Yuhki Yamashita, Chief Product Officer at Figma, is quietly redefining how teams collaborate through design. Since joining the company, Yamashita has helped steer Figma into the hands of a broader audience, dramatically expanding its user base beyond professional designers—now, two-thirds of users are non-designers. His leadership has deepened Figma’s identity as a product-led company: one where the product itself invites participation, feedback, and growth. Central to this is Figma’s URL-based collaboration model, which helped drive virality and community adoption. Yamashita led initiatives like extensibility and developer tooling, which made Figma more accessible inside large organizations. His influence can be seen in the shift to a deck-based meeting culture within Figma, compelling cross-functional teams to work directly in the tool, accelerating feedback loops, and making product intuition a shared responsibility.
After graduating from Harvard, where he also served as Head Teaching Fellow for CS50, Yamashita began his career at Microsoft before taking on mobile product roles at YouTube and eventually Uber. At Uber, he led major redesigns of both the rider and driver apps and later headed the design team for new mobility products like bikes and public transit. His move to Figma began during his time at Uber, where he first used the platform and saw how it effectively broke down barriers between teams.
Yamashita listens closely to users, reversing course when feedback proves a direction isn’t working, as seen in the redesign of Figma’s editor interface. He encourages experimentation, valuing discoveries that emerge from play rather than rigid planning; the similarity search feature in Figma, for instance, began as a byproduct of a different initiative. His team culture promotes direct engagement with users and minimizes the illusion of product success by relying more on relationships than dashboards. As AI reshapes workflows, Yamashita’s vision is not to replace human creativity but to give it more space—to help designers think more, not just click faster. He believes the lines between PMs, designers, and engineers will keep blending, and keeps building the culture that reflects this reality.