Inside Figma's PM team: transparency, reflection, and shared process
Product management looks different at every company, but the role always involves coordinating across disciplines. At Figma, the PM team tries to make that coordination more open by building trust and reflection into its regular rituals. The team’s approach, shared in a livestream and blog posts, centers on structured brainstorms, candid stand-ups, and recurring retros.
The core practices rest on a few pillars: including cross-functional partners early, allowing for personal context in meetings, and creating a culture where it's safe to admit uncertainty.
Structured brainstorming for better alignment
Brainstorms at Figma are meant to pull in ideas from across teams, but the PMs found that unlocking good ideas requires exercises that force alignment and prioritization. Without clear decision points, brainstorming sessions can produce creative output that never turns into action.
Product Manager Kelsey Whelan uses a few exercises to help teams move from raw ideas toward shared direction.
Buy a Feature
Prioritization is central to a PM’s job, especially when feedback comes in from users and internal teams. The “Buy a Feature” exercise maps priorities to time and resources instead of just producing a ranked list. Each participant receives a set amount of currency—Whelan prints bills featuring her team members—and "spends" that budget on various product ideas or focus areas within a set time limit.
The exercise "gives you a sense of how much people would invest in an area, not just a stack-rank list," according to Whelan.
Alignment scale
The team also uses alignment scales to surface convictions about a product direction. Teammates start by drafting a statement or list of beliefs to guide the work. Each person then places their FigJam profile stamp somewhere on the scale and uses comments to discuss their positioning. This gives a quick visual read of where the team stands and allows quieter dissenters to register their views.
Stand-ups that go beyond status
Product teams at Figma use weekly stand-ups to keep track of work progress, but the PM group's own stand-up extends beyond feature status. VP of Product Yuhki Yamashita leads the weekly agenda with executive updates. After PMs share ad hoc contributions, each person answers three prompts in FigJam:
- Personal update. What’s something you’ve been thinking about in your personal life?
- Worried or excited about. Work-related or not, what are you concerned about or unsure of?
- Hard problems. What hard or interesting problem have you been noodling on?
The group then uses dot voting, stickers, or reactions to flag challenges that seem most important to solve or worth exploring in future sessions. Product Manager Bersabel Tadesse, who runs the format, says the prompts "provide a low stakes way to share hard problems early on, which encourages more collaboration throughout the product development process."
The practice is particularly valuable when a PM is the only one on their team, which is usually the case. For a remote group, the personal layer also helps rebuild the hallway conversations that would naturally happen in an office. Knowing what a teammate is managing at home, or that they're uneasy about a feature, gives others a chance to lend support early instead of letting concerns become blockers.
Retros on a regular cadence
Retrospectives give teams an intentional space to review what went well and what didn't. At Figma's PM team, retros happen on a fixed schedule rather than only after a project wraps.
"It's really healthy to reflect at a cadence," says Yamashita. That wasn't always the norm: he admits he felt overwhelmed with incoming work and didn't promote a culture of reflection until Tadesse joined and helped institute a retro every six weeks.
An effective retro does more than list successes and failures. It creates room for praise, recognition, and honest frustrations. Yamashita says retros are "a good forcing function for recognizing good work and airing out frustrations," since people often hold loose, unformed opinions without a place to share them.
In a fast-paced environment, it's tempting to move on to the next project without pausing. "That next thing is waiting for you without even time to reflect," he notes. But retros give the team the chance to extract meaningful insights and take action.
Yamashita lists three conditions for a good retro:
- Everyone’s voice is heard.
- The reflection is deep enough to extract meaningful insights.
- Action items are taken.
Choosing the right questions
A generic "start, stop, continue" template may not spark the most useful reflection. Yamashita recommends choosing targeted questions to create "lenses" for the discussion. Some examples the Figma team uses:
- Do we feel that we’re building the right things?
- Are we doing this in the best way possible?
- How effectively & efficiently are we making decisions?
- How well are we working with other functions?
- How strong has our PM culture been?
"Processes have to change, companies grow a lot, and what worked a year ago may no longer be working," Yamashita says. The point is to find what works well for a specific team—and to keep improving it continuously. The PM team has shared templates for brainstorms, alignment scales, and retros in the Figma community for other teams looking to adopt similar practices.
