Figma’s dylan field on how design can continue to reshape business

Figma burst into the public eye in 2022 after adobe was blocked from buying the design startup for $ 20 billion. This chapter set the stage for an even bigger millstone at Figma: a splashy iPo this summer at nearly double that valuation. Cofounder and CEO Dylan Field Shares What Distinguishes Figma From Competitors, and Why Design Is Increasingly at the Center of Every Industry in Today’s Software-Driven Economy.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid ResponseHosted by Robert Safian, Former Editor-in-chiff of Fast companyFrom the team behind the Masters of scale Podcast, Rapid Response Features Candid Conversions with Today’s Top Business Leaders Navigating Real-Time Challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response Wherever You Get Your Podcasts to Ensure You Never Miss An Episode.

I should congratulate you because you had a blockbuster iPo this summer. The stock settled a bit, but you still get a $ 30 billion Valuation, which is duel what adobe tried to buy you for a couple of years ago. Going Public with So Much Fanfare and Attention and Success, Has That Been Fun? How much do you look at it as a distraction in some ways for you and your team versus, “Let’s ride this wave as long as it’ll go, this is great”?

I’ve been really proud of the team. I Think Nothing’s really changed in terms of our focus. I think the day itself was not just a celebration of figma, but a celebration of design and for design to go public in that way. I felt very honored to be able to be part of that day. Hanging from the walls at the new york stock exchange we had the words, “Design is everything’s business.” There was some champagne toasts, some people who were singing karaoke that night.

What’s your go-to karaoke song?

After two weeks of roadshow, my voice was given, so I was just trying to make conversation, not sing that night. But there was some epic performance for sure.

I thinkt about you a lot and the whiplash you had to go through the adobe merger getting blocked. I’M Curious How the Company’s different because of that experience. Are you different? Are your products different? There was strategic reasons you wanted to become part of adobe initially.

It’s interesting. The company that’s acquiring in this period between sign and close, they can’t direct activities, and that’s something I think people don’t real know. And so we had our road map going into the deal, and that was our road map during the deal.

It didn’t change, and our foot i think, was on the gas throughout. And the more that we started to have ask orselves with just regulatory being But i think that thoughts out

I was like, “Okay, if we’re part of adobe, great, we’re going in strong. And if we’re not, we should definitely be keeping our foot on the gas.” It was hard. As you’re talking with regulators all over the world, that’s almost a full-time job in its. And to do that while also keeping the company going at full speed and then some, the team was if if if there is a period.

In some ways was that part of the appeal for adobe of having figma? Like, you guys are future tools that they Didn Bollywood have in the future way of operating. Where they want to go is where you are, and to a certain extent, maybe where they are is some of the places you want to go.

We still don’t really see adobe as competitive. I think it’s the easy framing, maybe. A lot of the adobe suite, i’m not rushing to go build any of that. We have so much to go cover this journey from my data product, and i think that focus for us right now is on a lot of the ai stuff. , , Opportunities to make it so that we can lower the floor, brings more people into the design process, but also also raise the ceiling, make it (Possible for) designers (to) do more.

It’s easy to say those words. It’s a lot to execute on to actually make that really good and up to the standards of designers. Because ultimately all of us humans, we expect more from ai than we expect from a human. If you say, “Here’s a small prompt to change my spacing in a file,” Figma better get it right, otherwise people dismiss it out of hand.

I’m not saying that we have to do the work of a world-class designer, because we won’t. There’s a need for designers to lead the charge, and ai will only get you so far. But the drudgery, how do we remove that from the design process? How do we get more access to more people, brings more people into the world of creating prototypes and software? That are our big things to bite off.

I’ve noticed that the word design And the definition of what a designer is are often misunderstood by people in the business communication, often by investors in the wall street communication. People think, Oh, designer, they’re deciding what color the curtains are going to be Or something like that. And i’ve had these conversations before with mark parker when he was the ceo of nike who was a designer, brian chesky at airbnb. Designer Ceos Are Still A Small Club. What do people not understand about design? What Makes A Designer Ceo Different?

There are a million definitions of design, but I always like to think of it as a kind of core problem-saolving, and i think that people go on this design Journey and Maybe the FIRST STEP ES LIKE, Does That Even Matter? I made something cool. Why do I need a designer?

And then i think at some point people go, “Well, I should at least make it pretty. I’ll hire a designer. How do I make it pop? How do I make it cool, sexy?” And then i think from there people go, “Wait a second, maybe that’s not enough before i’m putting this in front of People, My Product, My Software, My App –and Apt -Aand They Done Done Done Don’T KNOW DO KNOW DOT KNOW TO UsT Getting Stuck. “

And i think then from there they kind of thought about, Okay, Well, What’s The Overall System? How do I think through how this enter the whole work? What’s the brand? What’s my point of view as a business? What are the business constraints? What’s the Culture Right Now? How dos that affect everything?

It’s like you can go out in these Outer Rings and Just Keep Going. And i think that designers have for a long time had a mentality of almost like this imposter syndrome. If you think about the way that design has evolved as a career, there was almost no designers in the 1990s, early 2000s, very few in number. They were oftentimes MISUNDERSTOOD, and Yet they did if you work despite it.

Then we get into the apple era of “Design is how it works,” and steve jobs really championing design. You started to see this rapid growth in the number of designers being hired. When we started figma, we didn’t know if Figma design was a big enough market believes the bureau of labor said that there was 250,000 designers or something like that in the united states. And the reality was that there’s this total exponical trend of how many designers were being hired and how design-to-engineer ratios were changing.

Through that growth, there was new challenges that wasre introduced. How do I keep everything consistent when all these different design voices have all sorts of creative ideas they want to explore? And also, how do I be efficient on a team with many designers Around the table? How do I brings my voice as a designer to the highest levels? How do I have a seat at the table? And that was the meme then.

Well, now design has a seat at the table in the era of today. I think people are recognize the importance of design. They might not all Always Undrstand it, but always’s trying to understand it. So now i think it’s like how do we lead? How does design brings people along and how do more designers step into roles where they can guide their organizations? BeCause the design process of thinking through different ways things can work, diverging, and then being able to converge on a solution and deliver it to customers and itaret, that is the bushes proxies the buses Through for everything, and that’s what everyone needs to be through as they adapt in this new age of software that we’re in.