Meet the Product 50 Winner: Avantika Gomes

Over the course of her career, Avantika Gomes has learned to lean into her passions.

This approach has served Avantika well in her role as Director of Product at Figma. Her responsibilities include bridging the gap between designers and developers—work that has earned her a spot among our 2024 Product 50 winners.

Learn more about Avantika in the latest installment of our Product 50 interview series, which explores the winners’ career paths, inspirations, and challenges, as well as their insights into the trends shaping the digital product landscape.

Avantika, welcome! To start, tell us about your career path. How did you get to where you are today?

I went to college at the University of Pennsylvania, where I got a dual degree in computer science engineering and business. After college, I took on a number of different roles—so many that I feel like I’ve had several careers. I started out with a stint in management consulting at McKinsey, did data analytics at Google, and ultimately transitioned into product, which I’ve been doing ever since.

All of those diverse experiences lent themselves well to the product manager role because they offered a baseline understanding of engineering, business context, strategy, and analytics.

Over the past decade, I’ve held product manager (PM) roles at Microsoft, Birchbox, and Pinterest before landing at Figma.

Give us some insights into your day-to-day work

I’ll start with some context. Figma is a collaborative platform for teams building products together, and it consists of a number of products:

• Figma: a collaborative web-based design tool—and our flagship product
• FigJam: an online whiteboard for brainstorming and ideation
• Dev Mode: a space for developers to translate designs into code
• Figma Slides: our newest product for teams to co-create and deliver interactive presentations

I currently manage a team of five product managers in an area called “design-to-production,” which is responsible for tools that help product teams translate designs into real-life products. This includes our design systems, prototyping, and developer tools teams.

A lot of my work revolves around helping product teams work better together, bring their designs to life, and ship their products faster and at a higher quality.

Can you tell us what you’re working on or excited about now?

A big focus of mine has been Dev Mode, which is a new space for developers that Figma launched last year. It’s very central to the mission of figuring out how to help bring designs in Figma to life. Developers are such a key part of that. We wanted to create a dedicated space in Figma for developers to easily navigate designs, find what they're looking for, translate it into code, and connect it to their code bases efficiently. We were proud to see Dev Mode named the winner of Fast Company’s 2024 Innovation by Design Awards in enterprise.

More recently, we had our annual flagship conference, Config, where we shared some exciting launches in the developer space that address how we’re thinking about bringing design and code closer together. That matters because every product team is looking to ship better products and ship them faster. Development is the biggest cost, so the more teams collaborate across functions, the more efficient they can be at shipping better products.

But we also know that today, designers and developers often work from different sources of truth, leading to miscommunication and mistakes in the process. When designers and developers start speaking the same language—such as when designers use the same building blocks in a developer’s codebase—they can implement designs much faster and with fewer errors. That's a win for all product teams.

What challenges keep you up at night?

Since I joined, Figma has grown tremendously. We’re thinking a lot about scaling and staying close to customers even as we get bigger. We also want to make sure our processes scale with us so that even at the highest levels, we can see what’s happening across teams and the dependencies between different product initiatives.

Beyond that, the industry is changing. A lot is happening that’s shifted the nature of how people design and the types of products we design—the most obvious being generative artificial intelligence (AI). There’s a fear that AI will replace designers and developers, but at Figma, we strongly believe that it will uplevel the craft of design rather than take it away. As AI offers tools to improve efficiency and reduce the cost of iteration, designers will spend less time on pixels, and more time on problem-solving.

I’m excited about how AI can help make design more accessible and empower more people to express themselves, but we want to ensure we stay ahead of these changes.

What do you see as the biggest trends shaping or impacting the industry?

Beyond AI, I’ve been thinking about generational shifts. The generation of digital consumers we’re building for is starting to look pretty different. At our recent product conference Config, there were interesting talks about designing for Gen Z and how that means moving from broadcasting to “narrowcasting,”—how the younger generation is more interested in more intimate interactions than broadcasting to large groups of people. They are more motivated by immediacy or instant gratification; personal experiences versus polished experiences go a long way. You see that play out on Instagram, TikTok, and other social media apps. That means we have to change how we think about our audience and how we design experiences.

How does data or digital analytics play a role in your work?

As a PM, data is critical. I’m biased since I was a data analyst in the past, but data can play a role at many different altitudes. Product analytics helps us understand how people use a product and what to ship. But data can also be powerful at higher levels—starting with strategy—as you identify the right market and consider opportunity sizing. The best product people I know are very data savvy. They have good intuition but validate that intuition with data and research.

What advice do you have for aspiring product and growth leaders?

When you start in a role, you often focus on how it’s defined. That’s especially true for PMs, who work with many different functions. It’s natural to want crisp definitions about the tasks you’re responsible for and the tasks others are responsible for, whether that means designers or developers. But the boundaries between these roles are getting more and more blurry. In fact, at Figma, we try to embrace that blurriness because we think the best products are built by people who aren’t afraid of stepping out of their lanes to do something they’re excited about or something they think matters for the product. My advice would be to think about your role in terms of what’s necessary for the product and what you’re good at. It’s important to know what your superpowers are.

What do you like to do outside of work that keeps you inspired?

I have a lot of artistic hobbies that keep me busy and inspired. Recently, I took up watercolor painting. I’m also very into gift wrapping. My pandemic hobby was a side hustle called Gift Butler, providing beautifully wrapped gifts and handmade cards.

I also hope to write a children's book. My grandmother was a writer with many stories she never published, so I’m trying to compile and illustrate them.