Episode 29: Dylan Field, Figma Co-founder, Talks Design, Digital Economy, and Remote Culture with Host Connie Yang

Nearly ten years ago, Dylan Field and Evan Wallace turned a Thiel Fellowship into a solution to the ‘single source of truth’ problem for design systems. 

Their interest in design collaboration and WebGL laid the foundation for the origin story of Figma, today’s ubiquitous browser-based design tool — and rapidly-growing company.

“The more (we) pulled this thread, the more we learned there’s so much to do in terms of making design better, and in making it so more people can access design within the organization,” says Dylan of their early pursuis. (Spoiler: drone technology was a runner up in their technology explorations).  

The latest episode of the Distributed podcast pairs Dylan, Figma’s CEO and Co-founder, and guest host Connie Yang, Head of Payments Design at Stripe, with past design leadership posts at Coinbase and Facebook.  

Connie’s passion — uncovering the bits of magic surrounding us in everyday life — guides their friendly dialogue from design to remote culture and much more. Early in the show, Dylan shares what he’s learned about instilling culture in a rapidly-growing company, especially amid the changes brought on by the pandemic. “The main thing that changes once you go from in-person to remote is you can no longer rely on physical context to instill culture,” says Dylan. “It matters even more to elevate the role of design, and elevate anything you think is really important in that digital context.”

Dylan also builds on a recurring Distributed podcast theme over the past year, adding “It’s really important to be intentional about creating serendipitous moments.” Figma’s playful approach to collaboration influenced its recently-launched FigJam, a digital whiteboard that can help fill the need for serendipity.  

Dylan speaks with the unique authority of a tech leader who has not only prioritized design but, with his team and products, greatly influenced it in a way that seems to have happened just in time for distributed collaboration. 

“We’ve gone from a physical economy to a digital economy. I don’t think these are new trends or new things that happen but now, all of a sudden it happened all at once, and accelerated massively,” he says, echoing Matt’s May 2020 post Gradually, Then Suddenly. 

“I think that we’re seeing every part of the economy shape around design,” says Dylan, noting how Figma has even observed collaboration in the product, beyond design, on days when other workplace chat tools were down.

Why does it matter? Because now, Dylan says, “Design leads to winning.” 

Thank you to both of our guests for this latest episode of Distributed. We hope you enjoy it.

The full episode transcript is below.

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CONNIE YANG:  Hey everyone, welcome to the Distributed Podcast. I’m your host for today, Connie Yang. I am the Head of Payments Design at Stripe and I want to give a  huge thanks to Matt  Mullenweg for allowing me the opportunity to host this podcast. 

I am super excited to have an opportunity to talk to one of the leaders in advancing design technology and changing how we all in the industry work together. Dylan Field is not only co-founder and CEO of Figma, a collaborative design tool used by some of the biggest design teams in the space, he is also a leading advocate for bringing more designers into companies and the importance of the role of design in building successful products. He is also a huge proponent of community and an open source approach to design. 

Dylan, thank you so much for joining us today.

DYLAN FIELD:  Thanks, Connie. It’s really good to see you.

CONNIE:  Good to see you too. Dylan, before we even get into Figma and all the momentum you’ve built let’s start by talking about design itself. 

DYLAN:  Okay.

CONNIE:  It seems like you had some amazing insight nearly ten years ago now on the importance of designers on teams, the way we work with one another and how we work with even non-designers. What did you discover about design in those early days that motivated you to dive into this world of design and creativity?

DYLAN:  Yeah so I’ve always been interested in design and excited about design product. But I think I started getting really excited about and interested in how do we make design tools better when I started working full-time as a design intern at Flipboard. And at the time I was kind of watching how the tools worked, we were in Fireworks pretty much every single day and collaborating through a Dropbox folder. 

We kind of had attempts to do a blog where we could post work in progress but honestly all the collaboration was kind of a mess and that was with a very design-forward team. Flipboard was very excited about let’s go make.. Flipboard was really into let’s go make design a really core part of the product experience and how we build product. 

And leaving Flipboard I was thinking a lot about creative tools with my co-founder Evan and should we go and build a company around this. And on the list was always design. We thought this would be a great area to go into is interface design but we weren’t sure the market was big enough. But honestly it was. Once we figured out that the market was there, the problems were very clear. 

It was.. the experience of designing product was not synchronous at all. It was you had all these different sources of truth, there was no one source of truth you could rely on. I remember the version problem where you have final underscore, final underscore two, you never know which one is the latest version. 

And then I started interviewing people at larger organizations and would hear stories about how a file would go halfway across the org at a super large enterprise and suddenly you’ve got some random product manager somewhere who’s mad at some other product manager because they think they’re doing something that they’re not even doing anymore because that was like two months ago. And the single source of truth problem was really huge. 

I think as we started to think about okay, what does it take to scale design teams up, design systems are incredibly important in that role and without a design system, it was really hard to keep things consistent or scalable. The more we pulled this thread, the more we learned in terms of there is so much to do in terms of making design better. And also so much to do in terms of making it so that more people can access design within the organization.

And I think we started to have this thesis about it’s just really important to get more people to do more design and for companies to invest more in design and that’s  how companies will win or lose in the future. And I think that has played out and is playing out now, which is really exciting to see.

CONNIE:  Yeah, I mean now has been a really interesting time.

DYLAN:  Yes.

CONNIE:  Especially for Figma, right? So we’re almost two years into the pandemic, lots of change, what are some of the top trends that you’ve seen change with designing remotely and the way that we work? 

DYLAN:  I think there’s a lot of changes generally in the way that work happens right now, especially for teams that were not distributed before. The teams that have been distributed this entire time, I don’t know how much change they’ve seen during the pandemic in terms of the way that they work. 

But I think that the main thing that changes once you go from in-person to remote is you can no longer rely on physical context to instill culture and it matters even more to elevate the role of design and elevate anything you think is really important in that digital context. And digital contexts have no walls, they are flat, but they are not.. they still have these systems in place were, for example, if I (imagine a digital?) context, if I don’t intentionally make time to talk with somebody, that conversation will not happen. Whereas in an office, we might run into each other on the way to the bathroom or something or waiting for a drink in the kitchen.

I think it’s really important to be intentional about creating serendipitous moments. And also I think to elevate the things that you hold dear as a company.

I think that the other thing that’s happened as we’ve all gone remote and during the pandemic is that we’ve gone from a physical economy to a digital economy. And we’ve gone from physical spaces to digital spaces in terms of where we congregate. And I don’t think these are new trends or a new thing that has happened. I think that actually has been happening for decades. But now we’re at a place where all the sudden it happened all at once and it accelerated massively.

So as you go from a physical economy to a digital economy, it is really important to create a great digital product experience, otherwise you’re not gonna win. And it turns out that everyone, every company needs to do this  to survive right now, whether you’re at Stripe and you’re creating a payments API, it actually does matter how good your design is. Whereas maybe 10-20 years ago people would assume actually it doesn’t matter at all. 

If you’ve a bank, if you want to survive against a challenger bank, you better have a great design. If you are a company that’s doing logistics or industrial, you need to actually have really well designed processes inside the company and good internal tools. And if you don’t design those well you might lose that to Amazon. So I think that we are seeing every part of the economy shape around design and realize that design is a core part of how they win or lose.

CONNIE:  Yeah and I love hearing all these specific examples that you’re bringing up of how these different companies should be thinking about building products. This is kind of a funny question. How do you think companies are.. Do you think they’re getting better at designing remotely whether they use Figma or not? Is it even possible to design remotely without Figma now?

DYLAN:  Well we definitely saw a lot of people that, as they went into a remote design scenario, they really wanted Figma.

CONNIE:  Yeah.

DYLAN:  So I’m not an expert on the work flows outside of Figma as much but I think it is less painful to design in Figma than not in Figma in general. And that’s definitely true for remote teams. But what do you think? Because you’re in Figma a lot.

CONNIE:  We are. We are definitely a Figma oriented team. I was trying to imagine what was that world like?  You know, we had the issues with updated files and (getting things across?), and all this stuff that you brought up earlier. So I sort of can’t imagine with the speed that we have to work now and the amount of distributed teams that we have, I can’t imagine designing without Figma. That’s pretty rough for me. But hey, props.

DYLAN:  Okay, thank you. I’ll take that.

CONNIE:  I definitely appreciate the tool. So Dylan, you and I have actually met a number of times before.

DYLAN:  Yup.

CONNIE:  Including co-judging a really big hackathon for crypto projects a few years ago. But big events like this are still not happening live and some will probably be forever remote from now on. So it’s a changing landscape. How can we still support events like this? Is Figma doing anything?

DYLAN:  Well, I think that again it’s about going from physical space to digital spaces. And if you look at how people are interacting online right now, there is so much happening, whether it’s just on Twitter but also in virtual spaces, whether that’s VR or Gather.Town or people are finding stuff like Clubhouse or Twitter spaces. We’ve even seen it in Figma. People have started to hang out in Figma and that inspired FigJam, which is our digital white boarding tool. 

And we started watching how people were interacting in Figma, which is basically this abstracted canvas, how they were greeting each other, how they were talking to each other, they were typing text. And we saw Slack went down one day and people started to really interact with each other over Figma instead. I’m not saying that we’re competing with Slack, we’re not, [laughs] no interest in that. But I think as we have seen more people go in these spaces they just want a place to play and they want a place to have these experiences and to be with people and to be collaborative. 

And I think that design is a really interesting place and role and activity to do where you’re visually creating with each other. And the more that you’re visually creating, the less you’re coming from a place of fear during a pandemic, the  less that you have ego involved. You’re just able to get in the sandbox and play. I’ve been really excited to see people do that in Figma, in FigJam.

I think in terms of the literal interpretation of your question around getting people together in person or together in event space, I think there’s just so much around that. We have thrown a few conferences during the pandemic. We threw one recently around design systems called Schema through a Config, every year. 

And just find ways to have people gather around an event, around a.. maybe it’s a product announcement or maybe it’s a topic that everyone cares about. But both finding ways to bring people together but also not have the wideness of the internet be a distraction. There’s so many ways that people that are trolls can come in or noise can get high, and so you have to be very intentional about that too, while also making it so people are able to have that access. 

Because that’s the beautiful thing, I think, about digital events is that they are not exclusive anymore. Right? You don’t have to find your way to San Francisco to come to Config and it’s hard to imagine going back from that. Even though there’s real benefits to having a physical event, it’s just really lovely to have that access for everyone in our community.

CONNIE:  Yeah, it’s like opening a gate, why would you close that again?

DYLAN:  Yeah.

CONNIE:  I really liked how you referenced so much of the word ‘play’ when describing Figma. And one side bar I want to dig into a little bit, when you say you watch designers or you see people using it in the space, what is that kind of user research like for you? Are you literally watching designers?

DYLAN:  Well, we do a combination of things. I mean, we talk to people, we watch people user research sessions use Figma, we talk about their lived experience and ask them questions about how they use it, what artifacts people create. We look at the way we use it ourselves, too. That’s a huge way we learn. 

And then I think also just.. for example for FigJam, one of the things I heard most about was how people were excited to do these playful things. And we watched ourselves use it and that’s what inspired the name FigJam. It’s a playful name. We’re using it and we’re trying different things and seeing what resonated with our own team. And the playfulness part was definitely the thing we came away with, like wow, there’s so many directions it can go but play and fun and getting too to flow with your team, that is such a big part of FigJam which [00:11:02.26] to ideate and brain stormings are there.

And from there it was like, okay, how do we double down on this. And so we did a design sprint for a day and we came up with maybe 60 ideas and three of them we’ve implemented, around three. We did stuff like curser chat, emoji reactions, (stamps?), audio chat, and plus widgets were starting to be born there, which is a way to basically embed a widget onto the FigJam canvas, you can use it on your whiteboard, and many more things that we haven’t shipped yet.  

But it was like one day with one clear intention and it was amazing what came out of it. And that’s when I think we knew, we were like, okay, we’re onto something here.

CONNIE:  Wow, that’s awesome. I’d love to dig into that story a little bit more later. But for now, another question about design overall.  What are some of the hardest problems about remote design that you haven’t been able to solve yet?

DYLAN:  I think it goes back to serendipity, what we were talking about earlier. I think that tools are doing a better job of this more and more but still there is so much to do to try to figure out how do you create serendipity in digital environments and across the suite of teams. 

One thing we have tried, which is.. Actually it’s interesting we’re talking this week because it’s a (maker?) week right now for us – 

CONNIE: Oh wow.

DYLAN:   – and we always try to have different little attempts to figure what we can do here during (maker) weeks. And so one thing we’re doing right now is we have these little crews.. We have a space theme and it’s called Figmaverse this week. Every (maker) week has a different theme and last year in the winter it was Figmaland. And this time they were like, we’ve gotta think bigger, Figmaverse. 

CONNIE:  Awesome.

DYLAN:  Not my idea but someone on our team, Anthony, came up with it. And it’s cool because they have these little.. they call them “squads” or crews, I think. With your crew you can all come together, you’ve got like six to eight people, you can bounce ideas off each other, share what you’re up to but also play this meta game on top of maker week. And it’s a random assortment of people  you might not meet otherwise in the company but just trying to create those connections that otherwise you might not have. And I think the more you can do that across the company, the more you can create these experiences people can bond over. 

Another thing I’ve done are new hire breakfasts, just trying to get people that have joined the company that are new.. six to eight at a time, we have breakfast together and just talk about whatever people want to talk about. And it’s totally casual, usually not super related to Figma, though if people want to talk about that we can. And it’s just a way for people to get to know each other across the company and start to connect those notes.

CONNIE:  Yeah. I loved hearing about ways you’re intentionally trying to bring more serendipity into the space. And it’s not always about work. It can be about anything.

DYLAN:  Yeah. I think that can be done not just on the company wide context but also in a team context. And so while [00:13:38.20] that’s not about design, it’s about.. just broadly about companies I think that it’s true for designers as well. And it’s so important for designers to be invigorated and challenged and inspired by people that are coming from lots of different backgrounds and from lots of different areas of the company. Otherwise they’re not going to do their best work. They won’t think of the challenge cases in their head, they won’t think of the random idea that might solve the problem. It’s important to get input from everywhere.

CONNIE:  Yeah, absolutely. So you’ve become a really well respected thought leader about the role of design and how we work. What is something really important that you’ve learned about designers that influences your vision for Figma and your leadership of the company?

DYLAN:  One thing I’ve learned about design and designers, I feel like it’s similar to many of my other answers, but I think it’s really important, is just how inclusive the best designers are and how much they bring other people into the fold. I’ve seen this with the best designers I’ve worked with and I suspect you’ve seen the same. 

But there’s just a stereotype among designers, or at least there was, of the designer that goes off into the ivory tower or the corner and they put their headphones and they just type on their Mac for a while or use the pen to [00:14:49.03] – 

CONNIE:  Yes, heard of those.

DYLAN:  – tablet and they are just..  they’re solitary, they’re a genius, they come up with the idea, they come to crit, they present it, everyone’s jaw drops on the floor and that’s it and you ship it. And like, that’s just not how it works.  [laughs] 

And so that was our hypothesis going to Figma but I think just to see it play out and to see how much is the truth and how much designers as well appreciate that myth breaking down and appreciate the collaborative process that can come along with design and breaking down those barriers and bringing more people in and how it results in just better work. 

Like, I think a myth that exists is that collaboration, more voices at the table, can sometimes lead to worst results. And I think we see this implicitly all the time. I’ve even caught myself implicitly doing it and accidentally started this myth when I have said things like, oh, I just want to have a small meeting here or whatever because I want to get this done. And I think it’s a balance, you don’t want to have thousands of people in a meeting, that’s not going to be productive either. But if there’s ways you can bring more people into the process, I do think that you get to better results usually, and often times simpler results, which is also interesting.

Like, we’ve seen for example, one of the case studies that we found during the pandemic was Kimberly-Clark. Do you remember the toilet paper shortage? 

CONNIE: Oh yeah, yeah who could forget?

DYLAN:  Yeah so they were trying to solve that. And they were trying to come up with an order form that was going from 14 fields or something crazy to much less. And so they all got on Figma and started to figure out how to reduce the number of forms on their order form. And despite a lot of people collaborating on that together they were able to come up with a much simpler experience for the user placing the orders than they had before.

And you hear stories like this and you go wow, bringing more people into the process can actually help. It’s not just always distract. 

CONNIE:  Yeah the ivory tower idea is an interesting one. I mean the reason it became an idea is that it works for some designers, a very, very small amount. And there are some companies that have been known and are quite successful for operating that way. Have you seen that change?

DYLAN:  I guess I would challenge it a little bit. A lot of times that people act in that way, I think that they are not propagating the right knowledge amongst their teammates. A lot of times you end up with a bus factor problem, a lot of times you end up with one person who is kind of like seen as an individual leader on the team but  no one else can critique their work properly because of social norms that start to take place.

So I do wonder if it’s actually a constructive pattern for organizations. And I think that just because it’s a working style that has existed doesn’t mean it’s the most productive one. And I also wouldn’t say that they’re working alone. A lot of times they’re building on the knowledge of others, they are building on patterns that have existed for a long time and they are definitely bringing on the people to complete the project and those people usually.. 

I usually find that designers and engineers working together, once they’ve had like [00:17:59.26] and help from product, in that implementation phase even, there’s so much that gets defined and figured out when you’re implementing something. So if nothing else, I would claim that a designer that’s working with an engineer, even looking at that atomic unit of collaboration, that is a time where you’re getting a lot of different back and forth that’s happening. And the engineer is pushing back and saying well what about this edge case, what about this edge case? And unless you’re (inputting yourself?) you’re just not going to think of those things.

CONNIE:  Yeah, absolutely. 

DYLAN:  But what about you? What’s your presumption and what you’ve seen there?

CONNIE:  I also think we’re stronger in numbers. One of my personal design principles is that we should make complex things as simple and as accessible to people. And you have to keep your audience in mind for that. And so the more audience or individuals that you talk to and the more variety that you understand, that’s when you really start to get what’s the common baseline for users, that’s how you have a broader audience, that’s how you grow, that’s how you make things as simple as possible.

So I am a huge believer in that kind of inclusivity. But sometimes it’s.. different people have different processes. That’s the way I think about it but there’s lots of different ways out there. 

DYLAN:  Totally.

CONNIE:  So let’s back up a little bit. We’re going to start talking about Figma as a company. You’ve had a lot of big moments this year. You launched FigJam, you’ve had significant fundraising, how do you describe Figma as a product today if you were to pitch it to someone?

DYLAN:  Yeah. Well, I think of it as kind of like we’re trying to serve the entire project design lifecycle. So we’re going all the way from ideation with FigJam and white boarding and brainstorming to the design phase with Figma where you’re really fleshing out mockups and you’re trying to work with other stakeholders all the way to prototyping and buy in from other people and eventually production where you’re trying to turn your work into code. And we are trying to serve that entire lifecycle.

CONNIE:  Gotcha. And if you could take us back to the beginning, if we could get into a little bit of an origin story, you started Figma in 2012 as a Thiel fellow and you were exploring other ideas at the time.

DYLAN:  Yes.

CONNIE:  How did you choose this particular problem to solve and how did you get started?

DYLAN:  Yeah so my cofounder and I knew that we wanted to do creative tools and we even wanted to work with WebGL. And I think that sometimes as you are figuring out a new business, one thing that happens is people really focus on like problem, solution, what is the total market that’s addressable and how much are you going to charge people and [00:20:14.26]. And these are all really good questions to ask but for us instead we really focused on what’s the technology that we’re going to use. And for us, that was WebGL. The backup was going to be drones but my cofounder Evan was not into that.

CONNIE:  Drones?

DYLAN:  Yeah, I thought drones were really exciting and I still do. We also saw that there’s a lot of regulation there, a lot of just privacy concerns and so that’s why we didn’t go into that area. 

CONNIE:  Harder to design with a drone too.

DYLAN:  I don’t know if [00:20:40.02] yeah. But  hey, it’s cool toys. But no, I think my cofounder had actually built drones in college and did a lot of programming with drones and he was like, no, the hardware run to bug loop, it sucks, I don’t want to do that. So we kind of focused more on WebGL and creative tools. 

And the from there it was like, okay, WebGL is the why now here. It’s the reason why this [00:21:02.28] exists that hasn’t existed before. And then the question is like what is it we’re going to make and what takes advantage of WebGL more than anything else? And we explored photo editing, (combinational?) photography and even a more Photoshop like approach where you blend a lot of things together before we realized that interface designer was (beginning of market?) and that was always on the list, always something I wanted to do, and then we (went to that?).

CONNIE:  Yeah. And for people who may not know the intricacies of WebGL, what would you say was so unique about that that made you want to use that for sure? 

DYLAN:  Yeah so WebGL is the way to use the GPU in your computer in the browser. And by doing that, you are able to take apps that traditionally would’ve been desktop apps siloed offline and move them to the cloud. And so I think that basically any creative tool but also any game, honestly, could be made with WebGL (as well as?) just a browser. And that way if I sent you a link to a Figma file, you can learn it right away as long as you have a browser. 

And that means it’s platform agnostic. It doesn’t matter if you’re on a Chromebook, a [00:22:00.04] machine, Mac, you can  use Figma. And that became really important I think because as we saw Figma spread, there’s sort of this heterogeneous mix of competing environments people are coming with in different organizations and also entire areas and countries that had never switched to things like Sketch because they didn’t have Macs. 

And it turns out Macs are like.. If you think about the designer stereotype you might have in your head, kind of going back to they’re on their Mac, they’re in a cafe, they have the headphones on, they probably have a really nice Moleskine, whatever that is in your head, it’s still not the reality for most of the world. I think a lot of our users are on PC or on Linux or more low end hardware. And not everyone is  on a Mac. So it’s really important.

CONNIE:  Yeah, again, thinking about people beyond what is immediately around us. It comes back again. 

DYLAN:  Yes.

CONNIE:  So how long did it take between when you started trying to build Figma and then when you actually first launched to any group of people?

DYLAN:  It was a long time. So we started talking about the company December 2011, started.. I got the Thiel Fellowship April or May of 2012. I was still an intern at Flipboard at the time. I told them six months, I finished that six months. So we were talking a bit more at that point. And then August 2012, we started full time. It probably wasn’t until June 2013 that we really were like okay, let’s go build what became Figma today and focus on interface design. And even then, we thought of it as interface design plus other things. And it wasn’t clear what those other things were. 

And there was a point where we had to really define that and say we’re going to focus on interface design and really had a nice (white board?) session with the team where we just crossed all these t things off. It’s like, what do we all think we’re doing? Okay, let’s cross them off one by one until we get to what we’re actually doing. And we used a cool framework, omit, raise, (use?), create.. from this book Blue Ocean Strategy to figure out okay, what are we doing that’s different than the competition, what are we not doing that the condition is doing? What are we doing worse and where are we going to make this brand new? 

Yeah, from there we didn’t launch our closed beta until December of 2015. And our [00:24:05.17] release was not until October 2016 and didn’t start charging until summer of 2017. So it was a very, very long road and it took a long time to get to the point where we actually had Figma.

CONNIE:  Wow. And it’s funny as me as working in the industry, I remember those milestones.

DYLAN:  You were there.

CONNIE:  Yeah, yeah absolutely.

DYLAN:  Yeah I remember Coinbase was a really early user and y’all took a bet and I really appreciate it.

CONNIE:  Yeah we had some big fans. 

DYLAN:  Cool. It was mutual.

CONNIE:  So when my team at Coinbase first got started on Figma, we weren’t even remote, we just kind of thought oh it’s a great tool, it seems collaborative, it seems easy, the file systems, all that seemed so much better. Do you see it now as a product for distributed creative process or would you say it’s still not specifically designed for remote teams?

DYLAN:  I think we are trying to get better about.. I think every team now is a distributed remote team basically even if you’re not all remote, literally, you’re all distributed. And as is increasingly the truth, you want to make sure that you’re especially good for that environment. That’s where I think the play, the focus on digital space comes in. And how do you make it really great for that environment.

But yeah, I would say that we should also work really well if you’re all in an office together. And hopefully in things like FigJam, the experience you have in FigJam white boarding is even better than the physical equivalent. So I think a real metric of success could be okay, we are all in a room with a white board, what makes it so that we want to use FigJam instead of the white board that’s on the wall?

CONNIE:  Hmm, yeah, that’s a great mission, a north star, to be aiming for.  You mentioned that there is a difference between a remote team and a distributed team. What is that difference for you?

DYLAN:  A remote team is when no one is in the office, a distributed team is where you maybe have multiple people that are congregating in physical spaces together. That’s my view. What do you think? We’re on the Distributed Podcast, so you’re probably an expert. [laughter] 

CONNIE:  It sounds good to me. And I think one of the things that we all realize is that even though we’ve all been adapting to this world, it is still really different from team-to-team, company-to-company. Everybody has different definitions and different ideas of what they think works best and how they build products best.

DYLAN:  Totally.

CONNIE:  What are some of the key moments in growth at Figma where you could see that you were really on track for the bigger vision, for where you ultimately wanted Figma to go?

DYLAN:  I think the first time that someone told me please charge for Figma was the big moment for me. 

CONNIE:  Hmm..

DYLAN:  Because we were free for a long time. And I always thought of it as like okay, we just gotta get to product market fit, we’re not there yet, it’s going to take a long time. And at some point this morass of just grinding, someone was like, hey, we really want to spread Figma at the big company I work at, like major enterprise, Fortune 100 company, and I can’t do it right now because y’all don’t charge and everyone thinks you’re going to go out of business.

CONNIE:  That’s funny.

DYLAN: And it was this double reaction of oh my god, we’ve made it and oh gosh, how have we not charged yet? I thought that being free would help growth, not block it. [laughs] So it was like, oh shoot.

CONNIE:   The things we get surprised by.

DYLAN:  Yeah, exactly.

CONNIE:  That’s awesome. That’s a fun milestone to really remember.

DYLAN:  Their big one was just seeing people that are non-designers start to get into Figma without formal design training. So I’ve had like now a ton of founders come up to me and tell me how they’ve designed the first version of their product with Figma and really dived into design. I think that’s so important as you’re building a business to just be design driven and to have somebody that has a design point of view and propagating that from the top. 

And so if we can help inspire the next generation of companies to be more design driven, to hire more designers, to put more people in design roles, I think that’s really, really important.

CONNIE:  Absolutely. One of the points actually that I recalled as you were explaining that was that when we were again, getting on board Figma at Coinbase and we had to convince not just designers to use it, we had to convince PMs, engineers, everybody else to use it, and an aha moment that we had was when a PM realized oh, he could edit text directly in Figma – 

DYLAN: Yup.

CONNIE:  – and then just be done with it. That was a major aha moment. I could see the light in his eyes. I was like, oh, that’s why I switch. That’s pretty incredible. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you that.

DYLAN:  That’s awesome. Yeah, the copy editing on the canvas is big but also just like I think being able to leave comments and conversation around the asset itself and have that be collocated is another one that’s really big. And then just getting to the point where you can use the design system and a product manager can start doing some of their own (blocks?) rather than just like oh yes, I need a designer to help me draw things. It’s like, no product manager, you can do that on your own, really, I promise you. [laughs] 

CONNIE:  Yeah, makes it as easy as possible.

DYLAN:  It makes it so the designer can focus on harder tasks. 

CONNIE:  Absolutely. Do you have any dream companies or teams that you wish would start using Figma, like where you really think it could make a huge difference?

DYLAN:  I would love government to start using it more. 

CONNIE:  That’s what I was thinking too. [laughter] Do you think they use it at all?

DYLAN:  Uhh.. I don’t know if I can comment on that. [laughter]

CONNIE:  Noted. So we started talking a little bit about the non-designers, PMs, engineers, writers, researchers, so many people who all have to come together to make products look really good. What impact do you really think Figma has had for those people that’s really important for you?

DYLAN:  I think again the more you can get people in the design process, the better designed products can be. I think also just the roles around what design mean and who does design are blurring so much. So I think that a [00:29:47.14] engineer versus a designer, that is converging more than I think a lot of people realize and both could be really additive to the other’s process. 

We could debate the next hour or two the difference between product and design or even research and what that trifecta looks like in that Venn Diagram but I think that all of them have to talk to customers, all of them need to think about strategy, all of them need to think about the future of what the product could be and paint an inspiring vision. And because all of them have use cases for Figma that are important, even if they have different orientations in a day to day job. 

What I have also been inspired to see is the amount the executives and people that are stakeholders outside of product engineer design are starting to use Figma to visually communicate, or ideate in the case of FigJam, but also just to really be on the ground and thinking about what it will take to win for the company through design. I think it’s interesting too because designers as an archetype are kind of more in touch with emotions, they are more in touch with the soft side of the business. But at the end of the day, design leads to winning. [laughs] And I think that people don’t realize that enough.

CONNIE:  Did you say design needs to..?

DYLAN: No, design leads to winning. 

CONNIE: Oh design leads to winning.

DYLAN: Exactly.

CONNIE:  Great phrase, yeah, I love that.

DYLAN:  In my opinion. I mean.. Somebody out there might challenge that but I really think it’s the case.

CONNIE:  Speaking of winning, and you had touched briefly earlier about competition and how Figma starting from a small place, what is your competition like now? What do you think about, what do you worry about?

DYLAN:  We have obviously a major competitor in this in Adobe. And I think it’s really important to just have a super healthy respect for your competition. Adobe in our case is like they’re the daddy of the creative tools industry, you know, they literally back in the late 1980s made Illustrator and in the 1990s acquired Photoshop. This is all before I was born, basically. [laughs]

CONNIE:  Oh, right.

DYLAN:  Obviously some of these products have bloat, some of them have long histories, but they also exist after decades and decades and decades. And I think just the work Adobe has done has been really inspirational for a lot of people, including myself. 

So I think you can learn from these companies that have been around for a long time, you can learn about how to create good software, you can learn about the traps of trying to build something for a long time, you can learn about the traps of trying to put too many things into one place. And I think it’s good for us to have strong, challenging competitors. That’s the way that we’ll become a better business in the long term.

CONNIE:  Yeah, it is a good way to look at that. I remember also that’s how I got started learning about design.

DYLAN:  Totally.

CONNIE:  It’s using those tools. 

DYLAN:  Yup.

CONNIE:  That was kind of the originator. Do you think they learn from  you and your team as well on how to make it more collaborative? 

DYLAN:  Judging by the recent releases, yes. But I think it’s hard. The fact is that we’re able to take assumptions about being cloud first that they can’t really take. And so having to accommodate a lot of off-line workflows.. it really constrains what you can do and it makes a lot harder to create great product experience people. 

CONNIE:  Yeah that makes sense.

DYLAN:  So we’re