Building 0 to 1 Products and the Inside Story of Figma Slides

While working on FigJam, Mihika saw Figma employees use it for presentations because it made discussion more participatory. Other teams wanted the polish of Figma, so she saw an opportunity to combine visual quality with interactive feedback. A Maker Week prototype reused the Figma editor and sent presentations into FigJam, where viewers could add notes and vote.

Mihika argues that a prototype can make an abstract idea easier to evaluate than a deck of claims. After the Maker Week demo drew company-wide interest, the team still had to show how the product could change how people work. In a one-month Vision Sprint, research, design, and engineering ran together, and prototypes made up about 90% of the vision deck.

Early research suggested people blamed themselves when presentations failed to produce useful discussion. When users saw concepts such as polls and alignment scales, they could imagine the tool helping quieter colleagues contribute and making disagreements visible. Mihika framed Slides around the presentation itself, an overlooked part of the experience, as well as the work of creating slides.

Mihika says early teammates should join because they believe in the idea, and that sharing prototypes and vision work helps attract more supporters. To demonstrate progress, the team used Figma Slides for an internal company presentation, which also pushed the product through demanding real-world use. After launch, they tracked detailed usage data and focused first on learning where traction appeared before setting concrete growth goals.

Mihika's advice is to find people with compatible working styles, invite others into development, build a recognizable identity, and pair optimism with action. She describes the project as a cycle of encouraging milestones followed by more work, and says a delay does not necessarily mean rejection. For day-to-day product work, her team uses designs with context alongside them as the source of truth, supported by broader strategy documents, because PRDs can become outdated or overly prescriptive.