Yuhki Yamashita, Chief Product Officer at Figma, discusses lessons learned from expanding beyond Figma's core design tool into multi-product offerings like Dev Mode.
Assertion Supported
Dylan Field mapped Design Twitter to seed Figma with top influencers
“And so he actually visualized Design Twitter into this graph And figured out the nodes that were the largest of, okay, who's following who, and then went to them and showed Figma, got their feedback, kept going back to them, not trying to sell them it, but jus…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Real-time multiplayer design was originally seen as undesirable by designers
“The tension was this idea that everyone could be in the file at the same time. And that was now intuitive, but back then was considered undesirable to some extent. Like, you know, this idea that a hovering art director is always going to be in your file, like …”
Insight
Operational changes at early Uber often had bigger impact than the app
“Uber was very much about, you can be a little bit more fast and loose, get stuff out there, learn. And to your point, ops was really important to the point where sometimes operational changes could have a drastically bigger impact on the business, on the user,…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Two-thirds of Figma's weekly active users are non-designers
“Two thirds of our users are, our weekly active users are non-designers, like developers, like PMs and others.”
Opinion
The biggest design problem is the gap between mockups and production code
“I think the biggest problem is that kind of, like, kind of gap between what's, you know, what's designed in their mock and what's actually built.”
Insight
Startups must sell product trajectory over feature parity when fighting incumbents
“When you end up in a conversation where it's just about features, this is not a place you want to be in, right? Because, well, technically, Sketch has more features, you know, or competitors have more features. And so, what we really needed to kind of, like, s…”