Nannearl Brown shows what it’s like to be a UX researcher at Figma who helps other UI/UX designers work efficiently, and what you need to know to get a job like this.

An excerpt from Dylan’s talk on how it took five years from the moment they started working on Figma to the first paid customers.

Interesting thread on a path that Dylan Field took from an intern and college dropout to the CEO of the $10B company.

Wonderful post by Clara Ujiie on her journey from Figma user and client to Designer Advocate.

”Product Manager Emily Lin shares the process of bringing FigJam to life, from beta to GA.“

Great stories and reflections from Marcin Wichary on bugs in software. ​“At Figma, there are many processes and tools to deal with bugs, including recurring Quality Weeks: time dedicated to coming together within a product team, and to fixing bugs that might otherwise get forgotten by time, bugs that deserve extra investigation, and bugs that stretch the traditional definition of bugs.”

This reminded me of another great post, ​“Debugging Misadventures: Down the Rabbit Hole”, by ex-Figma engineer Jamie Wong that I shared a while ago.

“Over the past two months, we’ve rolled out a number of updates to comments in Figma. As always, insights about our users and how they design together informed these improvements. The data science team spearheaded experiments to learn how to encourage feedback and collaboration directly in the file. Here, Data Scientist Emily Jia shares the hypotheses, tests, and learnings that lead to this cross-functional, data-driven product launch.”

The swag store is officially live! Every other day I see people hunting for Figma swag on Twitter, and it tells a lot about the product if happy users are willing to buy and wear its merch. Both the website and all items are gorgeous, and all profits are being donated to charity 👏

Anthony DiSpezio with an ode to Auto Layout 👏

One of the best profiles of the early days of Figma and Dylan Field’s transformation from intern to CEO.

Q&A with Tekeste Kidanu, creator of the SPELLL plugin.

“We recently caught up with three of Figma’s engineers — Alice Ching, Joey Wang, and Greg Blaszczuk — to learn more about how they use FigJam to navigate their day-to-day. Here, they share how jamming helps them break down complex problems, work through feedback together, and add more fun to the workday.”

Q&A with Gavin McFarland, creator of the Table widget.

“We are always impressed with the Figma Community and wanted to share what they’ve come up with, so we reached out to three developers to learn more about who they are, what they built, and what they’re working on next. Read our first Q&A in the series with Tru Narla, and check out her widget on the Figma Community.”

“In this episode of Uniquely Led, Dylan Field, CEO & co-founder of Figma, shares his journey of going from intern to CEO at the age of 20, discovering the difference between leadership and management, and the importance of being a low-ego leader. He discusses Figma’s culture of growth, which focuses on bringing in amazing people and ensuring they achieve their full potential.”

“For the infrastructure team, the question was: how do we empower our product engineers to build these real-time views easily, while abstracting away the complexity of pushing data back and forth? To provide a general solution to this fundamental business need, we developed LiveGraph, a data fetching layer on top of Postgres that allows our frontend code to request real-time data subscriptions expressed with GraphQL.”

“Kyle built Figma’s sales team from scratch. When he joined, company culture was established and PLG was already driving hypergrowth. Learn how Kyle integrated sales into Figma’s culture, and got the whole company cheering for the next gong.”

Pretty cool to see the backstage of the production. Schema wasn’t a typical Zoom conference.

“Last year, the Figma security team built a simple solution for zero-trust shell access on AWS. To do this, they leveraged AWS SSO and Systems Manager, an umbrella of services that provide monitoring and remote administration capabilities over various AWS resources. In this post, Security Engineer Hongyi Hu explains how the team designed the system and shares some tips to help other teams secure Systems Manager and protect their most sensitive data.”

Figma moved to the new office in SF, and it looks stunning! Love all the photos coming from the Figmates — one, two, and three.