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.

First Round’s deep dive into how Figma Slides founding PM Mihika Kapoor transformed a hackathon project into one of Figma’s most anticipated launches.

Erin and Carol from the Awkward Silences podcast are joined by Andrew Hogan, Figma’s Head of Insights, to explore the nature of collaboration today and how the structure of that collaboration can impact our ability to effect UX change.

Did you know that Figma’s cofounder Evan Wallace created a custom programming language Skew for their mobile rendering architecture? This story slipped my attention, but Andrew Chan wrote a fascinating look at some of its interesting features.

Jay from Sneak Peek asked Tim Van Damme (UI3), Tammy Taabassum (AI), and Kelly Li from Figma to share their working projects and walk him through their file organization. Tim had one of the most humble takes on the design collaboration and process.

Ridd interviewed Andrei Herasimchuk, who had one of the most enviable design careers as an interface designer of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and later the first designer at Figma, with stints at Twitter, Yahoo, and Booking in between. I’ve been following him since the Adobe days, but I had no idea he also contributed to Figma early on!

Dylan Field talks about startups and European regulation on stage at Slush 2024.

Designer Advocate Ana Boyer: ​“UI3 prompted us to rebuild our own design system from the ground up. Here’s how designers and engineers came together to create a new foundation for building consistent, accessible products.”

Figma is opening an office in Sydney, its first in Australia: ​“The​opening of Figma’s Sydney office builds on​Figma’s​impact in Australia and will help deepen relationships​with its growing local community and key​customers​, such as Telstra​and Atlassian, who is also a Figma integration partner and investor. ”

Mihika Kapoor and Yuhki Yamashita gave a talk at the Lenny and Friends Summit on doing product reviews the right way. While I look forward to watching the full video when it’s available, the slides are pretty comprehensive. They point out that the main goal of product reviews is not making decisions but winning trust.

Claire Butler, a marketing lead at Figma, shares three principles that help market to designers or other groups of passionate experts. Make sure to watch the video she is referring to.

I furiously nodded while reading her second lesson: ​“If you can come up with and understand all of the content, you haven’t gone deep enough. Whatever you are doing will come across too generic, and thus will not resonate. They’ll sniff you out.”