Robert Bye reflects on his time at Figma. I love the way he defines product sense as ​“Reading data + Listening to users + Taste + Intuition + Craft”. Here is how to develop it: ​“I’ve come to believe that product sense isn’t really something you can learn in the traditional sense. You can’t just read a book or take a course and expect to be good at it. It’s something you develop over time – by being curious, by trying things out, and most importantly, by surrounding yourself with people who have great taste who are willing to constructively critique each other’s work.”

“We founded Modyfi to build the design platform that multidisciplinary designers deserve. We have known the team at Figma for a while, and have admired what they’ve built for the broader design community, as well as their shared mission to make design more accessible. We believe that together, we can continue to innovate and push the boundaries of what’s possible for designers. As part of this transition, Modyfi will no longer be available after Friday, June 13th.”

The design community never lets a good meme opportunity go to waste. ​“Figma slapped Swedish AI coding startup Loveable with a cease-and-desist warning for naming one of its new product features ​“Dev Mode.” It turns out Figma successfully trademarked the term Dev Mode in November last year, according to the US Patent and Trademark office, having introduced its own Dev Mode feature in 2023.”

The time has come: ​“Design software maker Figma said on Tuesday that it has submitted paperwork to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering.”

Jay chats with Natasha Tenggoro who shows how she designed AI features for Figma Slides. You will learn about Natasha’s design process, AI design, designing shadows, design explorations for Slides and more.

Claire Butler: ​“A love letter to scaling from 10 to 1400 people and 0 to millions of users over a decade as Figma’s first marketing and business hire.” One of my favorite insights: ​“As a product marketer I’d been trained to lead with ​“benefits over features,” but with designers that didn’t work. They cared about what the tool could actually do. They’d believe the benefits once they experienced them.”

“In this interview, Jay chats with Natasha Tenggoro who shows how she designed AI features for FigJam. You will learn about Natasha’s design process, AI design, presenting to leadership and more.”

So excited to dive into it! ​“This file showcases the UI3 design language from Figma’s internal design system, featuring the styles, components, and variables that help Figma’s design team build products. By sharing this publicly, we hope to support other teams and creators, whether it’s with developing Figma plugins/​widgets, exploring ideas, or even creating your own design guidelines and UI Kits in Figma.”

In time for fully transitioning to UI3, Jay chats with Tim Van Damme who shows how he designed UI3 icons in Figma. You will learn about Tim’s icon design process, preserving visual weight, how he makes icons playful, and more. Don’t miss part 2, where they discuss designing UI3.

Figma’s designer advocates, product designers, engineers, and PMs hung out in London to record a mini-series about craft, users, and the design process. In this episode, they discuss the challenges designers face in the industry and how Figma approaches the design process to overcome these challenges. In the following Users episode, they cover how Figma product development teams approach user feedback and incorporate it into their design process.

In this interview, Jay chats with product designer Kelly Li who shows how she redesigned Figma Community. You will learn about Kelly’s design process, A/B testing, sharing research findings, and design explorations for the Figma Community.

Luis is working on an incredible community resource. Can’t wait to dig into it!

Jay chats with Tammy Taabassum, a Product Designer at Figma, who shows how she redesigned notifications for Figma. You will learn about Tammy’s design process, handling tough user feedback, design explorations, and more.

(Read without a paywall.) Bloomberg: ​“Design startup Figma Inc. plans to double the number of employees in its New York office over the next nine years, taking advantage of state subsidies to continue to add to an expanding workforce. San Francisco-based Figma now has 1,600 employees, up from 500 at the start of 2022, a spokesperson said. The New York office, Figma’s second biggest, will grow to about 500 people by 2034, supported by a tax credit from the state.”

(Read without a paywall.) The New York Times reports: ​“Figma, a cloud-based design platform, has met with investment banks in recent weeks to discuss an initial public offering that could come as soon as this year, two people with knowledge of the matter said.”

Jay from Sneak Peek partnered with Figma to launch a new video series, where he looks inside the Figma files of top designers. In this interview, Jay chats with Tammy Taabassum, a Product Designer at Figma. You will learn how designers at Figma organize their files, do engineering handoffs, design critiques, and more.

To celebrate his four years at Figma, Keeyen updated his portfolio with the FigJam and Slides projects he contributed to.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy from the Invest Like The Best podcast interviews Dylan Field, covering ​“the hardest part of building in private, his principles for avoiding common design pitfalls, and why human creativity is still as relevant as ever despite the growing capabilities of AI models.”

After being at Figma from 2019 to early 2024 and seeing the company grow from less than 100 to over 1,500 employees, Software Engineer Andrew Chan wrote down some notes on what brought him to Figma and why he thinks it succeeded. He highlights two factors that created Figma’s ultimate moat — browser-first link sharing brought non-designers into the product, and their multiplayer technology was hard to copy for existing products like Adobe XD and Sketch: ​“I would guess that this was less of a ​“collaborative algorithms are really hard to implement” and more of a ​“existing products are really hard to make collaborative” problem: Framer moved to browser-based collaboration pretty successfully, but it did so by completely ditching its old product, while Figma-like design collaborative design tools created from scratch are pretty common these days.”

Another great point is on forming strong product opinions early on and crunching on them until they’re right: ​“One clear thing to me is that Figma’s astounding success in design was due in large part to the company identifying a gap in the design space and working on it essentially in secret for years. Folks like Rasmus and Sho formed strong opinions on nearly every aspect of the product-to-be, which we would spend the next few years realizing in fairly recognizable form. I will make this claim mostly without evidence, but suffice to say that many features like auto-layout and component variants had their bones laid out years in advance (although most newer features like variables were designed later AFAIK).”

Vincent van der Meulen, Design Engineer at Figma, talks about Figma’s approach of complementing designers rather than replacing them as a part of the SaaStr AI Summit panel. They follow four key AI principles: improve existing user behaviors, embrace frequent iteration, systematic quality control, and foster cross-functional collaboration.