230. Tech Tools: Use Visuals to Your Advantage

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: This Tech Tools miniseries is brought to you by Prezi, the presentation tool that makes your ideas easy to follow, hard to forget, and faster than ever to create with Prezi AI. The best investment is in the tools of one's own trade. At Think Fast Talk Smart, we are taking this quote by Benjamin Franklin, the famous US inventor and founding father, very seriously. As you know, our show strives to share tips and techniques to help you hone and improve your communication and careers. These practices and approaches can be augmented with tools and technology. I'm Matt Abrahams. I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this Tech Tools miniseries of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. In this multi-part miniseries, we'll introduce you to tools we use at Think Fast Talk Smart to help us be better at our spoken and written communication. And you'll learn best practices from the founders who created them. Taken together, we hope these communication tools will help you find new ways to think fast and talk smart. I am super excited today to speak with Yuhki Yamashita, who is Figma's Chief Product Officer. Yuhki, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

[00:01:15] Yuhki Yamashita: Thank you for having me.

[00:01:16] Matt Abrahams: Some of our listeners might not know what Figma is. Can you share what your product is using the elevator pitch structure I teach my students? What if you could, so that, for example, and that's not all. Do you wanna give that a try?

[00:01:32] Yuhki Yamashita: So what if you could visualize any idea you have in your head and immediately collaborate on it in real time with others so that you and your team, if you have one, can make digital experiences like apps and websites together end to end? For example, you can brainstorm an idea on digital whiteboard, bring it into a design infinite canvas, present that vision in a deck, and actually get it built end to end. And that's not all. People have found other creative ways to use Figma, like sharing a visual resume or planning a trip or wedding, or even arranging an apartment floor plan.

[00:02:07] Matt Abrahams: That was a great use of that structure. You get an A plus. I'm curious, Yuhki, what led you to join Figma?

[00:02:14] Yuhki Yamashita: There is the practical reason and kind of the philosophical reason. So the practical reason was I was working at Uber before my time at Figma, uh, happened to be on a team that experimentally brought Figma into the company. And this is a time when we were trying to de-silo all the product work that's going on and get the rest of the company knowing what's happening inside of the product world. So it was a perfect fit for that. So I got to see firsthand how it spread virally, got everyone involved, but maybe even more importantly, it embodied a philosophy that I always had around design, which is that design shouldn't be just designer's consideration. I was a product manager for most of my career, and oftentimes had to dig through Dropbox files to find that right PNG, and then if I wanted to edit it, I needed to gain access to some other application or just, you know, go to Photoshop and make some edits. Figma took the point of view that I had, which is that over time, these boundaries between functions that should be blurred or are artificial. Design is something that everyone should be participating in. I saw Figma champion that world view early on, and I was really excited by it. 

[00:03:17] Matt Abrahams: Great. So it was a practical experience that lined up with your philosophical approach that, that led you to to join. You and Figma have thought a lot about visualizing and communicating ideas. What are some of the best practices you've identified for visualization and communicating effectively?

[00:03:37] Yuhki Yamashita: I think the first thing that comes to mind is the idea that people usually have only a couple takeaways that they can bring home or bring to other people. For example, if it's a pitch deck, there's that one slide that people remember, or that one framework to describe what your product is about or maybe what problem you're solving. And so I spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to distill that discussion or the thesis into something visual that people can remember. And sometimes I describe it almost as a meme, you know, like people have such short attention spans, they're often multitasking when they're consuming information. So there's just this one meme that they can take away. And maybe that's a really well articulated insight. Maybe it's a very provocative problem. Maybe it's a visual that you want to keep using over and over again, but those are the things that I think about most when I think about storytelling and visual storytelling. 

[00:04:36] Matt Abrahams: It almost sounds like there's an emotional connection to the image. Is that something you think a lot about as you think about leveraging images to help people focus and remember?

[00:04:46] Yuhki Yamashita: I think so, because oftentimes, for example, I remember maybe when I was back at Uber, I was responsible for the rider app, and the rider app had a lot of issues. When you're getting into a car, there's all things that can go wrong, and it's very easy for people to just bring up the thousand different issues that they want my team to fix, for example. But if you can distill it down to actually there are four stages to a pickup, you need to do this and then that, then all of a sudden you've given everyone a vocabulary, right? And then that is the very same visual framework that people might use in their own teams to slot in, oh, here are my problems and goals, and all of a sudden you've kind of discretized this ambiguous space into something. It's really just language and it just happens to be that like we, we've given it something visual or given it words that are memorable. Often people call it a framework, but you know, that's really essentially what it is. 

[00:05:37] Matt Abrahams: I'm a huge fan of frameworks when it comes to communication. I think it really helps, in fact, you leverage the pitch framework that I like to teach, but I like this idea of distilling processes down into their core components, and then thinking about what's the best way to visually represent this information. In essence, what you said is it gives you a different vocabulary beyond just words. It, it gives you a visual vocabulary and I like that a lot. Before we end, I'd like to ask you the same two questions that I'm asking everyone who's part of this miniseries. Who is a communicator that you admire and why?

[00:06:13] Yuhki Yamashita: One communicator who comes to mind is actually my first professor of computer science. His name is David Millen. He runs his introductory to computer science course that's also available online for anyone to take. And I admire him for two reasons. One is he never says, um, it's always just so fluid, even while navigating some of the most complex topics, and it comes from a lot of practice, but it's just really impressive. And the second is really able to make the most complicated things relatable. And he's actually managed to make computer science theatrical, almost. It's, it's really fun to watch and inspiring, especially from the perspective of a student who based on that may or may not pick up the skill. 

[00:07:03] Matt Abrahams: One, I love that you picked a professor. I think our profession can use all the help we can get. I appreciate that anybody can now go check out that course. When you said that one thing that stood out to you is that he made things relatable and engaging, were there particular techniques he used? You said theatrical but what does that mean? I'm just curious. I'm always interested in how does somebody take something which is rather complex like coding and make it engaging and accessible. 

[00:07:28] Yuhki Yamashita: For example, he was teaching the idea of binary search. He would pick up a dictionary and say, hey, let's talk about linear versus binary search. Linear search means that you're going, and maybe it was his phone directory and I could tell you, hey, go find John Smith. But start from the beginning and just flip through every page. That's linear search. Conversely, I could tell you to do a binary search and he took a directory, he ripped it in half, looked at the name, discarded half, kept ripping in half, and he could get to John Smith much faster. And that's such a visual and evocative way to understand what binary search is really about.

[00:08:02] Matt Abrahams: Yeah. So he showed you, used an analogy. I love that. That's great. He must've been very strong to be ripping phone books in half. Alright, question number two. Beyond your tool, what is one communication hack tool or shortcut that you use to help yourself be more effective? 

[00:08:20] Yuhki Yamashita: I think it's gonna come back to the idea of forming a meme. It sounds like a very trivializing thing to do, but I've just kind of realized that even as leaders in a company, you find that people start repeating things, phrases that they've heard that they picked up, that make them maybe sound smart or is a little bit counterintuitive or evocative, and therefore you want to spread it more. I mentioned spending a disproportionate amount of time honing in on what is a way to express this insight that makes people want to repeat it, or what is a way to visualize it so that they would want to reuse it over and over again. I really spend eighty percent of the time kinda coming it down to like, what is that one thing that's gonna spread virally?

[00:09:04] Matt Abrahams: I think that's actually really cool. To me, memeifying something, based on what you've said, is really about finding what is most relevant and what is most likely to be reused. And if you use those two ideas, relevance and reuse as a guide, it can really help you focus. Yuhki, this has been really insightful. I really appreciate not just you sharing what your tool does, which is very helpful for collaboration and visualization, but also your approach and the way you think about these challenges and how people can be more creative and make better decision making. Thanks for joining us.

[00:09:36] Yuhki Yamashita: Thank you for having me.

[00:09:39] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for one of our Communication tools episodes of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Please be sure to listen to all of the episodes in this miniseries. We appreciate Prezi's sponsorship of these episodes. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings, and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium.