A few months before Figma Slides launched in beta (to great fanfare) this summer at Config 2024, something unusual was happening behind the scenes: engineers from every corner of the company were clamoring to join this emerging project team. What started as a simple observation — users “hacking” the core Figma design canvas to create presentations — had transformed into the hottest internal initiative.
Behind this groundswell of enthusiasm was Mihika Kapoor, founding PM of Figma Slides (or “Flides” as she affectionately calls it). Her product intuition was already tested — she was an early PM on FigJam, Figma's successful whiteboarding tool, and had previously launched Creator Shops at Meta. And her product spidey senses were proven right when she found out 3.5 million Figma files had been turned into makeshift slide decks the year leading up to the launch.
“A lot of the existing players in this space either enabled solid slide design, or team-wide collaboration, but rarely both,” Kapoor says. “I saw an opportunity here for Figma to be the perfect blend of both.”
But even with her impressive track record and compelling user pain point, to win over leadership, she would need even more ammo. “Figma is powered by a philosophy that our CEO Dylan Field holds pretty strongly, which is you can’t just invest in a space because you think you can outdo the competition. You have to be able to show that your idea would truly elevate the way people are working,” Kapoor says. (In fact, Figma didn’t release its second product, FigJam, until five years after publicly launching Figma’s flagship design product.) To pull it off, Kapoor knew she would have to over-index on storytelling.
Kapoor's pitch and subsequent campaign to rally internal support proved so compelling that Figma's VP of Product, Sho Kuwamoto, called it “one of the best he's ever seen on what a product could become and why it would be differentiated.”
So what was Kapoor’s secret sauce? A carefully orchestrated parade of internal touchpoints to turn skeptics into champions and build unstoppable momentum for this bold, new product bet.
Figma Slides was a bottoms-up project that came to life via a series of internal viral moments.
On the arduous path from idea to yes, product folks face a series of dead-ends: resources are tight, engineering says it can’t be done, it gets booted from a one-year priority to a five-year one, etc. Perhaps the most chilling outcome of all is getting stuck in approval purgatory, where your idea may get a verbal thumbs-up from leadership, but nothing committal.
How can product folks avoid this limbo? In her retelling of the behind-the-scenes story of pitching Figma Slides, Kapoor unfurls her advice for getting your product idea to break through the noise. (And if you want more here, we highly recommend signing up for her upcoming Maven course, which examines these topics in even greater detail.)
In this deep dive, Kapoor reveals the five strategies she used to create the “viral moments” that turned even the biggest internal pessimists into advocates. With incisive storytelling and a little bit of internet humor, Kapoor’s tactics drive home why it’s so important for product leaders to get extra crisp around their product vision.
Whether you're a senior IC looking to drive a new initiative inside a BigCo or the first product hire at a startup trying to win over the founder, Kapoor’s playbook for turning Figma Slides from an idea into a company-wide movement offers invaluable lessons for anyone trying to get breakthrough ideas off the ground.
Five Proven Strategies to Get Your Idea to go Internally Viral
1. Add some drama to your demo
Let’s rewind the clock back to 2022. Kapoor had spent the previous year executing on FigJam, and was starting to brew up a new product idea. She was inspired by the interactive features users were loving in the new whiteboarding tool, and wanted to merge that with the visual fidelity of the core product.
Thinking of the millions of presentations she kept seeing pop up in Figma, she began informally pitching a slides product to leadership. However, the idea didn't initially get much traction. She received some head nods and murmurs of approval but no thunderous applause yet. “It was clear that words alone were getting me nowhere,” she says. “Especially in a see-to-believe culture like Figma.” Intent on making the idea larger than herself, she set her sights on making waves in front of the entire company. Maker Week, Figma’s internal hackathon, looked to be the perfect springboard. (For good reason too — past projects that have come out of Maker Week include Jambot and Figma’s entire widget platform.)
The first thing she did was approach her colleagues one by one, hoping to fortify the project with some muscle. “I walked around the NYC office asking every single person ‘Will you work on this thing with me?’ she says. “If one person says yes, you can use that to build momentum and assemble the early team.”
Once she finally managed to convince an engineer and a few other folks to come on board, they put their heads down and got to work on a scrappy demo they could present at the Maker Week showcase. “My advice for anyone going into a hackathon with an idea is not to be discouraged by the time constraints of a few days,” she says. Instead, lean into that restraint to focus on solving the most critical user problem, not obsessing over refined details. To prove just how barebones the demo was, the initial slides prototype:
- Took the Figma editor and added a carousel for a more slide-like feel
- Hacked together makeshift templates
- Leveraged FigJam for the presentation mode to demonstrate interactive feedback
The biggest myth is that hackathons are for engineers, but that isn’t true. Hackathons are for anyone who has an idea.
But what the demo lacked in last mile polish, it made up for in theatricality and storytelling. Kapoor took a gamble on a meta approach to the pitch. “We role-played as a PM who was late submitting their Hackathon project, and used Figma Slides in order to submit on time,” she says. “The Zoom chat immediately blew up.”
A clip from the Slides team's Maker Week pitch
But hackathons aren’t the only forums for PMs to present new ideas. As Kapoor reflects back on what made that moment so special, she condenses some of her learnings into tactics anyone can try for their first showcase:
- Find (or make) a forum for your idea. Company-wide events provide unparalleled exposure and visibility. For PMs inside larger companies, find a way to get involved in a cross-functional event. For PMs at smaller startups, that doesn’t mean you’re counted out. “If there isn’t already a company-wide forum that exists, make one,” she says.
- Fortune favors the bold. “It’s easy to be intimidated by large ideas or features, and wave them off as something that will take months, if not years, to build,” she says. “But people remember the idea more than the execution. Being bold and telling a powerful story is much more compelling than showcasing a polished product.”
- Lean into your playful side. Acting out skits isn’t everyone’s forte, but the more playful details you can add to your pitch, the more likely you will make an impression. To up the ante on her big reveal, Kapoor amped up the dramatics. “We dressed up in red carpet attire for our demo day, and then I switched into the role of a PM who was late for submitting their hackathon project,” she says. “I took inspiration from my first Figma hackathon, where a colleague of mine played both a developer and designer by throwing a hoodie on and off again to showcase a front-end project she created. Coming out of that hackathon, her idea is the one I remembered more than anything else.”
When it comes to presenting, the scale of the idea is more important than the execution. The stories, the pain points you talk about and the extent to which you truly lean into that playfulness will always be the thing that people remember.
2. Anchor around a vision
With the entire company now cheering on Figma Slides, you may think Kapoor would have gotten the official green light to start building out a team. But that’s not quite how it played out. Armed with the positive response she received at Maker Week, Kapoor then went on to pitch the executive team.
There was little precedent here, however. Most of Figma’s most recent products (like FigJam and DevMode,) were top-down bets, rather than bottoms-up pitches. With no formal pitch process in place for new ideas, Kapoor would have to face the blank whiteboard fearlessly. She delivered a second product review a few months after Maker Week to Field and Figma’s CPO Yuhki Yamashita. “I laid out the competitive landscape, stated why I thought Figma Slides could make a splash among all the existing players and ultimately painted an overly optimistic view of the market.” To her surprise, this backfired. “Only sharing the upside led to a lot of skepticism that this product could stand its ground,” she says.
When you’re sharing in company-wide forums, those are the moments you want to be overly optimistic, because hype is the thing that carries across the company. But any time you’re sharing in a small group forum, such as an executive team, you want to be incredibly real about what the risks are. Otherwise, you might degrade trust.
If you like Mihika Kapoor's advice for pitching 0-1 products, consider taking her course on Maven
Figma Slides wasn’t dead in the water, but Kapoor would have to change her approach to convince Figma’s leaders that her product could pass the smell test. Which brings us to Kapoor’s next strategy for virality: To build the intense emotional connection needed to fuel great product ideas, you must anchor your idea around a shared vision. “Vision is so powerful for a 0-1 project because it’s the constant amidst the changing chaos,” Kapoor says.
If you have a vision deck or document that folks are working towards and there’s alignment and excitement about that vision, any pivot along the way still feels like forward progress.
Conversely, it’s the teams without a vision deck that she sees spin out of whack. “Without a clear vision, every pivot feels like a step back. Teams might feel they wasted time marching in the wrong direction. However, with a clear north star, the reality is you’re always going to be working on a subset of your vision, so having something you’re tethered to that maps the grander vision ahead keeps morale and pace up.”
Crafting the vision deck
Pulling an idea out of your brain and onto the page can get messy (think whiteboards covered with sticky notes and incomprehensible scribbles). Fortunately, for the more left-brained among us, Kapoor says there is a methodical way to sprinkle in a little process here:
- Frontload the solution. Lead with where you are going, not how you got there. Opening with your solution immediately pulls stakeholders into the possibility of what could be, turning the rest of your pitch into evidence of your vision, rather than wasting time building up to it.
- Showcase your vision with mocks and prototypes. As Kapoor learned when pitching Figma Slides after the PM offsite, talk will only get you so far. Instead, showing the solution you are pitching through demos and prototypes lets execs experience your vision firsthand, making abstract concepts tangible and memorable.
- Speak directly to the end user. Get specific about who you are building for. Instead of talking about abstract market segments, Kapoor sprinkled in some of the imaginative role play she used for the hackathon to put the target user (startup founders) front and center. For example, to tee up a Slides feature that would allow meeting participants to “pin” a question to a particular slide to return to later (rather than interrupt the presentation), here’s how Kapoor framed the problem:
Her revised pitch passed with flying colors — Figma’s C-Suite was now on board.
3. Meme-ify your idea (seriously)
Right around the time Kapoor was pulling together her anchor vision deck, she made one simple, yet deliberate decision that would have an outsized impact on her product. “In January 2023, I added the term ‘Flides’ to my personal dictionary,” she says. “It’s a totally absurd name that you could not go to market with, and yet, this was the thing that made people feel the most irrationally attached to the project.”
The result was a domino effect of pure fun at work:
- The animation sync became the “flanimation” sync.
- The layout workstream became the “flayout” workstream.
It may feel random, but a big part of what made Figma Slides go internally viral was the fact that we called it ‘Flides.’
Anyone not taking memes seriously should take it up with Duolingo’s owl, which pulls in millions of views on TikTok. And Kapoor argues that this internet phenomenon isn’t just for amassing followers on social media. Bringing a little tongue-in-cheek humor to your shared Slack channels can also do wonders for making your product more visible.
“It was ultimately this meme that people were able to take and run with it,” she says. “That’s because being kooky humanizes your idea. It makes it easy for someone to bring it up in a Zoom chat, or with a Slack emoji.” The “Flides” meme became so popular that it sticks to Kapoor like glue. “To this day, people are pitching me on why Flides is a better name for this project,” she says.
On a tactical level, Kapoor offers up a few low-lift techniques to get your creative juices flowing:
- Give your project a code name. “Brand can be built in so many different ways. Think about code names for your project. Think about iconography — what visuals do you want to be synonymous with your project? Use that to inspire you,” she says.
- Apply the “double take test.” “If someone is getting an overview of all the initiatives going on at the company, will a new hire ask to learn more about your project? If you’re telling your mom about your day at work, is she asking to learn more about what you’re working on?” she says.
- Lean into your company’s communication tools. Make a custom Slack emoji — yes, seriously. “It will cause this interesting trickle-down effect. It starts with you reacting to every message with it. Pretty soon, your team will start using it, and then your company will. It’s a programmatic version of taking a project and getting it in front of the company asynchronously.”
If you haven’t already made a Slack emoji for the project you’re working on, I recommend doing it right now.
4. Turn company-wide meetings into your product team’s stage
By now, ‘Flides’ was picking up steam. Kapoor had assembled a scrappy team of go-getters and unblockers, and for months, it felt like the hottest ticket in town. “There were engineers begging their managers to get assigned to the team,” Kapoor says.
It felt that her idea was officially viral inside Figma, and she wanted to keep the momentum going. That meant increasing the amount of “airtime” Figma Slides would get in front of the whole company.
“In many industries outside of tech, there is a high importance on the concept of face time. But if I could pitch one thing it’s that airtime, not face time, is critical for product success,” she says. “The best way to do this is to rely on company-wide forums to advance your agenda.”
So when Kapoor got the news that Figma Slides wouldn’t be featured as one of the company’s spotlighted priorities for 2024, she was crushed. “Personally, I was really sad about this,” she says. “I felt that there was a lot of power and evidence to suggest that this was going to be a winning idea.”
It wasn’t that Figma’s leadership didn’t believe in the idea, she says. But there was extreme skepticism that the product would be ready in time for its mid-year user conference, Config.
“There was a widely perceived notion across the company that Figma Slides was a complex product that required a lot more baking time to complete,” Kapoor says. “Of course, from my perspective as the PM, I knew we were going to do everything necessary to get there in time.” Product managers reading this may be tickled — it’s usually the other way around. “There was this interesting disconnect where the Figma Slides team wanted to convince the executive team that we should accelerate the development time,” she says.
When you’re pushing your own idea, you need to be the one being irrationally ambitious with deadlines and pushing the pace on your team.
So she did what any PM worth her salt does after reaching a dead end, she pivoted. If Figma Slides couldn’t be presented as a top company priority, she would do the next best thing and hitch her wagon alongside the main priorities.
Again, leveraging the power of company-wide forums, Kapoor set her sights on Figma’s 2024 Sales Kickoff. “Every year, the entire sales and marketing orgs get together at an offsite location and talk about product priorities for the year,” she says. “Our CTO Kris Rasmussen and our CPO Yuhki Yamashita were going to deliver a product keynote on those priorities.”
She had another bold idea: What if that keynote presentation was made using Figma Slides?
Despite pushback from the tech team (after all, it was still an untested product) Rasmussen and Yamashita were game to try it.
But despite Kapoor’s optimism, with Sales Kickoff right around the corner, Figma Slides wasn’t exactly camera-ready. “The product was still buggy and rough around the edges,” she says. “The videos didn’t work. The speaker notes didn’t work. A lot of the features that Kris and Yuhki were going to be reliant on weren’t going to be ready until many weeks after the presentation.” That wasn’t going to cut it. “The entire team went on pause from their regular activities for two weeks to get this presentation in good shape.”
The show must go on, and despite not having a perfectly polished product, it was worth it for the movie-ending reveal Kapoor had in store. “The moment that Yuhki revealed to everyone that he was actually using Figma Slides to deliver the presentation blew everyone’s minds,” she says. “It definitely contributed to the internal hype.”
Looking back on everything that could’ve gone wrong that day, Kapoor reflects on the three pivotal things she did that went very right:
- Be irrationally optimistic. “You need to believe in timelines that no one else does in order for your vision to end up somewhere in the middle,” she says.
- Be persistent. “It takes a lot of work to get someone to use an unpolished product, even at a company like Figma where we use our own products pretty religiously,” she says. “Getting someone to use something that’s barely working, scraped together and requires 24/7 on-call assistance takes an insane amount of persistence.”
- Remember, the first reveal sets the tone. “This only becomes more true as you scale towards working at a larger and larger company. People will remember only a few meetings each year, and you can bet that first all hands will be one of those meetings,” she says.
You might think of your product reviews as your one-and-only stage. I’d like to push back on that. You should view every single all-hands as your product stage and as your opportunity to show your progress and push pace.
Not only did Figma Slides’ cinematic reveal keep the project top of mind for everyone in the company, it ended up changing the course of its fate. “Two weeks after Yuhki’s presentation, we got the green light to work towards a Config launch, something that wouldn’t have happened had we not pulled this off,” she says.
5. Bring your energy, not your script
If Figma Slides was the company’s hottest band of the year, then Config 2024 was Kapoor’s Coachella. In the final moment in Flides’ viral rollercoaster ride, Kapoor was officially getting the chance to debut her longtime vision on her company’s biggest stage: its annual keynote conference for product builders.
Kapoor was psyched. Not only had Figma Slides become a heavyweight inside her own company, but it was now going to get visibility and exposure alongside keynote speakers like Figma’s CEO Dylan Field and product experts like Linear’s Nan Yu (who, as it happens, delivered such a compelling presentation on org design that we published it on the Review.) She had managed to successfully drum up tons of internal momentum — but if Figma Slides flopped with customers, it would all be for naught.
The stakes rose even higher after her appearance on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, where a casual mention of a “secret product” set to be revealed at Config sparked unexpected buzz. Now, with anticipation building, everything hinged on Kapoor's upcoming keynote presentation.
But instead of preparing perfectly polished speaker notes to rely on, Kapoor took a hard left. “I actually found out the night before Config that I’d be presenting the entire Slides section of the presentation," Kapoor says. Speaker notes, and perfectly memorized speeches, were out of the question. But she would’ve ditched the polished prep work either way.
“I believe that speaker notes are the enemy,” she says. “It’s incredibly clear to someone in the audience when you’re using speaker notes versus when you’re not. In order to make things go viral, especially externally, you need to master the art of speaking for yourself as opposed to reading a script.”
Yes, she wants to pry these presentation crutches from your clutches. “Being on stage was my first perfect run-through, since I only found out the evening before that I was going to be speaking,” Kapoor says. “You have to learn to build the muscle of presenting on the fly, which means giving up prompts. At the end of the day, this will help you connect with your audience the most.”
Rather than memorizing an entire script, Kapoor encourages anyone presenting an idea to focus on the phrases that are a killer (in a good way) and kryptonite:
- Killer phrases: “These are the ones where after you say them, you pause, wait for questions (or applause), and then move forward. These are the ones that will resonate with people,” she says. “For me, it was ‘visual communication is the most powerful form of storytelling.’” She recommends having 1-2 sentences per presentation where you have these memorized, verbatim.
- Kryptonite phrases: “These are the phrases you keep stumbling over in rehearsal,” she says. Don’t waste time trying to memorize these word-for-word. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you know what these are, so you know to avoid them day of. Create a mental checklist in your head of the things you need to skip.”
She emphasizes that public speaking is a muscle, so patience and practice are both key.
Start with transitioning from speaker notes to bullet points on a slide. Then, try relying on the slide’s visual cues to signal the things you want to underscore. Bit by bit, you’ll be ready to present without a script.
Once again, the proof of Kapoor’s tips is in the pudding. “What was really cool is that after this keynote, Flides once again went viral. Only this time it wasn’t just internal. Externally, it was all over X.”
Newton's Law of Product: An Idea in Motion Stays in Motion
At the heart of Kapoor's story lies a powerful truth about product development: the best ideas often come from humble beginnings. “The reality of the product development cycle is that it's messy and chaotic,” she says. “You're going to have extreme highs and lows. You’re going to march in one direction only to hear from your users that it's the totally wrong direction and you'll have to pivot.”
But it's precisely this willingness to put an idea into the world—even if it's rough around the edges—that sparks the conversations, debates, and iterations needed to shape something truly revolutionary.
From a scrappy Maker Week demo to going viral on social media, Figma Slides emerged not because it was perfect from the start, but because Kapoor understood that an imperfect idea in motion beats a perfect idea in a standstill.
For product leaders looking to drive meaningful change, the lesson is clear: your boldest bets might start with something as simple as a ‘Flides’ meme or a buggy prototype—but it's the courage to put that first stake in the ground that sets the stage for a breakthrough.