Mihika Kapoor
Product manager (design, engineering and PM hybrid) at Figma, early PM on FigJam
Where to hear and read about Mihika Kapoor1 episode or test
Mihika Kapoor is a design, engineering and PM hybrid at Figma who was an early PM on FigJam and now leads a new product due in June. The thing most worth learning from her is how she turns a small idea into a company-wide bet: put a vision people can see in front of them, hold conviction openly, and keep pitching until colleagues carry the idea for you.
you don't hear the word no, or at the very least, you translate it into a not yet.
Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product, Figma)
Mihika Kapoor: the story and the lessons
1Mihika Kapoor's path from CS and design to Figma
Kapoor chose product management to straddle design and engineering. She majored in CS and minored in visual arts, missed design as an engineer and missed the technical side as a designer. PM let her touch more of the product development cycle.
She says her style does not tick every box and that she is bad at plenty of things PMs are expected to be great at. Her advice is to lean into your spikes and keep a growth mindset for the rest.
Before Figma she founded Design Nation and ran launches at Meta. Design Nation is a nonprofit that opens design education to undergraduates. At Meta she ran commerce and creator launches, then became an early PM on FigJam.
When Lenny asked on Twitter who the best PMs people had worked with were, she was the most mentioned.
Kapoor rebuilt Design Nation from scratch when its funding fell through. She had planned to host the conference inside an existing Princeton organization, but that group doubted the business value of design. She was left with no money or connections.
She saw that design was becoming a differentiator at companies like Airbnb and Pinterest while Princeton had no product design curriculum. She cold emailed executives from her .edu address and shifted priorities from speakers to fundraising to a polished landing page that made a scrappy student group look legit. It later drew speakers like Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and students from around the world.
2How Kapoor pitched a new product into existence at Figma
Kapoor's current product came out of conversations while pitching FigJam. A set of conversations about FigJam surfaced a gap. She tied the idea to Figma's push from designers to the whole product development cycle.
Her three steps were the right idea, buy-in through vision, then spreading it like wildfire. She says the idea needs to stay anchored on the broader company goal, not only on what you are working on now.
Kapoor pitched three times before the idea stuck. Early ad hoc pitches got a polite maybe. The second, at a PM offsite on next year's strategy, got momentum but not really. The third, at the Maker Week hackathon, led to the product.
She asked herself what she was seeing that others were not, and calls this a reality distortion field. Her rule is to treat every no as a not yet.
She asked colleagues one by one to build with her. Lacking design and engineering skills, she built conviction months before Maker Week, then walked around the New York office asking each person to work on it with her.
Eventually someone said yes, which built momentum and grew the team. She says thinking hackathons are only for engineers is one of the biggest mistakes.
Kapoor faked a new surface with a two-line code change. For a whole new product built in one hackathon week, she swapped the FigJam icon in the file browser for the new product's icon. A real new entry point would have been far too much work.
Her point is to decide where you take the hit on quality and where you push to feel believable. On demo day she switched between hosting and demoing, with a wardrobe change in between.
Demo day turned colleagues into evangelists. Presenting at Maker Week meant teammates, not just Kapoor, began pushing the idea. She was hosting the virtual hackathon while pushing her idea bottom up, and kept SF, New York and London included.
In her words, "it becomes not just you evangelizing the idea, but your teammates and your colleagues and your peers evangelizing the idea."
She got a rough demo into the Sales Kickoff keynote. In January she insisted the CTO and CPO include a demo in the Sales Kickoff keynote. Only about 10 people outside the team used the product, and it had bugs every day.
The visibility brought product insights and gave the whole company energy to ship. She pushes products into big forums like Maker Week, Sales Kickoff and CONFIG even before they merit it.
Kapoor opens early builds to colleagues on staging. Her first Figma project, sections in FigJam, was told it could not launch after a week on staging. She treats that feedback as a gift that helps the product mature.
When someone's feedback is implemented, they feel they shaped the product, which builds investment across the company.
She fits the hype to each product's own brand. FigJam is cheeky and friend-like, so its first anniversary became a birthday party. New features were hidden as birthday presents in an Easter egg hunt.
She says hype for FigJam is incredibly different from hype for Figma, and that users should feel the work was built to make them happy.
3How Kapoor builds vision and conviction
Kapoor builds vision as one shared artifact, not a linear handoff. She avoids the chain of research readout, design crit and product review, where each person owns only their own deliverable. Research, design and engineering make one combined artifact together.
Research lets you feel what the user feels, prototypes show the future and engineering keeps it achievable. FigJam's vision started from one proof point, that brainstorms are democratic, and aimed to make every meeting work that way.
Her vision decks repeat pain point, solution and proof point. Rather than listing pain points, then solutions, then a timeline, she loops the three and puts a user testimonial on top of a prototype or mock.
Figma designs and prototypes before a project gets a green light, because words only get you so far.
She puts an opinion out early, then holds it loosely. Her CPO advised going into research with at least an A- idea, so learning moves it to A+ and it never sits at a B. A wrong opinion still gives people something to react to.
She notes younger PMs often doubt themselves against ten-year colleagues and wait to gather every insight first. She is ready to kill her darlings when users say otherwise.
Kapoor asks non-users why they don't use the product. She asks friends in tech about Figma whenever they catch up. Asking former teammates why they skipped FigJam led to a placeholder experience that helped non-designers start on the canvas.
Adoption depends on marketing and perception as well as product quality, so non-user conversations are often the most insightful.
She runs a recurring sync with sales to turn insights into roadmap. She met the FigJam sales team on a cadence to hear what they heard and share what was coming. Their input set what to prioritize or drop.
A Loom of her own weekend FigJam use was sent to customers by sales. A Slack emoji turns any feedback into an Asana task, groomed weekly.
4How Kapoor leads and builds team culture
Kapoor labels her confidence so quiet teammates still speak up. Her designer first wondered why she had so many opinions. She now says things like "medium confidence, I defer to you", or marks something as a hypothesis or as having no opinion.
She tells every new teammate she is very direct and wants to hear disagreement. They now work closely, with a daily one-hour one-on-one for most of last year.
She asks for feedback first so directness runs both ways. She opens with "do you have feedback for me?" and takes it before giving hers, then acts on it fast to encourage the other person to do the same.
She says directness only works if it's two-way, and that feedback should not wait for a twice-yearly cycle.
She uses cheap rituals like Hot Seat and the Figgies to build trust. She started Hot Seat at the first post-pandemic PM offsite in March 2022, with fewer than 15 PMs. Each person gets two minutes, anyone can ask anything and they may decline. It later reached the exec team and new hires.
The Figgies, an Oscar-style ceremony for the product team, were built from Amazon trophies in about an hour. She argues connection makes a team durable when roadmaps change.
She asks each teammate how involved they want to be in decisions. Some engineers want a solution handed to them, while others cannot feel passion for what they did not shape. She asks new engineers directly.
With four options, she goes in with a leading view and invites pushback. Her phrase is "catering to the individual, as opposed to the average".
Kapoor names her own blind spots and hires to cover them. High conviction can look like pushing what she believes, so she keeps showing user proof points. Her scrappiness means last-minute work, such as editing a review deck minutes before presenting or working until 3 AM.
Her view is that individuals should be spiky and the team well-rounded, so as a team scales, leaders must know their blind spots and hire for them.
Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product, Figma)
Shows how to take a new product idea from 0 to 1 inside a large company: build a vision with users and teammates, show it in prototypes, build conviction and hype, and spread it company-wide. It matters because the approach took her pitch from three tries, to a Maker Week hackathon, to a product launching at Figma's Config.
Kapoor chose product management to straddle design and engineering. She majored in CS and minored in visual arts, missed design as an engineer and missed the technical side as a designer. PM let her touch more of the product development cycle.
She says her style does not tick every box and that she is bad at plenty of things PMs are expected to be great at. Her advice is to lean into your spikes and keep a growth mindset for the rest.
Before Figma she founded Design Nation and ran launches at Meta. Design Nation is a nonprofit that opens design education to undergraduates. At Meta she ran commerce and creator launches, then became an early PM on FigJam.
When Lenny asked on Twitter who the best PMs people had worked with were, she was the most mentioned.
Kapoor rebuilt Design Nation from scratch when its funding fell through. She had planned to host the conference inside an existing Princeton organization, but that group doubted the business value of design. She was left with no money or connections.
She saw that design was becoming a differentiator at companies like Airbnb and Pinterest while Princeton had no product design curriculum. She cold emailed executives from her .edu address and shifted priorities from speakers to fundraising to a polished landing page that made a scrappy student group look legit. It later drew speakers like Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and students from around the world.
Kapoor's current product came out of conversations while pitching FigJam. A set of conversations about FigJam surfaced a gap. She tied the idea to Figma's push from designers to the whole product development cycle.
Her three steps were the right idea, buy-in through vision, then spreading it like wildfire. She says the idea needs to stay anchored on the broader company goal, not only on what you are working on now.
Kapoor pitched three times before the idea stuck. Early ad hoc pitches got a polite maybe. The second, at a PM offsite on next year's strategy, got momentum but not really. The third, at the Maker Week hackathon, led to the product.
She asked herself what she was seeing that others were not, and calls this a reality distortion field. Her rule is to treat every no as a not yet.
She asked colleagues one by one to build with her. Lacking design and engineering skills, she built conviction months before Maker Week, then walked around the New York office asking each person to work on it with her.
Eventually someone said yes, which built momentum and grew the team. She says thinking hackathons are only for engineers is one of the biggest mistakes.
Kapoor faked a new surface with a two-line code change. For a whole new product built in one hackathon week, she swapped the FigJam icon in the file browser for the new product's icon. A real new entry point would have been far too much work.
Her point is to decide where you take the hit on quality and where you push to feel believable. On demo day she switched between hosting and demoing, with a wardrobe change in between.
Demo day turned colleagues into evangelists. Presenting at Maker Week meant teammates, not just Kapoor, began pushing the idea. She was hosting the virtual hackathon while pushing her idea bottom up, and kept SF, New York and London included.
In her words, "it becomes not just you evangelizing the idea, but your teammates and your colleagues and your peers evangelizing the idea."
She got a rough demo into the Sales Kickoff keynote. In January she insisted the CTO and CPO include a demo in the Sales Kickoff keynote. Only about 10 people outside the team used the product, and it had bugs every day.
The visibility brought product insights and gave the whole company energy to ship. She pushes products into big forums like Maker Week, Sales Kickoff and CONFIG even before they merit it.
Kapoor opens early builds to colleagues on staging. Her first Figma project, sections in FigJam, was told it could not launch after a week on staging. She treats that feedback as a gift that helps the product mature.
When someone's feedback is implemented, they feel they shaped the product, which builds investment across the company.
She fits the hype to each product's own brand. FigJam is cheeky and friend-like, so its first anniversary became a birthday party. New features were hidden as birthday presents in an Easter egg hunt.
She says hype for FigJam is incredibly different from hype for Figma, and that users should feel the work was built to make them happy.
Kapoor builds vision as one shared artifact, not a linear handoff. She avoids the chain of research readout, design crit and product review, where each person owns only their own deliverable. Research, design and engineering make one combined artifact together.
Research lets you feel what the user feels, prototypes show the future and engineering keeps it achievable. FigJam's vision started from one proof point, that brainstorms are democratic, and aimed to make every meeting work that way.
Her vision decks repeat pain point, solution and proof point. Rather than listing pain points, then solutions, then a timeline, she loops the three and puts a user testimonial on top of a prototype or mock.
Figma designs and prototypes before a project gets a green light, because words only get you so far.
She puts an opinion out early, then holds it loosely. Her CPO advised going into research with at least an A- idea, so learning moves it to A+ and it never sits at a B. A wrong opinion still gives people something to react to.
She notes younger PMs often doubt themselves against ten-year colleagues and wait to gather every insight first. She is ready to kill her darlings when users say otherwise.
Kapoor asks non-users why they don't use the product. She asks friends in tech about Figma whenever they catch up. Asking former teammates why they skipped FigJam led to a placeholder experience that helped non-designers start on the canvas.
Adoption depends on marketing and perception as well as product quality, so non-user conversations are often the most insightful.
She runs a recurring sync with sales to turn insights into roadmap. She met the FigJam sales team on a cadence to hear what they heard and share what was coming. Their input set what to prioritize or drop.
A Loom of her own weekend FigJam use was sent to customers by sales. A Slack emoji turns any feedback into an Asana task, groomed weekly.
Kapoor labels her confidence so quiet teammates still speak up. Her designer first wondered why she had so many opinions. She now says things like "medium confidence, I defer to you", or marks something as a hypothesis or as having no opinion.
She tells every new teammate she is very direct and wants to hear disagreement. They now work closely, with a daily one-hour one-on-one for most of last year.
She asks for feedback first so directness runs both ways. She opens with "do you have feedback for me?" and takes it before giving hers, then acts on it fast to encourage the other person to do the same.
She says directness only works if it's two-way, and that feedback should not wait for a twice-yearly cycle.
She uses cheap rituals like Hot Seat and the Figgies to build trust. She started Hot Seat at the first post-pandemic PM offsite in March 2022, with fewer than 15 PMs. Each person gets two minutes, anyone can ask anything and they may decline. It later reached the exec team and new hires.
The Figgies, an Oscar-style ceremony for the product team, were built from Amazon trophies in about an hour. She argues connection makes a team durable when roadmaps change.
She asks each teammate how involved they want to be in decisions. Some engineers want a solution handed to them, while others cannot feel passion for what they did not shape. She asks new engineers directly.
With four options, she goes in with a leading view and invites pushback. Her phrase is "catering to the individual, as opposed to the average".
Kapoor names her own blind spots and hires to cover them. High conviction can look like pushing what she believes, so she keeps showing user proof points. Her scrappiness means last-minute work, such as editing a review deck minutes before presenting or working until 3 AM.
Her view is that individuals should be spiky and the team well-rounded, so as a team scales, leaders must know their blind spots and hire for them.
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