 We actually structured the demo just like a product review, where the audience was the entire company. And what was so amazing was that the chat absolutely blew up. There were folks from around the company like Dylan who had previously expressed skepticism about this idea, who were so stoked in the moment. And I thought that by creating this totally hype presentation by creating an entirely net new product in just a few days, we had done it. We had gone ahead and created buy-in to go ahead with this idea. I was shocked afterwards when I asked if we had the green light and was promptly met with a no. And that a Zoom pitch doesn't really do it in terms of getting the buy-in you need to move something forward.
19:41 Speaker 0 And so, you know, recalculated, readjusted, and moved into a more formal product review setting where we reviewed the competitive landscape. We talked about why and how Figma should win in the storytelling space. How we were excited to build a tool that had the visual control of Figma and the interactive storytelling mechanisms of Fig Jam. And how no other player in the market satisfied all the core needs. As you can see, Flides had all these green boxes. And in my mind, I was like, okay, someone's gonna look at this chart and be like, obviously, we must make this investment. But at the end of the day, this was kind of stacking the cards. And even though there were good ideas in this deck, the answer to do we have a green light was still kind of a no.
20:32 Speaker 0 And so that moves us to the official vision pitch, which we've been talking through today. And in this vision pitch, it was not just a big bold bit pitch, but also an area where we treated the deck with a little bit of skepticism, where we took the time to go out and spend weeks talking to users, understanding their pain points. And a few tactical things that we did in this deck was that I basically structured it such that every pain point was immediately followed by a solution and then a proof point showing why this hypothesis that we had was either a great idea or maybe a not so great one. The second thing was for areas where we were pretty skeptical about which path to go down, it's actually to your benefit to be really honest about this.
21:22 Speaker 0 And so for example, one of the most kind of tedious or trying questions for Figma slides was thinking about how we would build a tool that allowed both non-designers and designers to have their preferred toolkit. And we laid out all these different variations. The last thing we did was akin to what Yuki was talking about earlier, which was basically preempt the spice and make sure that you actually do have the answers for all the spicy questions that might be in your executives' heads, and prove that you've done the work and the homework in order to have an answer there. And so big bold pitches are super important, but so is a healthy dose of skepticism.
22:07 Speaker 1 Alright, so today we covered all the things that you might be told as a PM, or even leaders in the room have been telling their PMs about how to approach reviews. And all of these on the surface are absolutely the right thing to do. But in practice, so much of this advice can be misapplied. And sometimes what seems wrong is actually more effective. And I think it comes down to the fact that in a review, all the stakeholders are ultimately human beings who have short attention spans, who get easily distracted, are context switching, and need to be guided along, and who are ultimately emotional creatures who are swayed by how the review makes them feel. And so the best PMs know this, the best PMs take advantage of this. And that's not all to say that we should we shouldn't focus on making decisions.
22:54 Speaker 1 We absolutely should should. But really winning trust is what allows you to make decisions faster in the long run.
23:02 Speaker 0 Now let's talk about the biggest myth of all.
24:25 Speaker 1 Um and about the vision, but we weren't sure that now is the right time to launch a new product given that we had all these other priorities. And so Mihika knew this. And so what she tried to do was just make it more real for everyone to go from a cool idea that a few people were exploring to an actual new product that we were willing to put the company behind. And so one opportunity she found was for our sales kickoff, which is kind of our internal conference for sales and marketing and our biggest internal event of the year. What if the keynote used Flights? And needless to say, the idea to have this keynote a completely unproven product was not to IT's liking, but we pushed through anyway. And the product was barely ready, and there are a lot of bugs leading up to it.
25:11 Speaker 1 Um but the day of was perfect a perfect run. And here is Chris, our CTO and I delivering uh the resulting presentation. Apparently, I always wear blue sweaters on stage. And at the very end of the presentation, we had this huge reveal where the deck we had been presenting in was made in Flides all along. And so while the initial product review bought the trust to explore the idea further, getting the product to a point where it could actually be used in this way brought the trust to bring it to market.
25:43 Speaker 0 Ultimately, five months later at config, Flides did launch as the hero number four at the event. And folks loved it. And so next time you're thinking about how to move an idea forward, remember that it's the trust that will carry you all the way, not just the decisions. Last but not least, if the only thing you were impressed by today was these slick animations that you are looking to integrate into your next product review, we have gone ahead and published the deck on Figma Community. It's open sourced at this link, so you can go ahead and remix it, take it to your liking, and build your own tips for how to bit how to do the product review right.
26:32 Speaker 0 Thank you so much for listening.
26:35 Speaker 1 Thank y'all.
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