My Dear Friends of Figma in All right good morning everyone so I’m Yuki the chief product officer at figma and in my role and over my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview a ton of different designers and product managers and during these interviews I would often ask this very simple question to.
Just tell me about a project that you’re particularly proud of really straightforward and most candidates go on to tell me the story of how they started with some foundational research that helped them find this really big problem and then they run this big brainstorm session to figure out ways to solve this problem.
Often with a lot of colorful stickies and then they sketch out some Concepts and they all culminates in this wonderful prototype and it’s such a satisfying story hearing this journey of a product going from conception all the way to completion but here’s the thing I almost never believe it because I know.
That products don’t get built that way that pillows products don’t follow this clean and linear and picture-perfect process the reality is so much Messier but instead of embracing this reality we’re often taught that there is this right way of building things that there is this right order to do things.
And I’ll give you an example of this as early product managers and designers are often told that the best way to build products is to actually start with a problem statement and then to think about Solutions and in theory this makes a lot of sense because you know if you come up with a really cool idea that doesn’t actually.
Solve a problem well then why build it at all and this is why being solution first is considered a cardinal sin but I’ll tell you a dirty little secret which is that in my time at companies like YouTube Uber and now figma most products I worked on actually started with the solution not the.
Problem that’s the very first step and you might find that surprising so I’m going to take it behind the scenes on how products actually get built at some of these companies so back in 2016 I worked at Uber and at the time Uber worked more like a taxi meter you call it the car uh it picked you up and then when you got off it’s.
When you were actually charged your price based on how far you’ve traveled how long the trip took and at the time the app looked more like this and the central call to oxygen was to set your pickup location right that was the very first step so one day a designer asked the question.
Well why is this the case right why if we were an assistant sitting right next to you helping you get a ride it’s the first question we would ask where are you would it not be where are you going and it led him to come up with this idea of destination first asking where you’re going as the very.
First step and as we thought about it it made a lot of sense and solved a lot of problems for writers that solved a problem because by knowing your destination up front Uber could compute a price up front and let you know how much it’s going to cost instead of having you resort to a lot of.
Complicated math or being really afraid of that receipt at the end of the ride and then for drivers it solves some problems too because sometimes writers send drivers to these really remote locations where they can’t get their next ride so Uber can be more Dynamic with its prices and if they’re going somewhere really far then maybe we can.
Make the price higher so that drivers are compensated accordingly all possible because we have the destination up front but when I was pitching this idea to the rest of the company I felt compelled to do it the right way which is to start with these problem statements and pretend like those are the things that generated this solution when in reality.
And in truth it was the intuitiveness and Clarity of the solution that rallied the entire company to fundamentally change its experience and business figma was another product that didn’t start with a problem statement Dylan and Evan co-founders of figma grew up on apps like Google Docs which are built in.
The browser which enabled real-time multiplayer editing and so it was obvious to them that design should work in the same way there wasn’t a designer asking to solve this problem around collaboration at the time and in fact in 2016 when figma first launched this was the common reaction right people saying if this is.
The future of design I’m changing careers people were really scared of collaboration back then but fast forward six years and multiplayer collaborative editing of design is considered an industry standard a necessity.
So both this example at figma and at Uber so that some of the best products actually do start and are born from an intuition around an idea a particular solution and yes it’s important to back out the problem but in my time at startups I found that you know you don’t get credit from your.
Users if you have a perfectly defined problem statement if you don’t also have an amazing solution and I would wager that I would rather start with a compelling solution than a compelling problem statement and despite our products being built out of sequence in this way we’re often taught that.
There is this right order of building things right and it caused me to ask well why is there this dissonance between what we’re taught and what actually happens in reality why do we have to pretend like we’re doing things the right way instead of following the natural course of the creative process and I think the answer is pretty simple.
Which is that design is really fundamentally changing but these theories these processes have not caught up and are stuck in the ways of the past and this fundamental change in design the way we build products that’s all it’s the way we work is that we live in a world where everything is always a work in progress where nothing.
Is ever done and in the old world of physical products mistakes really expensive so it made a lot of sense to have this rigorous linear process but over time products have become more digital they’ve become cheaper to build faster to iterate on.
And so as an example if you wanted to change the way the dashboard in a car is laid out well you could ship an update in a matter of minutes instead of having people stuck with a design for years and years and years and this Tesla dashboard is actually a constant work in progress in fact every.
Digital product is a work in progress where the design has never done the product is never done this has also changed the way we work in the old world we used to send around these files as attachments to get feedback from our peers but today we send links out and these links aren’t to static files they’re.
Actually Windows into the living work that is constantly evolving in real time and I’ve noticed this funny little phenomenon where when people actually see their work they actually put this work in progress whip indicator at the front of the title to indicate that the work isn’t done yet and this is also actually caused people.
To share their work earlier because all of a sudden everything is lower sticks you can send out a link and it can continue to iterate on it or if I’m writing a work in progress strategy doc I can share it but get not be locked into that strategy because I can continue to make it better and so in these ways apps like Google.
Docs and figma have enabled creators to share their work with their collaborators earlier which allows for a lot more spontaneity and fluidity in the process which is really amazing it’s also incredibly chaotic because it means that anyone can give you feedback at any moment in time.
It means that as someone giving feedback while you’re giving feedback on can change from underneath you and that feedback can be irrelevant the very next minute or you sign off on something as a stakeholder only to find that the key team has kept iterating and therefore they’re taking them significantly.
Different direction so we need new ways to navigate this chaotic but powerful world of work in progress and these old theories and processes just aren’t cutting it so how do you make progress in a work in progress world well I think there are three specific challenges in a work in progress world.
The first one is this question of when you review work when the work is always fundamentally changing and the second is the more broader question of how and when to give feedback when what you’re giving feedback on can constantly evolve and the last one is how do I know when you’re done how do I know when I’m ready.
To ship right when the work can be changed into the very last minute so I’m gonna dive into these three challenges and offer some tips and techniques around how I’ve navigated these the first is around when to review work so in my role I’m often wondering you know when should I review my team’s.
Work is it when we’re aligning on the problem aligning on the solution or when it’s ready for launch and in the ideal world work neatly graduates from one stage to the next there are these distinct moments where you can check in and ensure that over time they’re becoming much more confident in the product.
Direction but the reality looks more like this as time progresses it’s not the case that you’re more confident over time it’s much more tumultuous Journey and in this world nobody has any clue when to review the work maybe you’ve aligned on the problem but days later you decide to tweak the.
Problem statement maybe you’ve aligned on the solution but that doesn’t stop the team from iterating on the solution right and so what this has caused my team to do is actually wanting to review their work later and later later when they think they’re confident that they’ll iterate on it no longer but.
That’s a pretty dangerous game to play because if you’re reviewing at the very last minute and realize that people are not aligned well you’ve wasted a lot of time in contrast though I think that design crits have done a more successful job navigating this work in progress world design crits at figma happen every.
Tuesday and Thursday and designers bring their work in progress work and to have it critiqued by their peers but the significant thing is people bring in their work not because it’s in a particular state or stage of work but rather because it’s Tuesday or because it’s Thursday.
And I think this is the healthier way of working because even though it’s from time to time you might get some irrelevant feedback you’re getting this pulse on how people are feeling around your work right every single week opposed to waiting for that perfect moment which inevitably doesn’t exist.
So I think this is the future of reviews in a work in progress world that it’s much more effective to review work at a predictable Cadence no matter the state or stage of work rather than try to wait for that perfect moment because timing a review is just as hard as timing the market the next challenge I want to talk about.
Is giving feedback and there are a lot of challenges around this oftentimes a designer would send this a link out to their team to share work in progress work really early and in the beginning it’s really great because they’re getting some initial feedback and reactions from some of their teammates but very quickly it looks like this.
Right everyone’s opened your link and everyone feels like they have to leave their two cents in the file and you’re overwhelmed with this barrage of feedback and at Uber we called this phenomenon swoop and poop this idea that people especially important people can come in and just dump their feedback and then.
Leave with no consequences leaving the Creator to clean up after them and reply to each comment and resolve it and it’s a pretty devastating feeling especially when the feedback is maybe from someone like Travis kalanick the CEO of CEO of uber and every piece of feedback that I got from him gave me a little tiny little.
Heart attack and it caused me to stay up all night thinking about the perfect response to each of his comments instead of you know making progress on the underlying work not to suggest that Travis’s feedback was bad um but you get the idea I recently learned that the marketing team at figma has an interesting work.
Around around this feeling so the marketing team also shares a lot of work early work in progress work early and it often takes the form of things like blog posts and content and typically they would do this by sharing these Google Docs around and even though it’s early work people leave a lot of comments and all of a sudden you have.
This long list of comments that you have to individually resolve which is super stressful so instead what the team has started to do is actually take a screenshot of the work and paste it into fig Jam or whiteboarding product and people can leave feedback in the form of Post-its.
And stickers and highlights and annotations and the key difference here is that there isn’t an expectation that each piece of feedback is responded to and that by Design they have kind of this short shelf life and so something about this kind of feedback just fundamentally feels very.
Different from this official Google Docs comments that needs to be resolved and I think it’s much more appropriate for this stage of work but you often sometimes have this opposite problem which is that you want your feedback to stand out and not get lost in the sea of change.
At Uber this happened to me I was sharing this idea of destination first pretty early and one of the researchers pointed out this very critical problem in our approach that was pointed out by the team in Uber India and because the pro the the solution kept iterating and like we’re going through this process it was totally.
Unclear if we were ever gonna address the feedback or resolve it and next thing you know we’ve shipped the thing and we actually had to fix this problem after the fact weeks later and this is the kind of thing that we would love to have stood out and really be paid attention to and sometimes you just have to be.
Unnaturally forceful to make sure that this something is paid attention to in this way and so the team at HubSpot actually has come up with an interesting convention to enable this at HubSpot they come up came up with this idea of flash tags which are basically just hashtags that you put at.
The end of your feedback to indicate how important it is or in their words how willing to die on the hill you are for it so hashtag fii would mean that there was no Hill to die on just for your information hashtag suggestion means that there was in fact a hill scene but it wasn’t climbed so just take it or leave it.
#recommendation means they did climb the hill they breathe deeply thought about dying on it but came back down right and then hashtag plea which is they most definitively want to die on a hill and if you see this well you better be ready for a really rigorous debate right and I love the expressiveness of these flash tags and this example from.
HubSpot as well as the example from the marketing team using fig Jam show that the way you give feedback and the medium of feedback really matters and that if you want to influence work in progress work to form the feedback takes matters just as important as the feedback itself the last thing I want to talk about is.
Knowing when you’re ready to ship because it’s really tempting to keep iterating on the work right and get it perfect instead of actually shipping the thing and we like to imagine that there are these reviews at the very end where you’re going through every single detail and making sure the launch is going to be perfect.
But we know that the reality doesn’t work like this or if it did it would be too slow so you have to learn to let go a little bit and allow for imperfection to be out there and you’d be really surprised that oftentimes customers are not judging your product on at a singular moment in.
Time when it’s when it launches and rather expect your product to involve and you’d be also surprised to know that they want to be part of this Evolution Journey at Uber this is one of the ways in which we engaged Uber drivers we invited them to WhatsApp and talk and text with our drivers or with our or their employees.
And they really were excited to be part of this Evolution process of the product and that was the happiest of drivers who were involved in this program or at figma we would often get these tweets asking about participating in these beta programs or giving us a lot of ideas for for how to evolve our product in the hopes that they can influence our.
Roadmap and both the figma and Uber users they would much rather have this product that is constantly evolving rather than have a product that maybe is perfect out of the gate but never evolves so that’s my last tip which is to be less precious about what ships because there’s both an opportunity as well as.
An expectation that your product evolves after launch so this new world of constant work in progress is both chaotic and liberating at the same time chaotic because these all there aren’t these standard ways of working or processes to help navigate it but liberating because it.
Allows us to be more authentic to the true creative process so I hope today you learned a few tips around how to navigate this world but in truth I’m still confused at times or I still find this loss of control as things are always constantly changing around me so my journey around this is itself a work in progress.
And so this talk too is also work in progress and I hope to iterate on it out in the open I’ve posted it to the figma community and that’s my thinking around it evolves I hope to update this and it’s also open source so if you want to remix this and create your own tips please by all means do so and I’m really excited to evolve this thinking with you.
I hope you learned something new today and thank you so much for coming thank you
How do you make progress when the work is always in flux? What if some of the best features actually—gasp!—start with a …
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