User Immersion to Roadmap Loop
Turn constant user and non-user conversations into a prioritized roadmap and sales evangelism.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 88%
An operational system for staying fundamentally inseparable from users and converting what you hear into product decisions. The distinctive moves are interviewing non-users about why they don't use the product, running a recurring two-way cadence with the sales team, and capturing every insight into a backlog with a weekly grooming ritual so nothing is lost.
Origin
Mihika Kapoor's operating practice at Figma and Meta; she notes founder-market-fit matters because a founder can use themselves as a litmus test for user needs.
Core principles
- 01Immerse yourself in the circles where your users already are
- 02Interview non-users about why they don't use the product — often the most insightful conversations
- 03Adoption is about marketing and perception, not just product quality
- 04Match the immersion method to company stage: founders go direct; larger orgs ride sales calls
- 05Cross-pollinate sales-call pain points into the product roadmap and vice versa
How to run it
- 1
Talk to users AND non-users constantly
Ask users what they think, but especially ask non-users why they aren't using the product — this surfaces perception and marketing gaps, not just feature gaps.
Pro tip Probe a person's full end-to-end tooling usage, not just how you compare on your product.
- 2
Match the channel to your stage
At an early-stage company, personally hunt down users through any channel and use yourself as a litmus test (founder-market fit). At a larger company, build a tight relationship with sales and get onto sales calls.
Pro tip On sales calls, ensure customer pain points cross-pollinate into the roadmap and sales gets visibility into what's coming.
Watch out For infra or security products you can't just walk up to a random person — the conversation won't make sense; go through sales instead.
- 3
Run a recurring two-way sales cadence
Set a recurring meeting with sales: they tell you what they're hearing (feeds prioritization), you tell them what's coming (feeds which use cases they push to customers).
Pro tip Turn your own usage into a reusable artifact — Kapoor made a Loom of her 'week in FigJam' that sales distributed to inspire customers.
- 4
Capture every insight into a groomed backlog
For non-immediately-actionable input, store it (e.g. react with an Asana emoji in Slack to create a backlog task) and run a weekly grooming so insights are prioritized, not lost.
Watch out Not every sales request is feasible and not every product idea is stage-appropriate for a given customer conversation — the backlog is where those wait.
In the wild
Asking former colleagues why they weren't using FigJam ('maybe sometimes') despite it being built for them led to a set of features making it easier for non-designers to start, including a placeholder experience that previewed use cases on the canvas instead of traditional templates.
→ Product investments that lowered the barrier for non-designers, directly sourced from non-user conversations.
Common mistakes
Only asking existing users
Talking solely to current users misses the perception and marketing reasons non-users stay away — the most insightful conversations.
Letting insights evaporate
Without a capture-and-groom system, valuable but not-yet-actionable feedback from sales and users is lost instead of feeding the roadmap.
Is it for you?
Best for
A PM who wants a repeatable system to source and operationalize user insight rather than relying on ad-hoc memory.
Not ideal for
Very early exploration where formal sales cadences and backlogs don't yet exist — direct founder conversations suffice.
From the transcript
“not just ask users of your product what they think about your product, but to ask non-users about your product, why they are not using…”
“having a really tight relationship with your like sales team is really important and basically just like being on sales calls”
“we basically have we store it in Asana”
“you can like react with an Asana emoji and then like any piece of feedback that comes in um from sales or from the rest…”
“founder market fit at startups is so important is because like to the extent that you can use yourself as a litmus test for what…”
From the episode
Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company
Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma)