An inside look at how Figma ships product

And Figma is not alone. More and more apps in all categories understand that collaboration should and must be built in as a first party if they want to best serve their customers. Notion, Airtable, etc all understand this. The feedback loops of collaboration get so short that they become part of the productivity loop.

By working within the browser, Figma introduced an astounding level of efficiency into the design process and drove organization-wide adoption, which resulted in large ACV enterprise opportunities. This required a period of complex product development prior to monetization — so being product-obsessed and patient were a big part of the company’s cul

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Figma has collaboration built in natively as a first party. This means the ability to comment on designs. But it means much more too. It means the ability to design together at the same time. To be able to send a live demo to someone frictionlessly and then be able to make live changes as you talk to them. It means being able to build design system... See more

I used to be confused by the Figma’s team consistent framing of Figma as browser-first. What was the distinction between this and cloud-first? Over time I’ve come to see how important this distinction has been. When many creative tools companies talk about the cloud, they seem to view it as an amorphous place that they store files.

The core insight of Figma is that design is larger than just designers. Design is all of the conversations between designers and PMs about what to build. It is the mocks and prototypes and the feedback on them. It is the handoff of specs and assets to engineers and how easy it is for them to implement them. Building for this entire process doesn’t ... See more

That's where the challenge of building quality products starts to creep in. The constant tension of shipping faster versus shipping better. Falling into a cycle of "Ship, then iterate" is a trap. It ends up being more  shiterate . Things happen and that "fast-follow" V1.1 release or V2.0 you had imagined probably won't. There's alwa

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