“I walked into Figma a couple of years ago and I thought everyone was going to be using AI. It was going to be crazy AI pilled. I was already feeling behind. … And I realized basically no one was using these tools outside of engineering to get real stuff done.”
Lenny's Newsletter · Product & Design · November 2026
Context
Asked for the origin story of Figma's shared 'PM OS' repo, Mechaber says it began with him automating his own work. It grew into a tool every PM at the company installed.
Transcript
Thanks so much.
…flows. I think everybody's sort of crafting their like artisanal product platform now because they can. And so when you said you had a PMOS, I was just so excited to have you come on and demo it. So tell me, what was the origin story of what we're going to see today and why did you build it?
I like to tell my engineers that I, my goal is to be lazy in the right places. And so for me, a lot of it was, I walked into Figma a couple of years ago and I thought everyone was going to be using AI. It was going to be crazy AI pilled. I was just going to, I was already feeling behind. Like I just, I felt behind because we're all on Twitter and we all see like, you know, Tebow just posting about like the future of the universe. And I walked in feeling really behind and I realized basically no one was using these tools outside of engineering to like get real stuff done. And so I started just trying to automate some of my own productivity. Like I was the person who was trying to do too much in Zapier like many years ago. And the more time I spent with it, one, Cloud Code had just come out and I started to realize like there were things I could do in the terminal that were like really interesting. All of a sudden I could like build CLI. You know, we were in that CLI phase and like no other PMs who I was working with were doing it and they were…
Great. And so what were like the problems that you thought were most important for PMs to think they could solve with AI?
First of all, I feel like the like really trite thing about being a PM is that you're doing too many jobs. And the question is like, which jobs do you either do really poorly or not do at all? And so for me, it was like, okay, how do I do for the jobs I'm not doing and the jobs we are not doing as…
Amazing. And so I love this idea that you had a couple tasks on the PM plate that you were like, we need minimum viable doing of these tasks. Like it just needs to be not bad at it. Yeah. And I talk a lot about you have to like both raise the floor. Like we have to do just a little bit better on…
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