Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
I asked on Twitter, who's the best product manager you've worked with? You were the most mentioned.

**Mihika Kapoor** (0:04)
My take is that your scope is the world. Nothing should ever perceive as being out of bounds.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:10)
VPR product at Figma told me Mihika is really great at creating a vision and getting people to see what she sees.

**Mihika Kapoor** (0:15)
We lean heavily into designing and prototyping even before a project gets a green light. If you and your team do your job correctly, what does the world look like?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:26)
Say somebody wants to make their culture more entrepreneurial, what does it take?

**Mihika Kapoor** (0:30)
We have this concept called MakerWeek, which is our internal hackathon, giving people the breathing space to see ahead into the horizon and be wildly ambitious.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:42)
Today, my guest is Mihika Kapoor. Mihika is a design engineering PM hybrid at Figma, where she was an early PM on FigJam and is now spearheading development of a new product that the company is gonna launch in June. She's known as the go-to person at Figma for leading new zero-to-one products. And as you'll hear in our conversation, is beloved by everybody that works with her. Prior to Figma, Mihika founded Design Nation, a national nonprofit that democratizes undergraduate student access to a design education and led several products and launches at Meta focused on commerce and creators. On this podcast, I bring on a lot of amazing senior product leaders, but there's so much we can learn from stellar on the ground product managers like Mihika. In our conversation, we drill into many of the skills that Mihika has cultivated that have contributed to her success, including how to develop a compelling vision, get buy-in for your ideas, how to develop conviction, empathy, the importance of culture and how to create a culture on your team and within the company, and also how to deal with the constant change that happens within successful organizations. We also spent a bunch of time on how to effectively bring new ideas in your company from zero to one to launch, including getting to a bunch of the stories behind some of Figma's most successful products and features and how many of them began at hackathons and maker weeks. Mihika is a truly special product manager and leader, and I feel fortunate to have had this chance to learn from her. We went quite long on this conversation, but honestly, this could have gone for another two hours. With that, I bring you Mihika Kapoor after a short word from our sponsors. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.
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Mihika, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.