UK is following in EU’s footsteps: ​“CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) provisionally finds Adobe’s deal to buy Figma would likely harm innovation for software used by the vast majority of UK digital designers.”

Not sure if the CMA truly understands what each of the apps is for: ​“The inquiry group has also provisionally found that Figma is a credible future competitor to Adobe in image editing and illustration software – and that the threat posed by Figma has driven product development in Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator applications, including new web versions. The inquiry group considers that if the deal went ahead, it would eliminate Figma as a competitor which would otherwise have continued to seek to develop its capabilities in image editing and illustration, thereby fuelling innovation and product development by Adobe.”

November 17th, 2023: ​“The European Commission has informed Adobe of its preliminary view that its proposed acquisition of Figma may reduce competition in the global markets for the supply of interactive product design software and of other creative design software.”

Pretty incredible in this economy: ​“Design startup Figma Inc.’s headcount has grown roughly 60% since it announced merger plans with Adobe Inc. in September 2022, a sign the company hasn’t been standing still while it waits for the deal to close.” On the acquisition: ​“The Adobe acquisition is scheduled to be completed by the end of March, though it may be hard to conclude the purchase in that time frame with at least one of the regulatory agencies likely to challenge the deal, Bloomberg Intelligence antitrust analyst Jennifer Rie wrote in September. Adobe may owe the design startup a $1 billion breakup fee if the transaction takes longer than that and the deal collapses, according to the merger documents.” (See the archive link.)

Peter Yang interviewed Yuhki Yamashita about building FigJam AI, creating a culture where PMs and designers love their craft, making design accessible to everyone, and balancing new and power user needs. Most of Yuhki’s advice in this interview is for PMs, but it still applies to any product designer. (The interview is paywalled, but there is a lot of good stuff in the preview.)

Love this story about FigJam’s early days: ​“We had a meeting with our board two months before we were going to launch FigJam. The board asked us what our differentiator was since there were many other whiteboard tools. And Dylan said, ​“Well, it’s fun!” But then we realized that the product wasn’t fun enough. So the FigJam team ran a sprint called ​“FunJam” to come up with all the playful features that you see today like cursor chat, emotes, and more. So you’re absolutely right – fun was a core principle. Most workplace tools are a little boring and confine you in a box. We want to give you an inviting canvas with many lightweight ways to express yourself.”

Harry McCracken published a big story about Figma and Dylan Field at Fast Company. It talks about Adobe’s acquisition and what it could mean for both companies, the future of design in the era of AI, the origin story of Figma, and their big ambition to ​“make creativity the new productivity”. 

Figma Data Scientist and Researcher paired quantitative and qualitative learnings to reveal a complete picture of how notifications work, and how users interact with them. ​“At the end of the process, they found where the biggest opportunity lay for improvement: Most users weren’t receiving notifications at all. To improve communication and collaboration, it would be a matter of creating new alert types and rethinking who received notifications (and when).”

Lenny’s newsletter and podcast are my favorite on all things product and growth, so I’m looking forward to listening to this interview! ​“Claire Butler was Figma’s first GTM hire and their 10th employee. She led Figma’s early GTM strategy from stealth through monetization. She also helped the team through the journey to find product-market fit and built the team that drove Figma’s unique bottom-up growth motion. Eight years later, as Senior Director of Marketing, she continues to lead Figma’s bottom-up growth motion, along with community, events, social, advocacy, and Figma for education.”

Behind-the-scenes story on how Figma scaled their performance testing system from a single laptop running in the office to a dream setup built for scale: ​“After considering a few different approaches, we ultimately decided to ship two systems: A cloud-based system would handle mass testing, covering our bases for the majority of situations, and a hardware system would be highly targeted, tackling situations that required more precision. They would be connected by the same CI system, and engineers across product teams would run the same suite of performance test scenarios across them.”

“Adobe Inc.’s $20 billion takeover of Figma Inc. is set for an in-depth European Union investigation over concerns the deal could harm global competition for software used by designers.” The EU’s in-depth probe is set to run until December 14th, so the future of the deal will stay unclear until then.

Emily Brody, Product Marketing Manager at Figma, writes about the go-to-market strategy for the Dev Mode and how the team prepared for the launch and triaged bugs, requests, and feedback during the first two weeks.

Missed that piece at Forbes a few weeks ago: ​“If you ask me, the antitrust environment right now is kind of nuts. […] I’m going to apply similar thinking to Adobe’s proposed $20 billion acquisition of Figma. The short version: I believe this deal is a sound one, and that regulators who are dubious about it are looking at the wrong things if they really want to promote innovation and protect customers.”

Interesting note on Adobe XD: ​“At one point, XD had 200 people working on it, but the product lacked the real-time collaborative element that drives Figma’s success, and sales never took off. Adobe ultimately reassigned more than 90% of the people working on XD; fewer than 20 work on the app now, and their job is just to keep it running smoothly to fulfill existing contracts.”

In-person attendees of Config 2023 found a copy of a playful zine in their swag bags. Figma collaborated with It’s Nice That on The Playbook to showcase the benefits of spontaneous thinking and curiosity through design. Inside, there is a piece on ​“how to embrace (and enjoy) endless iteration” by Chief Product Officer Yuhki Yamashita, as well as an investigation into what it truly means to be a collaborative engineer by Chief Technology Officer Kris Rasmussen. If you prefer getting hands-on rather than sitting down with an essay, there are also a host of activities to tackle.

Damien Correll, Creative Director at Figma, shares some thoughts on the Config brand. Creating an identity for a brief event is an interesting challenge, and Figma’s brand studio does an incredible job every time. The pictograms were my favorite part — they are in lively motion on the screen but feel monumental IRL as wooden cutouts or a statue at Moscone, almost at odds with the temporal nature of the brand.

It might be hard to notice if you’re logged in to the app, but Figma rocks a new marketing website! Such a clear message and beautiful design.

You might have noticed that some of the above links point to Shortcut, Figma’s new blog. ​“Explore insights and opinions from industry leaders, get tips and inspiration from creators using Figma to build great things, and go in-depth and behind-the-scenes with the Figma team.”

A guest post in Lenny Rachitsky’s newsletter by Figma VP of Product Sho Kuwamoto on the importance of feel, service, and staying close to customers. ​“Fast-forward to 2023, and Figma has grown beyond what I could have imagined. It’s gotten to the point where people often ask me for advice on how to prioritize features or how to run a product process. These questions are hard for me to answer, because I don’t think we do anything special. Our process is messy and we make mistakes. We create designs and then throw them away. We miscommunicate all the time and forget to write things down.”

“Marcel Weekes is the VP of Product Engineering at Figma, and was formerly VP of Engineering at Slack. He unpacks why most startups get it wrong when they uplevel someone from IC engineer to eng manager and unfurls what stellar engineering management looks like at high-growth companies.”

Interesting findings about the state of design, tech, and product development from the year-over-year change in Config submissions trends. This year the team received a whopping 1,000 talk proposals 🤯 The general mood of submissions was markedly optimistic compared with the previous 3 years. AI, accessibility, inclusion-related, and designer-developer collaboration topics are on the rise, while mentions of ​“pandemic” and remote work are declining.

Fascinating comments from Sho Kuwamoto, Figma’s VP of Product, on how plugins are implemented. Each plugin runs in a security sandbox — ​“We actually took a JavaScript VM, compiled it down to WebAssembly, and then we run that VM inside of the browser. So it’s a completely separate engine than the native JS engine. For security reasons, we don’t want two scripts running inside that VM, because then the two scripts could potentially have access to each other. And we don’t want to run two instances of this VM, for memory reasons.” 🤯

In this video, Darshan Gajara from Consistent Creators podcast talks to Designer Advocate Luis Ouriach about his role at Figma, overcoming burnout, building an audience, and the breakdown of his viral Twitter threads.