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 milestone 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 Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations 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 got nearly a $30 billion valuation, which is double 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 everyone’s business.” There were 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 gone, so I was just trying to make conversation, not sing that night. But there were some epic performances for sure.

I thought about you a lot and the whiplash you had to go through with 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 were 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 really 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 to ask ourselves with just regulatory being what it was, whether or not that was a correct assessment, not a correct assessment, we’ll leave it to history to tell. But I think that throughout as we saw that regulatory risk was real, that gave us even more impetus to say, “Foot on the gas even more.”

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 itself. And to do that while also keeping the company going at full speed and then some, the team was incredible through that period.

In some ways was that part of the appeal for Adobe of having Figma? Like, you guys are future tools that they didn’t 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 the focus for us right now is on a lot of the AI stuff . . . opportunities to make it so that we can lower the floor, bring more people into the design process, but 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, bring more people into the world of creating prototypes and software? Those 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 community, often by investors in the Wall Street community.  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-solving, and I think that people go on this design journey and maybe the first step is 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 because I’m putting this in front of people—my product, my software, my app—and they don’t know how to use it. They’re getting stuck.”

And I think then from there they kind of think about, Okay, well, what’s the overall system? How do I think through how this entire thing should 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 does 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 were almost no designers in the 1990s, early 2000s, very few in number. They were oftentimes misunderstood, and yet they did incredible work despite it.

Then we got 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 because the Bureau of Labor said that there were 250,000 designers or something like that in the United States. And the reality was that there’s this total exponential trend of how many designers were being hired and how design-to-engineer ratios were changing.

Through that growth, there were new challenges that were 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 bring 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 recognize the importance of design. They might not always understand it, but everyone’s trying to understand it. So now I think it’s like how do we lead? How does design bring 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 iterate, that is the business process that you go through for everything, and that’s what everyone needs to be thinking through as they adapt in this new age of software that we’re in.