Interview Leaks · Primly Community

Figma PM interview: the question that caught me completely off guard

jordan_pm · 4 replies

did a PM loop at figma two weeks ago. four rounds: product sense, analytical, leadership, and a cross-functional round with a designer and an eng lead.

most of it was what you'd expect. the one that caught me off guard was in the product sense round:

"Figma is being used by a team in a way the product was never designed for. Walk me through how you'd decide whether to support that use case officially."

they didn't give me a specific example. i had to construct one. i ended up talking about teams using figma for project management (which is real, some teams do this with frames and connectors), but i kept second-guessing myself mid-answer because i wasn't sure if that was too obvious an example or if i was supposed to know something more insider.

i think the answer they want is something like: look at frequency and stickiness of the workaround usage, interview the teams doing it, understand if it's core to their workflow or a band-aid, see if there's a better solution in-market they'd switch to, and then decide if you support it natively vs. enable it through the API vs. ignore it.

but the real trick is they want you to argue for NOT doing it as a real option. a lot of PM candidates treat everything as "yes we should build this" and that's a tell.

didn't make it to offer. got cut after the cross-functional round. no feedback on that one yet.

4 replies

pm_priya

the "should we build this" question is so underrated as a trap. i did a meta PM interview where i talked myself into supporting a clearly bad feature request because i was nervous about seeming like i didn't want to build things. just say no sometimes. the business case matters.

jordan_pm

exactly. and at figma specifically, design tool companies have a lot of "power users" who want everything. the job is to say no to most of it so the product stays coherent.

apm_aisha

did you get any sense of what the cross-functional round was evaluating specifically? like were they testing collaboration instincts or was it more about how you handle disagreement with eng/design?

jordan_pm

honestly both. the designer asked me about a time i pushed back on a design decision and the eng lead asked about a time engineering said something was impossible and i found a workaround. i think they want to see you actually have opinions and don't just defer. i may have been too deferential honestly.