Today on The Review, we’re bringing you a behind-the-scenes look at how one Figma PM spearheaded her idea and created a groundswell of internal hype.
How to Make Your Product Idea Go Viral Inside Your Company: Lessons from Figma Slides
Last year, at its annual user conference, Figma released Slides, a brand-new presentation tool for designers and teams — and it was an immediate hit.
But this isn’t the story about the public beta launch of Slides. This is a story about the two year journey before hitting the keynote stage.
Our hero in this story is Mihika Kapoor, the founding PM behind Figma Slides (or “Flides” as she affectionately calls it). As she tells it, getting the whole company behind her bold product bet withstood plenty of false starts and took heaps of persistence.
To get her idea from a brainstorm doc to live product, Kapoor won over Figma execs and other company stakeholders by orchestrating a series of internal viral moments, that turned skeptics into champions and built unstoppable momentum that had folks clamoring to join the unproven project.
“Vision is so powerful for a 0-1 project because it's the constant amidst the changing chaos. 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.”
As Kapoor re-tells the story of how Slides came to be for The Review (along with plenty of artifacts, like a video from her initial hackathon pitch), she also reveals how she learned to adapt her pitch strategy for different audiences as she shepherded Slides from inception to launch. Her experiences offer valuable lessons for anyone trying to get breakthrough ideas off the ground:
- For company-wide forums, lean into optimism and theatricality. Kapoor rolled out the literal red carpet for her Maker Week demo, creating the kind of memorable moment that gets people talking. “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,” she says.
- For executive presentations, learn to be brutally realistic about risks and challenges. “Only sharing the upside led to a lot of skepticism,” she says. “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.”
- For external launches, she abandoned polished scripts in favor of authentic energy. “Speaker notes are the enemy. Being on stage was my first perfect run-through since I only found out the evening before that I was going to be speaking,” she says.
Her story demonstrates that sometimes the most powerful force for getting ambitious ideas off the ground isn't top-down decision-making, but bottoms-up enthusiasm — if you know how to seed it. Kapoor shares plenty of put-to-use-right-away tactics for wielding influence and convincing others to believe in your vision.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
Recommended resources:
-Looking for more hands-on help on getting buy-in for your product ideas? Consider signing up for a future cohort of Kapoor’s course on Maven.
-Cracking enterprise can seem like a black box. This thread on X explains exactly how one startup landed a Fortune 10 contract.
-Superhuman co-founder Gaurav Vohra penned a thoughtful articulation of how growth is evolving, and how that’s showing up in founding teams.