Dylan Field live at Figma's Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design
Summary
TLDRIn this special live episode, host Lenny Ravich interviews Figma CEO and co-founder, Dylan Field, at Figma Config. They explore Dylan's approach to product design, the importance of intuition and simplification in product management, and the future of design tools. Dylan shares anecdotes from Figma's early days, discusses the community's response to AI in design, and even hints at his favorite AI tool, websim. The conversation is interspersed with humor, including a playful discussion on 'raccoon feet vs. muffin hands' and a nostalgic clip of Dylan as a child actor.
Takeaways
- 🎙️ The podcast episode features a live recording with Figma CEO and co-founder, Dylan Field, at Figma Config, emphasizing the excitement and unique nature of the event.
- 🏆 Dylan Field expresses gratitude to the Config team for organizing the live podcast and acknowledges the importance of the community in Figma's success.
- 🤖 The conversation delves into the role of AI in product design, discussing the balance between AI-generated software and the need for unique human design.
- 🔮 Dylan shares his intuition and product taste development process, likening intuition to a hypothesis generator that is tested and refined over time.
- 🛠️ The episode highlights Figma's commitment to simplicity, with Dylan discussing the challenges of adding features without increasing complexity.
- 👶 A light-hearted discussion about Figma's 'raccoon feet and muffin hands' tradition showcases the company's culture and Dylan's approachability.
- 🔍 Dylan emphasizes the importance of understanding user needs deeply, mentioning his active engagement in social media and support channels to gather feedback.
- 🎨 The episode explores the definition of design as 'art applied to problem-solving,' indicating the balance between creativity and utility in design.
- 🌐 Dylan talks about his early strategies for gaining users, including reaching out to influential designers on Twitter for feedback and advocacy.
- 🚀 The podcast touches on Dylan's ability to spot trends, such as his early interest in WebGL and CryptoPunks, showcasing his forward-thinking mindset.
- 💡 Dylan shares his belief in the importance of mentorship from various sources, including peers, community members, and even those he mentors.
- 🎬 Lastly, the episode concludes with a fun look back at Dylan's childhood acting career, reflecting on his journey from actor to tech leader.
Q & A
What was the significance of the live podcast recording with Dylan Field at Figma Config?
-This was the first-ever live recording of the podcast, featuring a conversation with Figma's CEO and co-founder, Dylan Field, in front of a live audience at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, showcasing the community aspect and the excitement of the event.
How does Dylan Field describe the role of intuition in product development?
-Dylan describes intuition as a hypothesis generator, which is used to create and debate potential solutions, and then refine them based on data and feedback to form a working hypothesis that guides product development.
What is Dylan Field's perspective on the future of product management?
-Dylan believes that the roles of product management, design, and engineering will continue to exist and hold immense value, as they each bring unique qualities essential to creating great products.
How did Figma approach the challenge of simplifying its product?
-Dylan emphasizes the importance of making Figma more powerful without increasing its complexity. He acknowledges the difficulty of this task and the need to constantly revisit the system to maintain coherence and simplicity.
What was the initial strategy for gaining early users for Figma?
-Figma's initial strategy involved identifying influential designers on Twitter, reaching out to them for feedback, and building relationships. This approach was more about seeking valuable feedback and less about a traditional growth hack.
How did Dylan Field's early acting experience influence his current role as a CEO?
-Dylan humorously reflects on his childhood acting days, noting that the ability to read and sit still were his differentiators at the time. While he enjoyed acting, his interests shifted towards computer science during puberty, leading him to his current path.
What is the importance of mentorship in Dylan Field's journey as a leader?
-Mentorship has played a significant role in Dylan's growth, coming from various sources including the community, employees, investors, and even those he has mentored, highlighting the importance of being open to learning from all around.
What advice does Dylan Field have for product creators regarding the balance between quality and speed to market?
-Dylan advises that product creators should aim to ship their products as quickly as possible to gain feedback, but also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a minimum quality bar and iteratively improving the product post-launch.
How does Dylan Field view the role of product managers in the context of Figma's team structure?
-Dylan sees product managers as essential in creating frameworks that bring everyone together, providing a point of view and strategy, and ensuring the team shares a common understanding of the product's direction and goals.
What is Dylan Field's opinion on the importance of simplicity in product design?
-Dylan believes that simplicity is crucial in product design, as adding more features without maintaining simplicity can lead to a 'monstrosity'. He stresses the need for everyone in the organization to be responsible for maintaining simplicity.
Can you provide an example of a time when Dylan Field changed his mind based on feedback or data?
-One example is when Dylan initially had skepticism about implementing 'Pages' in Figma, but the community and team's needs convinced him of their necessity, demonstrating his willingness to adapt his views based on user requirements.
Outlines
🎙️ Live Podcast Recording at Figma Config
The script introduces a special live episode of a podcast recorded at Figma Config with CEO and co-founder Dylan Field. The host expresses gratitude to the Config team for setting up the live recording and studio. The episode delves into Dylan's approach to product development, his use of intuition as a hypothesis generator, and the future of product management. It also touches on Figma's efforts to remain user-friendly and the early days of the company. Dylan shares his favorite AI tool, 'websim,' and the audience is treated to a humorous clip of him as a child actor.
📣 Sponsorship and Design Philosophy Discussion
This paragraph features sponsorship messages for WorkOS and Anvil, highlighting their services for enterprise feature integration and document workflow development, respectively. Following this, the conversation shifts to design philosophy, where Dylan expands on his view of design as a fusion of art and problem-solving. The discussion lightens with a quirky inquiry into a Figma tradition called 'raccoon feet and muffin hands,' which showcases the company's culture and Dylan's engaging personality.
🤔 Building Intuition and Product Taste
Dylan discusses the development of his intuition and product taste, describing intuition as a hypothesis generator that is tested and refined through debate and data analysis. He shares his process of staying informed about Figma through various channels and emphasizes the importance of understanding user needs at a deep level. The conversation also covers his openness to changing his mind when presented with compelling evidence or arguments.
🛠️ The Role of Product Management at Figma
The dialogue explores the value of product management, with Dylan reflecting on the blurred lines between product managers, designers, and engineers. He stresses the importance of each role having a diverse skill set and contributing to a holistic product vision. Dylan also addresses the importance of product managers having a clear strategy and point of view, and the ability to create frameworks that guide the team towards a shared goal.
🛑 The Importance of Simplification in Product Design
Simplification is a key focus for Dylan as he believes that adding features without consideration of complexity can lead to a 'monstrosity.' He discusses the challenges of making Figma more powerful without increasing its complexity, emphasizing the need for constant vigilance to maintain simplicity. The conversation also touches on the redesign of Figma and Dylan's dissatisfaction with certain aspects that he found overly complex.
🚀 Early Days of Figma and Growth Strategies
Dylan reflects on the early days of Figma, the lengthy period from inception to launch, and the initial struggle to secure paying customers. He acknowledges the importance of hiring effectively and getting products to market quickly. The narrative includes anecdotes about personally engaging with early adopters and influencers to gather feedback and build a user base.
🌐 Spotting Trends and the Future of Figma
The conversation shifts to Dylan's ability to identify emerging trends, such as WebGL and CryptoPunks. He talks about his interest in 'websim,' an AI-driven platform that generates simulated web experiences. Dylan also shares his enthusiasm for the future of computing and encourages the audience to share their innovative projects with him.
💡 Learning and Growth as a Leader
Dylan discusses his journey from a small startup to leading a thousand-plus employee company. He emphasizes the importance of continuous learning and adaptation, highlighting the value of mentorship from various sources, including community members, employees, investors, and even those he mentors.
🎬 From Child Actor to Tech Entrepreneur
In the final paragraph, Dylan's childhood as an actor is highlighted, and he reflects on his career transition from acting to computer science and entrepreneurship. The podcast concludes with a light-hearted moment, playing a commercial from his childhood acting days, which Dylan humorously comments on before signing off.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Figma
💡Intuition
💡Product Management
💡Simplicity
💡AI Tool
💡Podcast
💡Community
💡Config
💡Craft
💡Iterative Improvement
💡UserTesting
Highlights
Live recording of the podcast at Figma Config with CEO Dylan Field.
Dylan discusses building and refining product taste and intuition.
Intuition as a hypothesis generator in product development.
Future of product management and its evolution.
Dylan's approach to keeping Figma simple and enhancing user experience.
Stories from the early days of Figma's development.
Dylan's favorite AI tool, websim, and its capabilities.
Importance of community in Figma's growth and success.
Dylan's thoughts on the role of product managers at Figma.
The challenge of balancing simplicity and power in Figma's design.
Dylan's strategy for operationalizing simplicity in product development.
The process of getting early users for Figma through direct engagement with influential designers.
Dylan's perspective on the importance of mentors and continuous learning.
Reflection on the journey from the early days to leading a thousand-person company.
Dylan's view on the early days of computing and the future of technology.
Lightning round with Dylan revealing his thoughts on various topics.
Transcripts
Today I am excited to bring you a very special episode,
which was recorded live at Figma Config with Figma CEO and co-founder, Dylan Field,
in front of a live audience at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is the first
ever live recording of this podcast and it was so much fun. If you watch this on YouTube,
you can see the epic stage that they built specifically for us to recreate my podcast
studio. I could not be more thankful to the Config team for making this happen.
In my conversation with Dylan, we dig into how he builds and refines his product taste
and intuition, how intuition is a hypothesis generator, the future of product management.
How Dylan attempts to operationalize keeping Figma simple and to continue simplifying the
experience. A bunch of stories from the early days of Figma that I've never heard before. Also,
he shares his favorite AI tool called websim, which is wild. And if you wait till the very end,
you can see a very young child actor Dylan Field in a clip that I found online that was hilarious.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite
podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and
it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Dylan Field.
Dylan, thank you so much for joining me and welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, Lenny.
Hi all.
Is this your first live podcast?
This is my first ever live podcast. Also, a big thank you to the Config
team who set up this crazy studio. I had no idea this was going to happen. I feel
like I'm in my studio here with a thousand people watching us. It's very impressive.
I very much dig the background and also the mics that may or may not be wired.
That's right. Don't say that. Don't tell people.
Oh, sorry.
There's no wires coming out of them.
There's no one behind the curtain either. Okay, so Dylan, I want to start by just checking in on
how you're doing. So Config is about to wrap up. We've been at it for two days now. I know how much
lift goes into doing these sorts of things. I imagine you've been thinking about this for a
long time now. I'm just curious how you're doing, any surprises, any highlights, any low lights?
The highlight is the community and just the incredible, incredible people here at
Config. Y'all are awesome. I don't know why I keep talking in the mic like this.
It's instinctual. But seriously, it's just the most amazing community to be part of
and I feel so lucky. And then in terms of how I'm doing at this exact moment,
exhausted, but riding on caffeine and whatever this really cool probiotic drink is.
Any surprises from the past couple of days? Anything that's like, "Oh wow,
that went a lot better than I thought, maybe less well."
Demo, definitely things I would've improved. But also Emil and Mihika were phenomenal, and it was
just so awesome to see them do their demos and present materials. I was just really pleased
with the conversation, I think, that's getting started at Config around AI. I was looking online
on social media and I think people are already zeroing in the right conversation, which is, okay,
in a world of more software being created by AI, what does that mean and the impact on craft and
the impact on quality and the need to have more unique design and how design is a differentiator.
And I think some people are saying, "I agree with that." Some people are saying, "That I disagree
with that", and that's exactly the bounds of what the conversation I imagined would emerge
from yesterday. It was funny, the make design feature, I think that I said on the keynote,
I was like, "This is going to give you the most obvious thing in the most obvious form possible."
And then people online are like, "It's just going to give you some obvious thing." I agree.
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free trial. That's use-A-N-V-I-L.com/lenny. Let's keep talking about design. You once
said that the definition of design is art applied to problem solving. Can you just
add a bit more to that? What do you mean by that? Because that's an amazing line.
Well, I don't think it's my original line. I think someone else said it,
but there's a lot of definitions of design out there too. There's also 'design is dialogue'
or 'design is problem solving'. You just go straight there. I could go with 10 more. But
I like art applied to problem solving because I think that design is often... There is some
component of creativity to it and unique expression that you're trying to provide
and create and put out into the world. But you are also trying to do it and match it to a user need,
a problem that needs to be solved. And I think that it's not pure art,
but if you lose the art and you're just solving the problem, it's totally utilitarian
and it lacks soul. And so the combination of those two things is to me really beautiful.
I'm going to pivot to a very hard hitting question. I hope your PR people don't kill
me for asking this. Many people asked me to ask you this question. Very important.
Please explain a Figma tradition called raccoon feet and muffin hands.
I should probably just leave this interview now. So this is a conversation, I'm not sure
exactly where it started, but it started in early Figma. And basically we had these lunch tables at
Figma where we would just all gather and have very long, interesting meandering conversations
before we got back to work. And one of the questions that, was a 'would you rather',
was would you rather have raccoons for feet or muffins for hands? And I think this is a deeply
philosophical question. I have pondered it since I've heard it. I still don't have one answer.
If you've got an answer, I'm curious what it is.
I've got follow up questions. Can you control where the raccoon take
you or are they just deciding on their own what's happening?
I think that raccoons probably wouldn't even agree with each other where to go.
Okay, that's complicated.
If you had raccoons for feet right now, do you think that it would interfere with this podcast?
But muffin hands would also interfere with my newsletter and I feel like I'd be out of work.
I don't know if you can type.
I'd need a special keyboard. This is very difficult.
You haven't even thought about the upsides of this yet.
What are the upsides?
We can get there, it's all-
Maybe I could eat some of the muffins.
It's the case for optimism.
Cupcakes?
If you have muffins for hands, maybe if you're hungry...
Do they regenerate as you you eat them?
That's a good question. There's no answers here, just questions. Do your nails grow?
Yes.
Oh, okay. Interesting. It's deeper than you might think.
I'm going to play a short clip with Rick Rubin and then I have
a question about it. So we'll see if that plays.
But exactly what he does and how is difficult to describe. Do you play instruments?
Barely.
Do you know how to work a soundboard?
No. I have no technical ability and I know nothing about music.
Then you must know something.
Well, I know what I like and what I don't like.
And I'm decisive about what I like and what I don't like.
So what are you being paid for?
The confidence that I have in my taste and my
ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists.
So I'm not going to say this is you. You need to grow the beard. But I think this
is a little bit you because what I've heard from a number of your
colleagues is that one of your superpowers is intuition and product taste. And someone
said that you have the sixth sense for what's going to work, when you're designing Figma
and you're making decisions in the product. So I'm curious how you've built and refined
your intuition and product taste when it comes to Figma and then even broadly.
That's a lot kinder than I thought you were going to be. I thought you're going to be like,
"You don't know how to code and you don't know how to design."
No.
But no, here's my framework for it. 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 support them or negate them. And then
you winnow it down into what is our working hypothesis? And from that you move forward.
I heard that you read every tweet that mentions Figma and share them with folks.
There's a Slack channel where you paste them. I imagine that is a part of this where you're
just constantly watching what people are saying about Figma, what people are complaining about.
I definitely look everywhere trying to constantly ingest information about Figma,
and it's not just Twitter/X, whatever that's called now, but anywhere on the internet,
support channels, et cetera. And I'm always trying to understand. I also ask a lot of
questions and I try to get to root problems and understand where people are coming from
and what are they actually trying to solve. Sometimes people are saying, "Hey, I need X",
but they really want Y or Z. And trying to do that myself and engage and dive deeper there, but also
to encourage our team to do that, I think leads to really good outcomes in terms of what we ship.
Is there something you've changed your mind about, building on that, either based on customer
feedback or some employee just making a case and like, "Okay, you're right." Is there something
that comes to mind of something you've changed your mind about recently? Somebody said Flides.
For when we started out Flides. I have not. It's Figma Slides. Well, it's not recent,
but one good example of me changing my mind is that you all have Pages in Figma, you're welcome.
But I think I have deep skepticism of Pages still. I'm not sure they're... 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 today. I just don't think it's the most elegant
solution in the context of the entire system of product design that you could create. The world
told me and our team that that did not matter and they needed Pages. And don't worry, we're not
shipping Pages. But I am still very skeptical of them and I think that in general, probably my team
would tell you that I don't always change my mind, but I also build trust with people in deep ways.
And I think across our organization, 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's
my feedback, here's what I'm skeptical of, let's see what happens." And then sometimes they come
back to me and they're like, "See I was right." But usually they're pretty polite about it.
Just to build on that, something a lot of people try to work on is being good
at influencing leadership execs, CEOs. What do you find works to change your mind? What
do people come to you with that helps you like, "Okay, you're actually right?"
I think the more concrete an artifact is or the more you can debate something,
the better. I ask for examples a lot, I try to ask follow up questions about things and make sure I
fully understand it. And I think where I get stuck sometimes is if I ask follow up questions and we
don't have answers yet, and then my response might be, "Let's go find the answer to these questions
and then let's go back to this conversation", if I think it's something that's really important. And
I think for some people they might go, "Okay, this is actually really obvious. I can't believe you're
so dense and you don't get it yet." And sometimes they're right and they come back and they're like,
"Okay, here's the data now, can we move on?" And we do, we move on and they're right. And
I just think that it's important though to just really understand something from first principles
for a lot of decisions. And maybe it's just a perfectionist quality repeated over time, I think
it leads to good outcomes as long as you make sure it's not bottle-necking the organization.
So following up on that, let's talk about product management. So last year you had
Brian Chesky here, I think maybe on this stage, maybe a bigger stage. And he said that
they got rid of product management at Airbnb and everyone cheered and all the PMs were very sad.
And he didn't actually mean they got rid of product management,
they changed the function and evolved it. I'm curious just to get your take.
It's funny. This year we have you here Lenny, so that's your answer. No...
I had him on the-
Before and after, all. Surprise.
We're still here. We're still here. I want to get your take on product management. You all
have amazing product managers at Figma. I've had three of them on the podcast already. I'm
curious just what value you find the best product managers bring to Figma?
It was really funny last year after that interview, so Yuhki, our chief product officer,
had invited me to a dinner for our PM team. And it took a while to get out of Config at the end
of the day, and I eventually made the dinner but I was 40 minutes late. And I walk in and Mihika who
was on stage yesterday, presenting Figma Slides, Flides, she was standing up and doing a mock Brian
Chesky impersonation. And she's standing up in front of the entire product team and she goes,
"And then Brian Chesky's like, 'There don't need to be any PMs.' And Dylan's like... Ooh." And
I'm like, "Hi, Mihika." And I'd never seen her so red. And then I gave a quick, "Hey PM team,
I believe in you. Thank you for your hard work." Seriously, I think that if you zoom out, it's
always tricky whenever you're asked to formally define, what is the separation between a product
manager, a designer, and an engineer? It's always hard to actually create those clear lines. And
I think in many organizations they're blurry. But at the end of the day, a PM and designer,
they need to have some technical expertise or at least understand how some systems work to probably
create the best things they can possibly make. A designer, engineer, they should probably have some
sense of the business objectives. They should have some sense of what users want. An engineer
and a product manager, they should have taste and craft and some sense of the option space, and some
desire to care about the visual implementation. And I think you can include research in there too,
if you want to make it four legs of the stool rather than the trio. And you can talk about
all three probably should have exposure to users and be talking in dialogue with users. So I think
that if you think about that group holistically, each is important. If you think about a team,
there's all these qualities that you have to have to make a great product. And that said,
I think for product managers and the product function... I think sometimes when you see people
that fall down in that function is because they treat it too much like process. Which
is very important too, don't me wrong. Good process can help support good outcomes. But
I think that you can't lose sight of the problems that you're solving. You have to go talk to users
and you have to actually have a strategy. And if you're really good, you should have a point
of view. And some point of views are going to lead to good outcomes and some point of views
aren't. And there's some tense sense of taste. And you also have to bring everyone together
and make sure that they get to the objective, that it's celebrated, and that at the end of
the project or when you complete a milestone, everyone's stoked. Otherwise, it's not going to
be a team that gels, you're not going to get to the next outcome. Even if you get to an outcome
and it's a milestone, but if everyone's unhappy, you failed. And so somehow good product people are
able to do all this and they're able to create great frameworks that bring everyone along with
them. And so everyone's able to have a shared head space around what it is they're trying to get to.
Someone once said that if PMs disappeared or if a PM goes on vacation, everything's okay for a week
or two or three and then things start to crumble a little bit because they glue everything together.
Do you find that sort of thing? Let me actually ask a different question along those lines,
are you bearish or bullish on the future of product management? Do you think PMs will continue
the way they are? Do you think PMs will dwindle any sense of the future of product management?
I think probably everyone's learning to do a bit more of everyone else's job in this current
moment. That said, I definitely think there's still immense value in product, immense value
in design, immense value in engineering. And so I think those roles will continue to exist.
So maybe I just want to come back to the question of just, with the best PMs that you work with,
do you find, what value do they most bring? I guess is there anything that's like,
"Here's what would be gone if we didn't have these PMs"?
The best PMs, I think again, create those frameworks that bring everyone else along
and those frameworks also have a point of view and a strategy associated with them.
So you're able to take the strategy, take the point of view, wrap it all up in a framework,
and then make it so that everyone knows what the destination is and how to get there.
So along these lines, something I've heard you're really big on is simplification. Somebody told
me that when you're in a designer view and things just feel too complex to you, quote,
"You furrow your brow and insist there must be something simpler." Why is simplification so
top of mind for you, why is it so important for you and just why is it so hard to do?
Oh, gosh. Well, I think probably anyone here who's worked on product knows how hard it is. I
think the more that you add, the harder it is to create something that's coherent. One essay that
Evan, my co-founder, introduced me to early on in famous history, I think from Stevie's
[inaudible 00:23:06] grants or something like that, contains the term irreducible complexity.
And it's basically this idea that one plus one does not equal three, it sometimes equals one
and a half. And the more that you add and the more that you continue to put in something,
the more complex it gets and the worse it gets. And I think this is definitely true for tools.
So in the context of Figma, we can make it more powerful, but to do that in a way
that's not making it more complex at the same time is extremely hard. And we have to always
be paying attention to how complex or how simple things are because if we don't, it just becomes a
monstrosity really fast. And there's parts of our product that, I don't want to dive into that part
of the conversation, the self-critique, but definitely 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 all the right local decisions and yet together
they're too complex and they're not working anymore. And let's go revisit the system now."
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I know you just redesigned Figma. I imagine part of that came from things are just getting too
complicated, not as simple as we want. Is there anything that's been bugging you in the old Figma
but like, "Oh, this is way too complicated, I really want to simplify this thing"?
Yes.
What's that?
We'll move on, but many things.
Sounds good. And in terms of how to keep things simple, so I had Dharmesh Shah on the podcast,
he's the co-founder of HubSpot, and the way he described it is
that you're always fighting the second loft through more dynamics of entropy,
just the product getting more complicated. And he sees himself as part of the solution,
of top down, you have to be on top of that. Is that the way you see it? That's your role,
to keep things simple. Do you think people further down the ladder can do that?
Absolutely, everyone's responsible for simplicity. And I think another quote
that is not mine but is a really a good one is "Keep the simple things simple. Make the
complex things possible." And I think that's a really important principle to hold as you're
designing tools. And I'd say that it's really easy to make the simple things complex, unfortunately.
I want to pivot to talking about early days Figma. So I don't know how many people know this,
but it took three and a half years to launch Figma from when you were beginning to work on it.
Way too long, don't do that.
This is my question. So it took three and a half years to launch and then five years
to get your first customer. Dylan, what the hell were you doing all that time?
I don't think it took five years for a first... Well okay-
Paying.
First paying customer, sure. Okay, fine. Slightly less but approximately five years,
it gets to be round up. I think that if I had been probably better at hiring and recruiting... I see
Nadia in the audience, making eye contact with her the entire time, for some reason. She's our chief
people officer. If she had been at Figma from day one, we would've hired probably faster and
we would've gotten to market faster. But I think that it was a hard product to build and to get
everything to come together with. I also see Sho. And I think for... Sho's joined us as a director
of engineering. He's a VP of product now. Again, people can wear many hats. And he was someone that
joined Figma and said, "Hey, y'all need to ship this thing, you're really close." And he really
helped catalyze us to ship in that moment. And I think, in week one, he gave a presentation. It
was like, "Here's what we got to do, here's the gap. Everyone agrees on it. Let's go."
You already said that you wish you shipped earlier. Is there any advice
there for just people building something today of-
Get it out as fast as you possibly can. Everything they tell you about making sure
that you get a product out really quickly is totally true. The faster you get it out,
the more feedback you get. That is a positive thing. And now I index on that when we try to
build. And FigJam's a great example of that, we shipped it incredibly fast and it helped us get
to market and get feedback faster. Figma Slides, great example of that too. Dev Mode, for what
it's worth, it took us longer. We just had to keep iterating and building it and building it again.
Certain directions we tried didn't work out and we really had to get to a place where we
were able to really believe that we were adding value and really understood the developer's user,
and it just didn't happen for a long time. So it's interesting because I think people look
at Dev Mode and sometimes they go, "Oh, this is quite simple", to the point about simplicity.
Figma, is this simpler than FigJam? And the reality was it took at least three times as long.
So your advice is ship quickly. There's also this push the-
I'd hold the bar, for sure.
That's the question I have, is there's also a lot of talk of just the bar has risen. You need,
especially B2B software, craft is really important. Linear talks a lot about this,
just the bar is very high for people to switch from something out there. Is there
anything... I don't think you'll have, "Here's the answer. When you're ready to ship...", but
just any advice of just like, "Here's good enough" versus "No, you should probably wait."
Well, another thing that Evan taught me was that for a new launch, you got quality,
features, deadline, choose two. And I think that the beautiful thing about software is
you can keep iterating on it. So it's not like a physical product where you have to
always have quality in there, otherwise it's never going to have quality. You
can ship it with features and deadline and then improve it iteratively over time. I'm
not saying you should always do that. Sometimes you need to at least have a
minimum bar of quality for the things you have and you're going to ship less features maybe.
So you choose quality and deadline and sometimes you say, "Actually here's the minimum feature
set and we're going to have this quality bar and you're willing to push it out." But I think you
have to know when you're introducing a new thing, what it's going to take and then to
make that minimally awesome product. But also I think that when you're iteratively improving it,
you shouldn't just be focused on the features, you have to focus on the quality too.
I like this term you use, 'minimally awesome product'. Love it. So the way you got your
early users for Figma is quite fascinating. I don't know how many people know this story,
but you basically wrote a script to scrape Twitter
and create a graph of the most influential designers on Twitter,
and then you made it your mission to convince them to use Figma and make them evangelists.
Is there anything more to the story there? And then I have a question along those lines.
You can't do this anymore, first of all, because the Twitter API doesn't exist anymore. Rest in
peace, Twitter API. But look, I was an intern at LinkedIn and when I was there I saw some really
cool work people had done with Gephi, which was a network visualization tool. And based on that
I thought it'd be interesting to try to, like you said, look at who the design network was,
who the central nodes were, which you can just run [inaudible 00:31:31] on and see. And you could do
that for other communities too, which I have done in the past just because I'm curious about social
network dynamics and social network analysis. And you could just do those things back in 2012,
2013 when Figma started. So I constructed this list of, "Here are the most central designers
in the graph", but also then I looked at their work. And the ones that I was really inspired by
as a total fanboy, and someone who wanted to learn as much as I could about design,
was inspired by these folks, the ones I was inspired by I reached out to and said, "Hey,
can I buy you a coffee?" And most of them are really kind. The design community is amazing.
And they said yes and then from there was able to learn from them, show them Figma, get their
feedback. And I think it started honestly more as me fanboy and me getting feedback.
One example is Tim Van Damme. I saw him on Dribble. Max [inaudible 00:32:35], I'm like,
"Oh, my God, this guy is just genius. These icons are incredible." I think the first
time I met Tim was at Dropbox and think I had this total fanboy moment. I'm like,
"I've been tracing your icons." He's like, "Hi."
And I had been working on vector networks with a team, and my test cases were a lot
of his icons. Because they were just beautiful and I liked looking at them and studying them.
And to now have Tim on the team and have him doing the icons for UI 3 is such an honor,
and privileged to work with someone of that craft. So reaching out to your hero sometimes works.
It's interesting because when people hear that story, when I've heard that story many times,
it was always like, "Here's a growth hack. Find the most influential people in your field,
go try to convince them to use your product." And the way you're describing it is you were using it
more as feedback. "I just want to show you the product, get your feedback, make this better",
and then it ended up working. They're like, "Oh, I love Figma, I'm going to use it."
Well, I think it especially works for designers that way, because designers are really good at
giving feedback. It turns out that not everyone is good at giving feedback, but designers are awesome
at that. So we're really lucky. And literally early on in Figma's existence, folks... I think
Payam [inaudible 00:34:00] is here somewhere. I'm not sure if he's in this room, but I was hoping
to see him before the end of Config. Payam wrote a very long doc for us about all the things that
he wanted to see in Figma after we did a user research study with him. With a bottle of wine
because our text editing didn't work very well then. So I ran him through the user study, I knew
we'd need a bottle of wine to finish and it took hours. The type of sentence in Figma was so slow.
That reminds me of a story I've heard where... One of your first customers was Coda, sponsor I
think of Config. It used to be called Krypton. And there's a story where you installed Figma,
you helped them get set up, you drove home and then they called you like,
"Hey, Figma is not working anymore." And you drove back yourself to help fix them and it
ended up their wifi was down or there was a wifi issue. Is that the story?
I don't remember what the solution was, but-
That's what I heard.
... we were halfway home and somehow I saw... I'm sure I was not looking at my email while driving,
definitely is not something anyone here should do. But somehow found out that
they had an issue and we turned the car around. Shishir is amazing by the way,
and has been a mentor for a long time to me and many people on our team. And he, I think, at the
time did not know he was the first customer. And later on he came over to Figma's office
and I introduced him without really thinking about that. And I was like, "This is Shishir,
he's team was really the first user of Figma as a team." And he goes, "Wait a second, I am?"
I want to talk about something totally different. Something I've noticed you are good at is you
spot trends ahead of other people. So obviously WebGL you were on early and that's what allowed
Figma to exist, to link it in the browser. I saw you tweeting about CryptoPunks way
before they were worth millions of dollars. You're just like, "Look, CryptoPunks. Look,
I got a few, they're really cool. They're super cool, little pipe." I'm curious if
there's anything these days you're really excited about that might become bigger in the future?
Well, we talked about websim. We were just talking
about them backstage and I think before this conversation too.
Talk about websim.
And that's an example of something where it's so interesting because
there's a generative UI component and yet it's not what we're going for, for Figma,
it's totally different. So we actually invested in websim with Figma Ventures.
Maybe explain what websim is for folks.
Websim is a hallucinated internet basically. If you go to websim.ai, you can use different
models like Claude or GPT-4o, and you can do that either through their defaults or you can use open
router to get a bigger context window. And the more that you use it, the more you construct
this context window of this almost universe that you're building up in websim. And as you do it,
it's almost like you're world building. And I just have gone deep and geeked out on this when I've
had time, and they've evolved the platform a lot. So we were back there and they were showing
me some new functionality that's really cool too. But I think it's so interesting
to see it as this almost lean forward entertainment tool using the internet.
So I thought you would answer this and so we're going to have a picture come up here,
that I tried websim and played around with it. And hopefully a photo comes up somewhere. So all
I typed here was gmail.com/dylanfield. So this is in an invented Gmail. Just came up with this
using AI of what your inbox should look like and it looks pretty accurate. There's Adobe stuff-
DOJ, not FTC.
... financial. This is not actual information. Nobody buy stock based on this. So it's pretty-
No comment on 75% year over year.
So the way it work-
I hadn't ever tried Gmail before. Did you try you? What was your inbox?
I didn't do me. I don't think it would have anything. It'd be like, if it does-
Who are you?
So the way it works is just you type a URL or a prompt in the URL
field and it'll just invent what that website looks like. It's hilarious.
It's awesome.
It's awesome. So I think they're going to get a lot of traffic right now.
One time someone posted in our random channel on Slack, they said, "I had a dream last night." It's
always a good start for the random channel. "I had a dream last night that I was working on FigJam,
but it wasn't FigJam, it was Frog Jam. And websim was like figma.com/frogjam
and it came up with a whole marketing website complete with toad puns for Frog
Jam. The sticky notes were lily pads and you were supposed to... It had this whole
metaphor of hopping from lily pad to lily pad to generate new ideas.
This is genius. Interestingly, before Figma, your only other job was an intern at three
different companies and now you're leading this juggernaut of a business, a thousand
plus people. I imagine there's a lot you've had to learn over this time. So I'm not going to
ask you what you've learned because I think it's probably a lot. I'm curious just what
has most helped you scale and learn? Is it exec coaches, is it co friends? Is it hiring
execs? What's most helped you scale with the business and become the leader you are today?
I think all the above. And also just having a mindset of, you have to constantly adapt
and grow and change and adapt. But I would say that mentors can come from anywhere. It can come
from the community, all of you. Mentorship can come from the people you hire. It can come from
folks that you actively seek out as investors or explicit mentorship and mentors. It can come from
people that call themselves coaches. And what's interesting too is it can come from people you
mentor as well. There have been plenty of people where they ask me a question at some
point and I give them an answer and they think it's insightful for whatever reason. And then
years later where we're talking again and I ask them a question and they're like, "Well, years
ago you told me..." And they repeat back what I told them like, "That's a really good point."
Or they've grown and they've changed and they've learned and they tell me something completely
different. They give me a new framework. And so I think that when you're... A lot of times
when I talk with new founders, they teach me things that are totally things that I've just
never thought about. Or interns at Figma have been mentors to me, in many ways. So you really
have to have a ready mindset and just always be ready to absorb new information, I think.
When you were just tinkering around with Figma 12 years ago, I think at this point,
did you ever imagine you'd be running a thousand person company and audience just
spell bound by what you're building? There's people lining up to take photos with your
logo in the lobby. That doesn't happen. That's very rare. Just to give you a chance to reflect
on just how it feels to have built that over time, how does that feel? I'm sitting here right now.
I feel very, very lucky, but also very humbled by just the community that is around Figma. I
mentioned in the keynote, but just the people that are in the Figma community are the people
that are shaping the world's technology. And the chance to serve them and to make software
for them and hopefully improve their life in some little way is such a privilege. It's a
responsibility and one I don't take lightly, but also I try not to carry that as a weight,
but rather as pump me up and get me excited to go build for them.
When we were talking about this idea earlier... The first thing you said is it's a responsibility,
which I didn't expect. Is there anything more there just like,
"Wow, I really have to help make..."?
Well, again, going back to the simplification point, it's very important that we continue to
make Figma more and more simple. We make Figma as powerful as we can for the people that are
in our community. That we figure out what people's needs truly are and that we advance
the state of the craft, make it so that we do that in a responsible way. And that we champion
design and champion quality. So we're trying to do all those things. We sometimes mess up,
but people have been very patient with us and we're very thankful for that. And thankful for the
support of just everyone here and in our community that are giving us a chance to make this impact.
Is there anything else you want to... Oh, there's some applause. Love that.
Thank you.
Applause break. Is there anything else you want to share? Anything else you
want to leave listeners with before we get to a very quick lightning round?
Well, no, one thing I'll share is I think we're so early on this journey of computing in general.
And in our lifetimes, we're going to have the chance to just build such incredible
technology and incredible products. And I'm really excited to see what everyone in this room builds,
but also everyone on the internet that [inaudible 00:43:48] maybe also builds
and send me cool stuff. If you build something cool, message me somewhere and share it with me.
What's the best way to message you?
Email's good. You can probably figure out my email if you-
Just use websim.
... [inaudible 00:44:03] for five seconds or use
websim. Twitter/X is good. Those are two places at least you can find me.
Dylan, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. We
only have a couple of minutes left. It's a very short one. Do you have a favorite
product that you've recently discovered that you really love other than websim?
Well, I'll say that, and it's not like a favorite product,
but I will say that if you get... Hesitate if I should say this or not.
We'll cut it out in post, don't worry about it.
I'll say this, it's so fascinating to look at all the different LMs out there right now
and what each one is uniquely good at. And it's really fun if you can hack them the
right way and get them in the right mood, what they'll do. That's what I'll say.
Whoa, what does that mean?
It's my diplomatic answer.
Interesting. Do you have a favorite life motto that you come back to,
repeat to yourself, share with friends or family, that you find really useful?
I don't know if I've got a life motto, but one piece of advice I've always appreciated is
when people give you advice, they're not giving you advice,
they're giving themselves advice in your shoes. I think that's an interesting one.
So if I gave you advice here, I'm giving myself advice in your shoes.
Final question. Not many people know this, but you were a child actor when you were five years old.
Do you think you made the right career move? Do you feel like you sometimes regret acting?
Yes, definitely. That's my mom. My mom's in the audience and she says yes. No. We've been
talking about product. If you're an actor, you're a product in some way. And that's not to disparage
actors, actors are awesome. Acting is awesome. I loved it. But my differentiators when I was five,
five and a half I think, was that I could read and I could sit still and I was decently cute.
And I hit puberty and those things were no longer differentiators. And
then it was like, let's do some computer science.
So to close, we're going to play a... Oh, applause. We're going to play a clip,
something I found on YouTube to close and enjoy. 30 seconds clip.
Where will you find a world of ideas for your child? Only at
eToys. From Barbie to Brio to SwimWays. eToys, where great ideas come to you.
That was a good find. Thank you.
Dylan, thank you so much for doing this.
Thank you. Can I make one comment about that commercial?
Okay, one comment.
One comment before we end. That commercial made that company go
bankrupt. Thank you all for joining. Thank you for having me, Lenny.
Good luck. Thanks Dylan. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you
found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or
leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all
past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
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