Inside How Figma Builds AI Products

Yamashita says PMs can give more useful design feedback by examining the constraints behind a design, such as a design system or technical feasibility. He encourages PMs to discuss users’ feelings, goals, and journeys, while designers can benefit from understanding PMs’ goals and tradeoffs. At Figma, craft shows up in attention to detail and a natural interest in improving the user experience; teams evaluate PMs on whether they set and meet meaningful goals, even when those goals are hard to measure.

Yamashita recommends explaining a product’s rationale in a way that makes sense to someone outside the company, by tracing the chain of reasons behind the work and adapting the story to the audience. He describes FigJam’s origins in pandemic-era uses of Figma for meetings and social activities, including the observation that two-thirds of Figma’s weekly active users were non-designers. The team leaned into fun before FigJam’s 2021 beta, adding features such as cursor chat and reactions to make workplace collaboration more engaging.

A Figma AI hackathon produced Jambot, which lets people transform and iterate on sticky notes visually. Yamashita says the team also saw concrete FigJam needs: helping people start a meeting with a template, grouping brainstorm ideas into themes, and summarizing outcomes and next steps. PMs had to take ownership of output quality through trial and error with prompts, internal dogfooding, and feedback from alpha users. The launch bundled several features and was judged by whether people could facilitate meetings and get work done, with retention as a secondary signal.

Yamashita describes balancing power and simplicity by giving design system creators more control while making components easy for others to use; FigJam favors sensible defaults and contextual controls. He says non-designers can have a collaborative first experience by following a designer through a file, watching changes in real time, or commenting on a prototype. For learning, he recommends modifying an existing file and getting help from someone in it. At Figma, hiring makers and holding Maker Week, where people create product ideas or craft projects, helps preserve a hands-on culture as the company grows.