Vision, Craft & Deep Care

Mihika Kapoor

Product Manager, Figma

ZERO-TO-ONE

Core Principle

Your Scope Is The World

"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

pillars of vision

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.

Based on Mihika Kapoor's episode on Lenny's Podcast. All ideas on this page are from the episode.Watch on YouTube Follow @mihikapoor on X

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