James Mikrut
Product Leader
Figma
[About]
James Mikrut is a product leader at Figma and the founder of Payload, an open-source, developer-first headless CMS and application framework. A designer-turned-developer, he built Payload to give developers full control over their backend without fighting their CMS.
Mikrut led Payload through Y Combinator (Summer '22), helping it gain rapid adoption among developers and Fortune 100 companies. In 2025, Payload joined Figma, where he now works on bridging the gap between design and development, bringing his vision for developer-centric tooling into Figma.
Robots Can't Taste
We spent years abstracting away the hardest parts of building software. That worked and Payload is a good example. Now, LLMs use tools like Payload to do the heavy lifting—Auth, roles, APIs, and gluing your systems together. But when anyone can spin up functioning software, implementation is no longer a superpower. It's table stakes.
And yet everything looks the same. Same layouts, flows, ideas. Prompt in, purple website out.
This talk explores the shift from implementation to intention: why faster tools don't always lead to better outcomes, and how AI is great at producing code, but it has no taste. No point of view. No opinion about what should exist. That part is still on you.