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Lenny's Knowledge Sketch · Zero-to-One PM

Vision, Craft & Deep Care

Mihika Kapoor
Product Manager, Figma
ZERO-TO-ONE
Core Principle

Your Scope Is The World

INFINITE SCOPE
"Nothing should ever perceive as being out of bounds. Your scope is the world."
  • Don't limit yourself to the project you inherited
  • Step back, understand your company's vision and users
  • Find what fires you up within that ecosystem
  • You can found inside or found outright—both valid paths
Craft

How to Build a Compelling Vision

RESEARCH INSIGHTBEAUTIFUL DESIGNUNIFIED VISION
3
pillars of vision
1
unified artifact
use cases to find
  • Immerse in users: Research insights that let you feel what they feel
  • Cross-pollinate: Design, research, and engineering working together from day one (The Medici Effect)
  • Make it real: Prototype and design before green light—see to believe, see to feel
  • Communicate visually: Words fail; mocks, videos, testimonials prove your vision
FigJam's vision arcBrainstorms are democratic. Most meetings are one-way. What if we made every meeting as generative as a brainstorm? Pain → Solution → Proof Point, repeated.
Operations

How Insights Become Action

  • Recurring cadences: Weekly syncs with sales to hear what customers want
  • Share internally: Create artifacts (Loom videos, use case docs) that sales can evangelize
  • Prioritization signal: Customer insights inform roadmap—what goes up, what goes down
  • Store the overflow: Use Asana + Slack integration to capture early feedback you can't act on yet
  • Link vision to daily work: Every shipped feature ties back to the north star
The weekly grooming habit

Sales drops feedback → Slack Asana emoji reaction → Weekly task review. What's actionable now? What's too early? What's not feasible?

The evangelist motion

Mihika walked sales through her personal FigJam usage. They made a Loom. Customers saw brainstorms, retros, planning, sketches, parties—infinite use cases unlocked.

Foundation

Deep Care as Fuel

  • When two people disagree on strategy, they have different assumptions—not different facts
  • Make assumptions visible. Align on them. Buy-in follows.
  • Care deeply = people care deeply. You can sense when a leader doesn't care about what they're building
  • If you don't love the current project, expand your lens: your scope is the world, not the sprint
Julie Zhu's wisdomDisagreements stem from different assumptions. Make them explicit. Then belief—and passion—align naturally.
Contrarian

What Most PMs Get Wrong

I'm just a PM on this one project.INSTEAD →Your scope is the world. Find what you're passionate about within your company and beyond.
Write a deck, get buy-in, ship.INSTEAD →Prototype and design before the pitch. People need to see and feel it, not read about it.
Collect feedback, add it to the roadmap.INSTEAD →Operationalize insights: create signal, evangelize findings, store what's early, prioritize ruthlessly.
You need to be good at everything PMs "should" do.INSTEAD →Lean hard into your spikes. Be a hybrid (design + engineering, or left-brain + right-brain). Fill gaps with your team.
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