Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field
Dylan Field, CEO and co-founder of Figma, discusses leading the company post-Adobe deal, his evolving leadership, the vision for Figma Make, and the importance of product taste. He emphasizes differentiating through design, accelerating time to market, and fostering a culture of clarity and continuous improvement.
Deep Dive Analysis
17 Topic Outline
Adobe Acquisition Deal Fallout
Maintaining Team Morale After Failed Acquisition
Strategies for Sustaining High Company Pace
Maintaining Figma's Unique Company Culture
Dylan Field's Leadership Evolution
Improving Clarity as a Leader
The Controversial Launch of FigJam
Lessons from Expanding Figma's Product Lines
Obsession with Time-to-Value
Introduction to Figma Make
Future of AI App Prototyping with Figma Make
Lessons from Figma's Initial AI Product Launch
The Importance of Craft in Software
Developing Good Product Taste
Future of Product Development and Role Merging
AI's Impact on Job Roles and Productivity
Personal AI Use Cases & Jailbreaking
3 Key Concepts
Time-to-Value
Time-to-value refers to how quickly a user experiences something special or amazing about a product. It's crucial to shorten this duration to enable users to rapidly see and have that incredible moment, revealing the product's true value.
Product Taste
Product taste is defined as one's point of view on things, developed through a continuous loop of experiencing various forms of creativity (art, music, food), reflecting on personal preferences, understanding the broader context or 'canon' behind them, and refining one's own thinking. It involves building an internal curatorial ability and being willing to make judgments.
Blockers (Product Development)
Blockers are issues that prevent users from adopting a product or fully experiencing its value. Addressing these blocking issues, even if they are not the 'coolest new features,' is as important as adding innovative functionality, as removing them systematically improves retention and activation metrics.
11 Questions Answered
Figma prioritized transparent communication through frequent check-ins and offered a 'Detach' program, allowing employees to take severance and reapply later, which helped reset expectations and reinforce the company's challenging pace and opportunity.
Figma maintains its pace by selecting motivating problems, being willing to move on from projects that aren't converging, scrutinizing timelines for padding, keeping a flatter organizational structure, and proactively addressing technical debt while balancing quality.
The most important factor is the people, as culture is a collection of individuals, their rituals, and engagement. Figma attracts creative, maker-oriented individuals across all functions and celebrates this through initiatives like 'Maker Week' to reinforce their impulse to build.
Leaders must consistently unpack context for their teams, ensure they show up in a way that aligns everyone towards the same goal, and be willing to ask hard questions and push through murky areas until trade-offs are understood and everyone is on the same page.
The decision to differentiate FigJam by making it 'fun' was initially unpopular and controversial. However, it proved to be the right move for a brainstorming tool during COVID, helping to draw out creative spirit and build the team's confidence in expanding the product platform.
Companies should follow the workflow of their users, identifying what people are already doing or asking for within the existing product that might be better served as a separate, specialized surface. It's also important not to be solely obsessed with market size (TAM), as trends and differentiation can expand a market.
Time to value is the speed at which a user experiences something special or amazing about a product. It's crucial to shorten this time to quickly show the product's true value, such as a collaborative multiplayer moment in Figma, to improve activation and retention.
Figma learned the critical importance of rigorous QA, especially for products with a wide surface area and non-deterministic outputs like AI. An early feature, 'Make Design,' was pulled due to a QA failure where it too closely replicated existing app designs, highlighting the need for thorough testing and clear communication of intent.
Developing good taste involves a continuous loop of expanding one's viewpoints by exploring new things across different fields and mediums, reflecting on why certain things are liked or disliked, building an internal curatorial ability, and being willing to revisit past viewpoints.
Product development will see an acceleration of role merging, where designers, engineers, product managers, and researchers increasingly dip into each other's responsibilities. AI-powered tools will make everyone feel the need to be more of a generalist, and design will become an even more critical differentiator.
While AI will change the skills needed and how tasks are performed, it's not expected to lead to massive job displacement in product development. Instead, it's seen as an opportunity for companies to grow and for individuals to learn and adapt, with demand for roles like engineering still strong.
34 Actionable Insights
1. Differentiate Through Design
To win in the game of software, differentiate your product through exceptional design and craft, as ‘good enough’ is now considered mediocre. Strive for great or excellent design to stand out in the market.
2. Accelerate Time to Market
Launch your products faster and get to market quickly, avoiding prolonged development cycles before monetization. This allows for earlier user feedback and revenue generation.
3. Shorten Time to Value
Prioritize getting users to quickly experience a product’s core benefit and ‘specialness’ upon first interaction. This ensures rapid activation and appreciation of the product’s value.
4. Balance Table Stakes & Awesome
Consistently fix blocking issues and ’table stakes’ features that prevent user adoption, but also sprinkle in ‘awesome’ elements that communicate the product’s vision and excite users beyond a mere MVP.
5. Expand Products by Tracing Workflows
Identify new product opportunities by tracing and supporting an entire user workflow, understanding what users are doing and what complementary tools they need to complete their journey.
6. Don’t Design by TAM Alone
Avoid solely designing products based on existing Total Addressable Market (TAM) data; instead, identify and leverage strong market trends, especially when a capability like design becomes a key differentiator, to expand the market.
7. Differentiate with Fun
Consider making products fun and playful where appropriate, especially for tools designed for collaboration or brainstorming, to encourage participation and draw out creative spirit.
8. Foster a Culture of Making
Prioritize hiring creative, maker-oriented individuals across all functions and celebrate this impulse through initiatives like ‘Maker Weeks’ (company hackathons) to drive innovation and product improvement.
9. Align People with Projects
Understand what motivates your team members and map their interests to the right projects to maximize their performance and engagement.
10. Maintain Frequent, Clear Communication
During periods of uncertainty or major company shifts, provide consistent and frequent updates to employees, being direct about challenges, opportunities, and the path forward to maintain focus and morale.
11. Offer ‘Detach’ Programs
During significant company transitions (e.g., failed acquisition), offer a program allowing employees to opt out with severance, fostering clarity and renewed commitment from those who stay.
12. Scrutinize Project Timelines
Approach project estimates with curiosity, challenging assumptions and identifying any ‘padding’ to ensure realistic timelines and better decision-making.
13. Address Tech Debt Systematically
Proactively address technical debt to prevent systematic slowdowns, balancing quality improvements with pushing new features forward to maintain overall speed and agility.
14. Maintain Flatter Org Structure
Keep the organizational structure as flat as possible, as this can be helpful in maintaining pace and agility as the company grows.
15. Challenge Path Dependencies
Question assumed requirements and ‘path dependencies’ to avoid unnecessary delays or critical oversights in project execution.
16. Prioritize Clarity in Leadership
As a leader, actively investigate murky areas, ask hard questions, and push for clarity on company direction and team goals, even if it means difficult conversations about trade-offs.
17. Approach Mentorship as Two-Way
View mentorship as a mutual learning process, recognizing that you can learn valuable insights and frameworks from anyone, regardless of their formal role or experience level.
18. Develop ‘Taste’ Intentionally
Refine your ‘point of view’ or taste by intentionally experiencing diverse inputs (art, music, food), reflecting on your preferences (‘Do I like it? Why?’), and understanding the broader context that shaped them.
19. Expand Viewpoints & Frameworks
Expand your viewpoints by exploring diverse fields and mediums, finding cross-correlations, and then reflecting to create personal frameworks that build internal curatorial ability and refine taste.
20. Cultivate High Judgment
Develop strong judgment by being willing to discern what is good and bad, as this critical ability is fundamental to developing and applying good taste.
21. Adapt Design Taste to Brand
Great designers can adapt their personal taste to match a brand’s aesthetic, even if it differs from their own preferences, effectively ’turning on and off’ their personal style.
22. Anticipate Merging Role Boundaries
Embrace the accelerating trend of traditional role boundaries (designer, engineer, PM, researcher) merging, as AI tools encourage a more generalist approach to product development.
23. Designers as Future Leaders
Encourage designers to step into leadership roles and urge all product functions (PMs, developers, researchers) to deeply engage with design, as it will be critical for future success.
24. View AI as Growth Opportunity
Frame AI primarily as an opportunity for company growth and expansion, rather than solely as a means for cost-cutting and efficiency.
25. Use AI for Personal Growth
Leverage AI as a tool for personal learning, growth, and exploring human consciousness, rather than just for simple task automation or ‘doing homework’.
26. Prioritize AI Prototyping & Working Apps
When building AI tools, focus on making the prototyping experience awesome, and also enable users to create actually working applications, whether robust prototypes, shippable products, or internal tools.
27. Integrate AI with Design Systems
Ensure AI-generated designs can integrate seamlessly with existing design systems to maintain consistency and prevent good ideas from being dismissed due to inconsistent visuals.
28. Ensure High Visual Quality in AI
Prioritize incredible quality for visual outputs from AI-generated designs, as this is crucial for user acceptance and product differentiation.
29. Conduct Rigorous AI Product QA
Thoroughly test AI products, especially those with wide surface areas, and invest in robust evaluation (evals) processes to ensure high quality and prevent preventable failures.
30. Hire High-Judgment, Craft-Focused
Seek out and hire individuals with high judgment who are willing to get into the details, perfect their craft, and possess a bold vision for continuous product improvement.
31. Use AI to Inform Experts
Leverage AI models to inform your point of view before consulting human experts (e.g., lawyers), but understand that AI does not replace their specialized advice.
32. Leverage AI for Possibility Spaces
Use AI to explore multi-dimensional possibility spaces by generating combinations of attributes, which can build intuition about potential outcomes in creative or complex scenarios.
33. Actively Seek User Feedback
Value and actively solicit user feedback from all channels (social media, support, forums, direct conversations) to continuously improve the product towards excellence.
34. Encourage Reporting Edge Cases
Encourage users to report actual product issues, especially rare edge cases, as these help uncover problems and ensure the product works well across a broader range of scenarios.
7 Key Quotes
We're no longer in this era of good enough is fine. Good enough is not enough. It's mediocre. If you want to win in the game of software, you need to differentiate through design. Craft matters.
Dylan Field
Don't do that. Get to market faster. I wish we had.
Dylan Field
The team was like, what? We're going to make fun our differentiator? In retrospect, it was absolutely the right move.
Dylan Field
You can't constrain by always sorting, designing by TAM. We learned that very much from Figma design.
Dylan Field
Prototypes beat static mocks and static mocks beat lots of words.
Dylan Field
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.
Dylan Field
I get like Truman Show vibes from people liking chocolate. I'm like, this is so obviously repulsive and disgusting. And I don't get like how you all like it.
Dylan Field
1 Protocols
Developing Good Taste
Dylan Field- Experience something (e.g., art, music, food).
- Reflect: Ask yourself if you like it or not, and critically analyze why.
- Build repertoire: Understand the greater context or 'canon' that led to its creation.
- Formulate: Determine where you agree or disagree philosophically with the path that brought it there.
- Refine: Continuously repeat this loop, expose yourself to more, and refine your own thinking and viewpoints, being willing to revisit past judgments.