Figma

“Like I think that community lends itself particularly well if you have something that your product creates that people want to share because it exhibits something about themselves.”

“One of my favorite interview questions It's asking, describe to me a time when you're part of, like, controversial product decision, right? And, you know, what did you do, and all those things, and I think it's really revealing because, you know, if they can k…”

“So Chris, RCTL, and I kind of, like, intervened. We created this new channel, private channel called Concerning Tweets. And it's just, you know, for this small group of us that Dylan can kind of, like, drop those. And then these are tweets that aren't going vi…”

“So in theory makes a lot of sense and things that our customers asked us for. But once we built it, you know, in the initial stages, didn't really see that much adoption. And, you know, it didn't feel great because it was like a really big investment for us.”

“We have this one called the alignment scale, which is a widget that you can insert into FigJam or Figma design actually, but, and we use it all the time. So basically, it's just a simple scale. And whenever people click it, their face appears on one end of the…”

“And so I think as we're getting bigger, one of the things that I'm realizing is that we're starting to build a lot of features that are not necessarily for organizations like ours. And when we do that, we really need to be creative about how we understand how …”

“And so that was when I kind of deprecated it on, you know, and said, I just want to understand, like, your headline, like, what are you trying to do, like, philosophically? And just, like, don't stress about whether you can measure it or not. I just want to un…”

“One of the things that I kind of, we all are collectively realizing is, you know, we talk about product-led growth, but in some ways, you know, I like to think about it more as kind of like community-led growth, or there are certain people inside a company tha…”

“For Dylan, I think it's very hard for him to really kind of like fully get bought in until he kind of sees like the end implementation to this really feel like if this is a good solution or not.”

“Like one of the first things I did when I arrived was, we're a little bit more of a memo culture. And I was like, you know what, we should be a deck culture, because we can build those decks in Figma.”

“More than half of Figma users weren't even designers once it was embedded in the enterprise.”

“Don't do it for your MVP. It makes zero sense. Do not waste time of data scientists that can train models with using powerful machines that are going to take weeks to train. This is because if you have an MVP and you just want to get buy-in for an idea or a fe…”

“We have the CPO Figma on this podcast, and he told the story of how they moved away from OKRs at one point, because they found themselves sitting in these meetings, reviewing these like large spreadsheets of hundreds of tasks that were basically just like task…”

“And when we got to starting the Stripe Billing product, we realized that there were a number of our existing users. These were companies like Figma and Slack. We were already using Stripe for payments, but had these subscriptions business models. And we figure…”

“If you work on Figma or you work on Slack, you also live in Slack and you live in Figma all day. So you can become more of a power user than anyone else on earth. And what we were realizing, especially for people trying to build Slack for the next million cust…”

“Having designers spend more time creating more visionary prototypes and then sharing those out in videos. It just has just huge impact on, on how exciting work is and how excited the team are. And so just providing that clarity is massive. And I think just aga…”

“We didn't spend that much money, any money really programmatically on paid or programmatic marketing because all of our leads for sales would come in through like a form on our website, which was current users, either free or pro wanting to upgrade.”

“Design systems are one of the main reasons you upgrade. From protocol or enterprise, right? It's like you're at this phase where you're getting more organized and more advanced, you're a bigger company. And so that's one of our big gating features for upgrade.”

“We did quality weeks with engineering, and then we decided a couple years ago, we had this idea where we're like, oh, when we package all of those quality updates up into one thing and launch them together, and we could even show like the tweet or the, you kno…”

“The product Figma was going to be named Summit. That was the name. So the company was going to be Figma, and then the product suite, the product design tool, right, was going to be Summit”

“Initially, the way that it worked was our starter team was that you could have like unlimited files, but only collaborate with two or three people... We realized that, wait a minute, like that's hurting us, and so we switched it, and now it's like you can have…”

“The first person I hired was actually a designer advocate. So it was not a marketer. It was someone who was a designer and we brought, you know, the designers and the engineers that I was trying to get to help me with stuff, like also had to design and build t…”

“By the time you're getting to the organization level or, you know, the, I'm spreading this to my other spheres of influence, like my community, people I know. You're kind of putting yourself on the line, right? You're taking a risk when you're doing that, espe…”

“We can talk about that if you want to know, like, making a decision of when to go to stealth, because we almost didn't, because it didn't have multiplayer.”

“Dylan is also a great engineer. If you don't know that about him or a scrappy engineer who can figure things out. And he had this idea and he built this tool or the script, this scraper where he identified a couple of influencers in the design community. Like …”

“And so I think we're able to just draw so many different people who are the practitioners and the ICs because we're not just putting thought leadership out there. We're talking directly to How do you use the tool and the things that individual contributors are…”

“We can't have two brands. Someone's not ownable. Like we can't build equity and like multiple things. Like that's just never going to work. We kind of have to just stick with one. And I think Figma is ownable and makes sense.”

“When you're a designer and you're in a tool eight hours a day, saving that one click is huge. Right, and so I think the obsession with quality and with craft within the editor, right, for us, for Figma, is maybe the difference. And I think about other go-to-ma…”

“When we launched Desider News, which was a popular forum back in the day, the first response was, is this, if this is the future of design and changing careers, because designers did not want to be collaborative.”

“People, I remember, they were like, take the laptop out of Dylan's hands when he would start showing it because they wanted to play with it. And to me, when I started seeing designers do that, even if I wasn't sure if they'd use it as a team, even if I wasn't …”

“And so I remember we decided that day that the next day we just had to have an open public forum where we could talk directly with our users and let them ask us any questions. And so we'd have the Twitter space the next day with Dylan and show Raji and Tom.”

“We actually didn't have a sales team for the first three years. So all of our revenue, we did have it was paid, but it was all self-serve.”

“We had Coda. They were our first user and they were based in Palo Alto. Dylan and I drove down and demoed the product to them and they were the first ones. Their designer, Jeremy was like, yes, we'll take this on full time.”

“It was Xamarin. They were the ones who were using Sigma first, and we saw that. And, you know, then, so they were that kind of patient zero at Microsoft.”

“They ended up working very closely with Coda. I don't know if you know the story where they just wanted to make sure the Coda team, and it was called Krypton back then was very happy with Figma. And so they went to the office, they set them all up. They starte…”

“You know, you kind of find that, or I've found, that words will only get you so far. So when I put together a vision with my team at Figma, it's all about, like, not just your traditional, like, okay, here are pain points, and then here are solutions, and then…”

“Like the reasons why you would found inside of an existing company is if you think that there is a distribution advantage that you want to take advantage of, if there is a technical or platform advantage that you want to take advantage of, or there's also like…”

“At the company, you know, some of our most monumental launches have come out of hackathons and have come out of bottoms up projects. So like recently this week, we had a launch of multi-edit, which was like a long clamor for a feature where folks can, you know…”

“When you're actually presenting a vision, one of the most important things is that there is, like, a single artifact that the team is creating together, so I think, like, a common occurrence is to kind of have, like, the research readout, followed by the desig…”

“We basically have, we store it in Asana, basically. We create, like, we have this integration which many companies might have, which is, like, a Slack integration where you can, like, react with an Asana emoji, and then, like, any piece of feedback that comes …”

“We use Figma the way that everyone uses Figma, but we use FigJam on steroids. Like, every single activity in this company is done in FigJam. It's like, our product reviews are in there, our Gantt charts are in there, our bug bashes are in there, like, every si…”

“It is really important to create a vision that you believe in, that your team believes in, and that your company believes in. Because the reality of the product development cycle is that it's so messy. It's so chaotic. You're going to have, you know, extreme h…”

“I think what you find is that if you push your product to get visibility, maybe even beyond what like the current stage of product development merits, is that you have really incredible learnings. Because the more that you can put your product in front of peop…”

“We lean heavily into designing and prototyping even before a project gets a green light. So I think that's something that's really unique about Figma is normally you will like talk about like the market space or the opportunity or the sizing and then decide to…”

“I think something that's very unique about Figma as compared to other companies is we have a multi-month plus long staging our dogfooding process.”

“Something that I find incredibly useful Is to 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 your product. And actually, I think that those are the most insightful conversat…”

“I sort of set up like a recurring cadence with the folks in our sales team in order to understand like, okay, like, what are you guys hearing? And then I would share what was coming. And then I would use their input as signal as to like, what should be priorit…”

“There are things that are harder inside of an existing company, right? It's like harder to take an executive decision. You actually cannot take an executive decision. You need to receive buy-in on every single decision that you make. Sometimes it's like harder…”

“I think the key to being successful at zero to one is to honestly have optimism that borders on delusion. You need to have insane almost like reality distortion field where You don't hear the word no, or at the very least, you translate it into a not yet.”

“Ok, so Canva is bigger than Figma and Miro and Webflow combined. Both in terms of valuation and in terms of revenue, you guys are generating 2.3 billion dollars in ARR per year, and you're profitable. You've been profitable for about seven years at this point.…”

“As I'm in conversation with a bunch of our product leaders at Figma, there's parts where it's like, okay, this thing is too complex as a system, and we made, like, all the right local decisions, and yet, together, they're too complex, and they're not working a…”

“I think intuition is like a hypothesis generator, and you're constantly generating these hypotheses, and others are generating hypotheses as well, and you then take these hypotheses, and you put them forward, and you debate them, And you try to find data to su…”

“The make design feature, you know, we, anything I said on the keynote, I was like, This is gonna give you the most obvious thing in the most obvious form possible.”

“So I kind of constructed this list of, like, here are the most central designers in the graph, but also then I, like, looked at their work, and the ones that I was really inspired by, and, like, as a total fanboy, and someone who, like, wanted to learn as much…”

“I think I have deep skepticism about pages still. Like, I'm not sure they're like, if you could freeze time, And I could just go in with my team, work on Figma for a very long time. I'm not sure we'd come to the same implementation of Pages that we are at toda…”

“His team was really the first user of Figma as a team, and he goes, wait a second, I am?”

“If things are not going to be fatal, then if I hear from someone, hey, I really think we should do X, Then I'll say, okay, just go with it, and here my, here's my feedback, here's what I'm skeptical of, let's see what happens.”

“The broader point is that truly not every team needs a product manager, but the activities, the outcome that one would drive needs to get done no matter what. And in some cases, this is why the prototypical companies that everyone references when they say they…”

“I think prototyping with these models is a thing that is underused. Like, our best PMs do this, where we'll get in some long conversation about, like, should the UI be this or that, and before our designers have even, like, picked up their Figma, like, our, of…”

“And something that most people don't know is that at the beginning of this year, we had three company priorities, and Flides was not one of them.”

“One ritual that we like to do in Figma is actually have what we call this alignment widget, where we solicit everyone's opinions and see where the misalignment might be so that a PM is spending the time honing in on the areas where there's the most disconnect …”

“If you're saying everything, chances are what everyone else is hearing is kind of nothing. And so we think that rather than covering all your bases, what you should actually be coaching PMs to do, Is to make a meme and go internally viral within the company.”

“We actually think that the most important outcome that can come out of our product review is not just making a decision, but building trust. And winning over your key stakeholders.”

“Specifically, that over 3.5 million people had made slide decks in Figma design over the last year.”

“The first was Maker Week, which is our internal hackathon at Figma. This was the forum where I initially tried to get buy-in for the idea. I worked with a team, walked around the New York office, and convinced a bunch of designers and engineers to work on this…”

“In a review, we really believe you should start with the punchline, not to build up context and all the suspense, but rather go quickly to the part that feels controversial, the thing that will cause everyone to pay attention and actually engage in the convers…”

“And I think product market fit, when you start with the market first, it's accelerated, but I will say this, I think that it's also capped on the upside. Because you're starting with the market. Versus the Airtable and the Figma, which started with the technic…”

“If you look at the other productivity apps that have really worked on the web, they've all had this compute model, right? Figma, when you open a Figma document, there's not like some cloud VM that gets spun up for you to render the documents you're dragging th…”

“Now it's faster to do this with bolt in code and have a real working software products than Dragging around frames in Figma to actually make a static version of it.”

“So on any fig my URL, when you're looking at like a, you know, a design that you've made if you just put bolt.new in front of that URL and hit enter, it's gonna suck that design into bolt and turn it into a full stack app or mobile app just.”

“In a shaping session, you can't collaborate on, on, on something so high fidelity, right? And so we need also some ways to collaborate, and this is where you see these techniques in the book like breadboarding and fat marker sketching. These are tools to help …”

“Why shouldn't we be, like, vibe coding demos right, left, and center? Like, instead of showing stuff in, like, Figma, we should be showing prototypes that people are vibe coding, you know, over the course of 30 minutes to illustrate proofs of concept and to ex…”

“How the tools you pick are going to impact the thing that you produce. So once you go into Figma, you've made a decision about the thing you're going to produce. If you stay in a sketchbook, you've made a different decision.”

“I think the same is true for Figma, which you know, actually like had a very parallel timeline to us. Like we both were founded around the same time, both spent two and a half years building the product like hands on you know, that early team before launching.”

“The PMs are mostly using vZero. The designers love Figma, so they're using Figma Make. The engineers are using a combination of tools right now. So Cursor, Cloud Code, GitHub Copilot. Marketing teams use all sorts of tools for translation, subtitles, you know,…”

“You can't constrain by always sorting, descending by Tam.”

“At least my product reviews and product conversations, I feel like prototypes beat static mocks and static mocks beat lots of words.”

“If timelines are maybe not well reasoned through from first principles and perhaps there's padding that has been, you know, well intentionally added by, you know, different folks you have to kind of understand fully, okay, what are the assumptions of how long …”

“I think for a second product, it's very hard to go from one to two. Going from two to N is much easier, but going one to two is hard.”

“She had gathered a group of people to create Figma slides that came out of Maker Week. Many of our products and our most important features have come out of a Maker Week setting”

“Don't do that. Go faster. And the lesson is not, okay, how do I make the awesome thing? I'm going to sweat every detail and I'm never going to ship. The lesson is you just got something that you can have that people can see the vision of where you're going. Bu…”

“It's interesting for that survey we ran, I think it was 16 or 17% of respondents that were designers who said the development in tech tools, AI are a threat to my role. So only 17%.”

“56% of non-designers said that they engage a lot or a great deal in at least one design-centric task. Like prototyping or visual brand exploration. And we'd actually done that question a year before with a similar respondent set, and it was up to all percentag…”

“If things are not converging, dragging out, you have to be willing to move on and move to other projects.”

“We did a design sprint where we're able to rapidly explore all these different ideas for features and ways to shape the product. I mean, I think we camped with like, 20 ideas that day. A few of them made it to FigJam and have became a, I think, very definition…”

“I think in this world where software can be created more easily, design matters so much, and designers matter so much. I think designers are going to be the leaders of the future, and I think that more designers need to step into that leadership role”

“We started the company August, 20 12. Started working hardcore at Figma in June, 2013. Close beta was December, 2015. Didn't do GA with multiplayer until October, 2016. And then summer of 2017, we made our first money.”

“The trend that we've been seeing for the past five years is a trend that it's gonna accelerate the next five years. And that's a shift to emergent of roles. I just think that we're seeing more designers, engineers, product managers, researchers, kind of all th…”

“I think it's not enough to have the MVP. You gotta have something that's a little bit awesome, at least.”

“I think we're going to swing back to being way more expressive and draw as part of that story.”

“We are nowhere near, at least at Figma, ah, the point where our demand for development, for example, is satiated. Have we seen productivity increases? Yeah. Mild to moderate, but like, that is not something that has made our new head count we want for engineer…”

“And I think that too many people are of this instinct of like, rah, rah, you know, we always gotta be positive or something. And it's not about positive or negative. It's about, well, do we understand it? Like, have we had the hard conversations? Have we, like…”

“We looked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the start of Figma. It was like, 250,000 designers in the world is what it said.”

“The journey of making thing design was a lot of table stakes features had to be built, as well as the shiny coolest new stuff. And we literally at some point had a team that would, that was called blockers. And they just went in one by one, struck them down. A…”

“Where we came out of was that board meeting was let's go differentiate by making FigJam fun. The team was like, what? We're gonna make fun our differentiator? And in retrospect, it was absolutely the right move.”

“And AI won't get you there alone. AI is still in the realm of kind of law of averages and better prompting can help, of course”

“Various regulators did not like the deal and had arguments against it. No need to go into those and not, but yeah, the, it was a long process, 16 months.”

“Right now coding or right now working with some of these coding tools doesn't lend itself super well to that because it's super linear. You could super invest in one direction and you just iterate with a lot on them, for example.”

“You might think as I did from far away that folks in at hedge funds or at large, you know, public equities funds are extremely nuanced and thoughtful, and they are like, you know, on whiteboards with, you know extremely deep and, oh, maybe even theoretical mat…”

“Which essentially is, I mean, the static image of a chat is basically the dead fish here. You have to feel the AI. To some degree.”

“On one hand, I do see like sort of a drop in usage of Figma in some designers at Notion.”