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.

Engineering Manager Alice Ching discusses how Figma draws inspiration from the gaming world in its development process. There are similarities between video game engines and Figma’s tech stack, with collaboration and creating delightful user experiences being the key aspects.

Regardless of going to the in-person Config this summer, this is a great intro of the international designer advocate team. Here is the full list for you to follow — Lauren Andres, Hugo Raymond, Hiroki Tani, Julia Kestner, Mallory Dean, Corey Lee, Alexia Danton, and Sebastian Metel.

Jenny Wen, Product Design Manager at Figma, had a virtual AMA with the Designer Fund community, where she answered questions about leadership, the value of a ​“riffing” culture, designing for moments of delight, and where she goes for product design inspiration, news, and updates.

“In 2020, Figma’s infrastructure hit some growing pains. With database traffic growing ~3x annually, Engineer Tim Liang and the databases team set out to reduce potential instability and pave the way for scale.”

Every time someone posts pictures of Figma’s SF office, I’m blown away by its beauty and creativity.

Nadia Singer, Chief People Officer at Figma, shares why she believes anyone can become a skilled talent evaluator, her best interview questions, and how Figma leverages transparency across the org.

For this April Fun Day, Figma added a snake game to a Section tool inside FigJam. I don’t expect it to be around for too long, so give it a try if you can! See also a thread from Mihika Kapoor on how the team came up with the idea and built it.

I love reading about how design decisions are being made! This story shares a few anecdotes from the designers and engineers behind the current shipment of Little Big Updates, including multi-select search, background blur in prototypes, on-canvas previews, and hanging punctuation.

Figma published their internal design team career levels and accompanying Skills Chart widget to the Figma Community! Last year they refreshed the leveling framework and Design Manager Sara Culver wrote a detailed post documenting this work. For additional context, I highly recommend Noah Levin’s thread on this project. Also, don’t miss their templates for performance reviews and calibration.