II. My Role

My Approach

As the Fellowship was led and instructed by PMs from some of the world’s top product orgs (Facebook, Google, Uber, etc.) it drew influence from their teams’ leading practices. Here were some of my considerations as I worked through the end-to-end process from discovery to solutioning for my MVP:

Recognize Opportunities and Limitations: This project presented the creative freedom to explore ideas without the constraints of real-world budgets or timelines. At the same time, however there were resource limitations, such as the lack of actual user data, feedback, and analytics to run A/B tests or make informed quantitative decisions. I had to be pragmatic about what I could and could not achieve when building my MVP.

Lean Towards Skill Development: When constructing deliverables, I focused on grasping and demonstrating my knowledge of product concepts that I wanted to learn and upskill on. My work was biased toward exploring these frameworks rather than replicating my best guess of what the behind-the-scenes documentation at Figma actually looks like.

My Process

A. Opportunity Identification

For the first stage of my capstone, I clarified the problem space by identifying my customer persona: early-career designers with less than four years of experience using vector-based digital platforms like Figma, Adobe XD, and Sketch. Leveraging the Jobs-to-be-Done framework, I focused my investigation on the core job of conceptualizing creative projects and audited the existing Community experience to map out phases of this job where barriers could occur.

Next, I ran 8 UXR interviews with members of my persona group to validate these barriers and add more context to:

• Why they use Figma Community

• What job(s) they hope it accomplishes

• What ideas they had for generally improving the product

These interviews enabled me to refine my job map by validating and adding new actions, goals, and barriers. They also shed light on the forces for maintaining the status quo, such as a designer's existing familiarity with Figma, desire to perform tasks on one platform, and hesitation to add complexity to their workflow. By understanding the criteria that deter customers from switching to a competitor, my interviews provided direction on where I could improve the Community experience.

Based on my UXR interviews, revised job map, and Four Forces Analysis, I arrived at the following question: 

"How might we enhance the search and discover experiences of Figma's Community product?"

B. Defining Product Scope

After determining my customers and their jobs, I focused on identifying the needs my product could satisfy. I extracted a list of needs from my updated job map and evaluated them through a matrix that assessed their importance and user satisfaction with current solutions. This exercise helped determine whether the ideas were potential product opportunities, faced competitive markets, or were not worth pursuing. My analysis revealed the most significant and underserved needs, positioning Figma Community as a workflow tool over use cases like curation or social networking.

To further clarify the problem space, I used the Kano model to distinguish between must-haves, performance benefits, and delighters in design workflow tools. I reviewed the experiences of similar products (e.g., Canva Templates, Sketch Templates) by my list of needs to align on the benefits and tradeoffs of my proposed solution, leading to the following value proposition:

“An efficient, integrated, and familiar solution in sourcing high-quality creative assets to inspire the design process.”

This statement aligns with my product hypothesis:

“By streamlining the experience of finding and using resources, Figma will improve the perception that design is intuitive, approachable, and fun. Designers will be inclined to leverage Community more often in their use cases, driving both supply and demand-side growth within the platform.”

C. Crafting an MVP

Having aligned on a hypothesis and value proposition, my next step was determining the feature set for my MVP candidate. I broke the product down into sub-features that mapped the experience from discovery through to onboarding, task in-progress, and task completed. I then prioritized the features essential to validating my hypothesis and crafted a user flow on FigJam. This diagram became the foundation for my prototype.

After several iterations of wireframing and mockups, I produced a final design for Figma Toolbox, a feature within the editor that allows users to browse and directly add Community resources into their current file.

D. Analytics, Testing, and PRD Development

To test my MVP, I defined a set of metrics to determine what success should look like post-launch, along with counter-metrics on what it should not compromise. I also created a phased rollout plan with exit criteria at the end of each stage to ensure launch readiness.

With my prototype now ready for review, I ran five user testing sessions with cohort members to gather feedback on the usability and functionality of my MVP. For the final step in my capstone, I synthesized and consolidated my deliverables into a PRD on Coda, which is the platform that the company uses to write its product docs.

My Impact

On demo day, I had a prototype, presentation, and PRD ready for Figma Toolbox. I pitched my concept to audience of PMs and cohort members, receiving invaluable feedback on potential next steps and considerations.

Through this fellowship, I gained a deep understanding and appreciation of how the world’s top tech companies ship 0-to-1 products. More importantly, I built and fostered a network of PMs who remain committed to growing Ivey's product reputation on the global stage.