Figma CPO on Building Product
Figma's Chief Product Officer, Yuhki Yamashita, revealed the company's PMs are expected to "champion the user's voice" by facilitating conversations between design, engineering, and users. This user-centric philosophy is being supercharged by an ecosystem of AI tools like FigGPT, which embeds GPT-style assistants directly into the design canvas to automate tasks like writing microcopy.
Yuhki Yamashita’s philosophy is deeply rooted in his own experience as a product manager at Uber, where he was an early adopter of Figma. Frustrated with the clunky process of sharing static design files, he saw how Figma's browser-based collaboration transformed the workflow, blurring the lines between product, design, and engineering. This focus on "multiplayer functionality" became a core tenet of Figma's strategy. Before joining Figma, Yamashita led major app redesigns for both riders and drivers at Uber and worked on product at Google for the YouTube iOS app and at Microsoft for Outlook.com. The emphasis on cross-functional collaboration is baked into the product itself. Yamashita notes that while people think of collaboration as multiple users editing a file simultaneously, for enterprise teams it's more about ensuring everyone is always working from the latest version, which Figma's URL-based system guarantees. AI tools are extending this collaborative vision, not replacing designers. Data from Adobe's 2024 "State of Creative Work" report showed that 78% of product designers use AI tools weekly, up from just 12% in 2022, with 84% reporting that it improved their process. Plugins like FigGPT, MagiCopy for AI text generation, and Automator for repetitive tasks are now part of a growing ecosystem. These tools are designed to handle tedious work, freeing up designers to focus more on user research and strategic thinking. Figma's own AI features, like "Make Design," aim to accelerate the journey from a text prompt to an interactive prototype. This allows for faster iteration and testing of ideas, reducing the friction between a PM's concept and a tangible user experience. Yamashita encourages his PMs to deeply engage with the user community, build relationships, and understand their problems firsthand. This "user love" is a key driver of Figma's product-led growth, turning passionate users into builders and advocates for the platform. For Yamashita, storytelling is a crucial PM skill. Since product managers don't typically write the code or create the final designs, their core job is to motivate the entire team by telling a compelling story about the problem they are solving for the user.
