Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field
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We're no longer in this era of good enough is fine. Good enough is not enough. It's mediocre. If you want to win in the game of software, you need to differentiate the design. Craft matters. What are a couple lessons you've learned for founders that are thinking about startup ideas? We started the company August 2012, started working hardcore at Figma June 2013, and then summer 2017 we made our first money. Don't do that. Get to market faster. I wish we had. Is there a counterintuitive decision you made along the journey of Figma at Figjam? About a month before the launch of Figjam at config, it was like, okay, we built a thing. It's just lacking something. The soul isn't there. Let's go differentiate by making Figjam fun. The team was like, what? We're going to make fun our differentiator. In retrospect, it was absolutely the right move. Let's talk about Figma make. The use cases that seem to be emerging in this world of AI, app prototyping are prototypes for product teams. PMs are no longer sayings the designer, hey, can you draw this thing out for me? That frees up designer time to go this or more deeply the stuff they need to go into. And it allows anyone to kind of add to that first conversation of where should we go? Which function maybe is most in trouble? It all depends on the way that things play out from here. What you have to believe is your organization is better as models get better. Have we seen productivity increases? Yeah, but like that is not something that has made our new headcount we want for engineering go down. We're hiring. Today, my guest is Dylan Field. Dylan is the CEO and co-founder of Figma, one of the most beloved and used products in the world. I don't know a single product team that doesn't use and love Figma, which is extremely rare. In our chat, we talk about how Dylan kept the company focused and motivated after the Adobe deal fell through, how he's most evolved as a leader over the past 13 years,
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