An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire)

[00:00] We had Coda, they were our first user, and they were based in Palo Alto. Dylan and I drove down and demoed the product to them, and they were the first ones, their designer, Jeremy, [00:10] I was like, "Yes, we'll take this on full time." And I remember we were both like, "What? Really? He will?" That was like the first person who said yes to us. And so we were like so excited. This is like a huge milestone. We were just so stoked. And then we got back to the office and I think Dylan gets a text from Jeremy being like, "Oh yeah, I tried this show. This was to leave my engineer and he can't get the file to open. So..." [00:28] I guess we can't use it." And we were like, "What is it? What happened? We finally got someone." And I remember Dylan was like, "Everybody drop everything. We have to fix this." [00:37] And after some, you know, looking at the servers and things, they were like, nothing's wrong. [00:41] And then they realized there was a problem with Philippe's MacBook. And Evan had a car, so Dylan had to drive Evan down to Palo Alto to fix the MacBook of Philippe just to get them to use the product. [01:03] Today my guest is Claire Butler. Claire started at Figma while they were still in stealth as their 10th employee and their first ever marketing hire. [01:11] She led their original launch and go-to-market, and also their branding and positioning and messaging work. And eight years in, she continues to lead their go-to-market and bottom-up growth motion, along with community, events, social, advocacy, and Figma for education teams. In our conversation, we get the first ever in-depth glimpse into how Figma grew and continues to grow. Claire shares her two-part go-to-market strategy, which involves getting ICs at a company to love you, and then enabling them to spread the product within the organization.

[01:41] Tons of amazing stories and examples and lessons from how the Figma team executed the strategy and how you can apply it to your own product. This is an incredible episode with so many gold nuggets of wisdom. You'll probably want to listen to it more than once. With that, I bring you Claire Butler after a short word from our sponsors. [02:00] This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth. Thousands of fast-growing companies like Gusto, Com, Quora, and Modern Treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage, and demonstrate their security and compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks, not months. [02:30] need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses, and build trust with external stakeholders. Over 5,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC 2 and these other frameworks. For a limited time, Lenny's podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com slash Lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts. Get started today. [03:00] This episode is brought to you by Mixpanel. Get deep insights into what your users are doing at every stage of the funnel at a fair price that scales as you grow. Mixpanel gives you quick answers about your users from awareness to acquisition through retention. And by capturing website activity, ad data, and multi-touch attribution right in Mixpanel, you can improve every aspect of the full user funnel. Powered by first-party behavioral data instead of third-party cookies, Mixpanel is built to be more powerful and easier to use than Google Analytics.

[03:30] analytics. Explore plans for teams of every size and see what Mixpanel can do for you at mixpanel.com slash friends slash Lenny. And while you're at it, they're also hiring. So check it out at mixpanel.com slash friends slash Lenny. [03:47] Claire, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Lenny. I'm [03:55] You've been on my wishlist of guests for a long time, and so I'm really excited to be finally chatting. [04:01] You're the 10th employee at Figma, which is now worth tens of billions of dollars, depending on which valuation you look at. [04:08] and probably thousands of employees, I don't even know, but many, many. [04:12] and you joined before the product even launched. [04:15] And so I have a million questions I want to ask about how Figma grew and all the things that went into it. [04:20] I'm curious what it was like to be [04:22] early days at Figma. Is there a memory that comes to mind that's zany, funny, fun? [04:29] tangible of just like what it was like to work at Figma in the early days. Yeah, totally. That's a good question. We were right downtown on New Montgomery and Minna. And I think the thing that sticks out to me is actually two competing stories that talk about just how much at that time you'd oscillate between these like really high level strategic decisions. [04:48] and then like total crunk work, right? So like my first day at Figma, I come into the office, and you know, we're going through some stuff. There's like 10 of us in the office, we're chatting, and I look at some of the plans, some of the things they're working on, and,

[05:01] I see that they actually had some branding and positioning and things that [05:06] The product, Figma, was going to be named Summit. That was the name. So the company was going to be Figma. And then the product suite, the product design tool, right, was going to be Summit. With the idea that, you know, eventually we'll have other tools. And that could be like Mountaintop or I don't know what the real, they had a whole thing around the different things that could be for the future product set. And I remember my first day, I had an immediate reaction of like, we cannot make this thing Summit. That's not going to work. We can't have two brands. Summit's not ownable. [05:36] and like multiple things, like that's just never gonna work. We kind of have to just stick with one. [05:41] And I think Figma is ownable and makes sense. And we should just go with Figma. So we should probably kill the summit thing. [05:46] And Tillman said to me, he was like, "Oh, that's interesting. How about you make a presentation and present it to everyone tomorrow?" And so I did that. I was like, "Oh, okay. I guess this is what I'm doing the rest of the day." So I went and made a little presentation about [05:58] you know, like how we couldn't build all this equity in two places and [06:01] all the things. And then the next day we decided to kill that name. And so we went with Figma for the name of the product instead of Summit. [06:08] And that's how fast things move, right? And how much you just kind of ran with it and had ownership. [06:13] I compare that to the first meetup we had, which was probably just like 10 people in the office, honestly. But I remember I was like, you know, I was in charge of that. So I was like, I had to get all the food and everything there. And I just Instacarted some things and ordered some pizza, but I'd forgotten ice. And so I had to go walk down to the nearest corner store, which was like three blocks away or something and get ice. And I got like four bags. And I remember,

[06:37] I was walking down the street, down probably third street with like three bags of ice and it was really heavy. And I remember thinking, this is so hard. This is so heavy. I can't carry all this ice. And it's just like that's I did that, too, like probably like the next week. And so. [06:51] I think it was just this oscillation between like, oh, we're making these high level strategic decisions and someone else has to go by the ice. That's what it was like in the early days. [06:59] That's incredible. That's almost a metaphor. Someone's got to go carry the ice. No, it's got to get the ice for the meetup. Yep. That's so interesting about Summit. I had no idea that was... That was a good name. So if you liked that better, I'm sorry. Because I killed that. Who could like it better now that everyone loves Figma and that's just what it is? [07:16] Do you think Figma would have been [07:18] as successful with that name looking back? I think we probably would have changed it later. You know, I think we just we just saved ourselves some time and without having to change it. [07:26] And then how many days or weeks into your tenure was that? [07:30] happening. [07:32] the name change or the first day. No, that was literally my first day. No, no, no, that was my first day and my second day. Like not even kidding. My first day I made the recommendation, the second day I gave the presentation and the decision was made. [07:44] Wow. I was going to ask you what the most stressful memory of early day Sphigma was. I'm guessing it's the same story. It's not, actually. [07:51] So I think the most stressful thing I was thinking about this was when we launched out of stealth. So like I come into Figma. I had lots of experience. I'd been in another startup before that. I launched stuff. [08:02] But I was still kind of junior, you know, like I had done these things, but I didn't have a ton of a ton of ton of cycles. And I never like run the whole thing from like, OK, like.

[08:12] messaging and positioning like we this was a forcing function for us to do our messaging and positioning and i remember they were like there was like more than one day where like we locked ourselves in a conference room and i like made dylan and show at the time have this positioning up on the big screen and like made them agree on it word for word because we just never done that before but then i'd also like never run pr press and all of a sudden i had to run press and pr and i think the hardest part there and the most stressful part was like [08:39] I didn't know anyone to talk to. It was just me, right? And I didn't at the time have enough cycles. [08:44] to have the confidence that like the decisions I was making were the right ones. And so I like, you know, it was hard not to second guess myself sometimes in that position. And, [08:54] I think that's some of the hardest times of being at a startup, especially when you're the only marketer, the only go to market person is you don't need to talk to to like gut check stuff with. And so it does take this like immense confidence in yourself. But like that's stressful when you don't have the cycles. Right. And so. [09:09] That was very stressful for me, for sure. [09:11] How did you... [09:13] overcome that. Did you find people [09:15] to work with and run ideas by? Did you just do it and figure it out? I just, I mean, I had Dylan, but we just did it, right? Especially in those early days. I remember there were a couple of freak out moments where I would like, [09:25] try to get our VCs to help us. I remember Greylock was helpful, Elise over there. But ultimately, they don't know that, you know, they help a lot, but they don't know your business as intimately as you do. So at the end of the day, you know, that's something Dylan's really good at is trusting his intuition and gut. And so he was helpful on the decision making. But then also, you just got to go for it. And I think that that's something that I learned at that time. That's,

[09:47] helped me throughout the rest of my career is like building that confidence or that trust in yourself because it wasn't something that i necessarily immediately had [09:55] Next question I wanted to get into briefly is, [09:58] You joined Figma really early. [10:00] became one of the most successful beloved companies in history. [10:03] What did you see early on that convinced you that Figma was the company to join and ask? Because a lot of people today are looking for places to join you and decide what to do. Clearly, you made a good choice. What did you see? So I had been another startup before Figma, a little bit bigger. I think I joined at Series B and then got through acquisition. And I had a sense that I wanted to do something early. [10:22] So I'd already kind of made that decision that I wanted to go early stage. So I'll take the decision-making part out. But then from there, I was talking to a couple of different companies and I'm [10:32] When I went to Fingride, there were three areas that stood out the most to me. The first was [10:37] It logically made sense. And I know maybe that sounds basic, but like I was talking to like a drone company or like a SaaS, like tech, like ad tech company. And I just didn't get it, honestly. [10:49] Like it didn't intuitively make sense to me or I didn't understand the technology or something. But at Figma, the basic premise like immediately logically clicked for me like, oh, yeah, I use Google Docs. I use Asana. I use all these online tools like that's so weird that designs. [11:03] "Not online." Like, why isn't it? And as a marketer, I'd worked with designers and sent feedback and emails. [11:10] And that's really inefficient. And it made a ton of sense to me that, yes, that should be online and collaborative. [11:15] So that was like the first thing that I was like, check the box.

[11:18] And the next one was I knew people who believed in it. [11:22] So I got introduced to Dylan via Index. They were an investor at the last company I was at, and Danny Reimer specifically, and my old boss, Greg Smirin, who was EIR there. And I trusted them a lot, and they invested in it. I also met John Lilly. I didn't know who he was. I had to Google him. But he seemed really smart, and when he Googled it, he was very impressive, and he believed in it, so that was great. [11:43] And then I think the third thing was, I remember when I was trying to decide, Dylan really didn't take no for answer. He's very persuasive. And I remember he'd call me and text me and then I'd have all these concerns or things and he would just pick them apart one by one of reasons why they weren't real concerns or things to get over them. And so I think that that was the third thing is like, [12:04] that's just kind of who he was. And that's how he is with everything. And so that's how he is with me. That's how he is with [12:09] any obstacle that he has. And so when I looked at that, I was just like, all right, let's give this a go. And I didn't know, right? I had no idea it would be as big as it is today. So some of it was luck too, for sure. But those are the three things of how I made my decision. [12:24] So what I took away there is when I just believe in an idea, obviously, like make [12:29] Make sure you actually think this could be really big. [12:31] Two is some social proof. People you trust really believe in it. [12:35] In this case, it was really smart investors, they knew. And then the third is just, sounds like you were also just impressed with Dylan. Yeah, totally. I believed in him. [12:42] So you joined Figma before it even launched, it was still in stealth. [12:45] You joined as the first go-to-market hire. You helped launch Figma. You continue to lead go-to-market at Figma. And so this is a good segue to where I want to spend most of our conversation.

[12:55] I essentially want to try to unpack what worked correctly. [12:59] to build Figma into the business that it is today from beginning to even [13:02] Now, you're also there for eight years, so you saw a lot of what worked and didn't work. [13:07] And so, [13:08] Let's start with the beginnings of Figma and the go-to-market motion that you developed in [13:13] how you actually implemented it. So maybe to start, [13:17] If you could just talk about just... [13:19] What is a bottom-up go-to-market motion? [13:21] And then you also shared somewhere that, [13:24] Figma has a very unique bottom-up go-to-market motion. So maybe just those two areas, just like broadly what is bottom-up go-to-market motion, and then two, what is unique about Figma's approach? I've reflected back to get to some of these answers. I think in the moment, so much of what we were doing was [13:40] was influenced by like gut, by like trying to connect with people, listening to them. But when I look back is when I'm like, oh, this is like a repeatable motion. So when I look back at it, I would say that if I were to define and think about how I define go to market motion, [13:56] And we've said it, we've called it a lot of things over time, right? We called it product-led, we called it community-led. The way I think about it now is this bottoms-up motion that really is focused on ICs. [14:05] Right? So it's all focused on like, okay, so you have this core audience. For us, it was designers and they're largely individual contributors, right? So there are people who are practitioners who are using your tool. [14:16] For us, it's like eight hours a day. If you're a designer, you're in all the time and they they love you. Right. And you build this relationship with them within the product. But it's beyond the product. Right. It's also believing what the product can be in the company and the brand. And they just they love you so much that they're willing to put their social capital and themselves in the line and spread.

[14:38] the product throughout their, whatever their communities are. And the one that's connected the most to revenue is companies. And so that's where the revenue model really [14:47] kind of clicks in as you have all these individual contributors who love you, but then they also work at these big companies and these big orgs and they become these internal champions. [14:56] who spearhead adoption within their organizations [14:59] and eventually turn into large amounts of revenue. [15:02] And I think of that as our bottoms up motion, and that's different from tops down. And a lot of SaaS is tops down where you go straight to like a VP or buy like an executive buyer. They then like kind of like agree to doing a tool to find a tool and then that kind of goes down to their organization. [15:16] I think with technical tools, especially like this becomes really important. The practitioners have to love it. Right. And also sometimes I wonder, does an executive care, you know what I mean? Like what tools people are using? And so for Figma, what that looks like and why this is like so efficient of a go to market motion for us is [15:32] We actually didn't have a sales team for the first three years. [15:35] So all of our revenue, we did have it. It was paid, but it was all self-serve. And so we'd work with these. We weren't worried about things like, [15:44] I mean, you cared about security, but all of the org features that people need and want when you're working with procurement. We were just focused on technical features for users, mostly. [15:53] And then the individual contributor or maybe the manager would just put Figma on their credit card. That was the way that things grew. [15:59] and so there was no sales team for a long time we did have one eventually and i'll talk about what that looked like but then the second thing was we also once we did have a sales team and even [16:07] up until now so much of our our revenue and our sales and our like mqls or market qualified leads come from our free tier right so it's people they're using it maybe they use it for free we have a very robust free tier

[16:19] Maybe they use it for pro, which is on your credit card. And then once it's widespread and they gain the confidence, [16:25] Then they're ready to bring in sales. [16:27] work with procurement and they actually come to us and they're like, Hey, [16:31] "I work at this company, I really wanna get my whole company to use it, but security's not letting me. Can you help me unblock it with them?" [16:39] Right. And so we didn't spend that much money, any money really programmatically on paid or [16:43] programmatic marketing because all of our leads for sales would come in through a form on our website, which was current users, either free or pro wanting to upgrade. And at that point, it's a very different sales conversation to block someone or to [16:57] you know, just help them implement Figma when they've already already have an internal champion who's bought in and they're really the one leading and driving the sale within their organization. So I think that that's what's made us really efficient as this is a really efficient model and has really powered so much of our growth over time. [17:14] Somebody listening to this that has a saying, SaaS, B2B SaaS companies, like, [17:18] "Oh, okay, I just need to get people to love my product, and it's going to be great." And so I want to unpack that. [17:24] Just like what you did, because it wasn't obviously an accident that people loved Figma. [17:28] But before we get there, you talked about that there's a unique approach to the way you did bottom-up. What do you see as what the typical bottom-up? [17:35] go-to-market motion is that other companies try to play that you think figmented differently? Is it this like [17:40] obsession with ICEs on Teams or is there some other element of it? [17:43] I think there are other people who do bottoms up and who do it well. I think for us it's unique because the individual contributor spends so much time in the tool.

[17:52] And it's so important to them. I think about things that we focus on where it might take like one click off of someone's workflow. [18:00] and [18:01] that seems like a really small update, right? Like you have to click one time instead of twice to do something. When you're a designer and you're in a tool eight hours a day, saving that one click is huge. [18:10] Right. And so I think the obsession with quality and with craft within the editor, [18:15] right for us, for Figma is maybe the difference. [18:19] And I think about other go-to-market tools that maybe focus so much on the collaboration side or like the product led of the expansion. And that is a huge part of it. Don't get me wrong. [18:27] but the the tool itself right like the editor [18:31] That's where it all starts. And that's what these people love. And then the collaboration is kind of like, [18:36] Yes, it's the thing that's like our differentiator, but it's actually like you stay for the collaboration. You don't want to talk about it or learn about it or nobody wants to talk about collaboration. You just want it to work. Right. You care about the tool and that the tool is working well. And so I think that maybe that's the difference is the obsession with the tool itself. [18:52] Awesome, yeah. Something I learned recently is that multiplayer wasn't even a part of Figma at launch. I know, I know. We can talk about that if you want to know, like making a decision of when to go to self, because we almost didn't because it didn't have multiplayer. [19:04] Oh, yeah, let's talk about that. That was a poor differentiator, and we can't not have it, but then... [19:08] But we did anyway. Yeah, let's take a tangent there, actually, just that decision to go from stealth. [19:13] Figma was in Stella three years or four years before the idea? Gosh, three, I guess. I think it was 20... [19:19] 20 2012 that we that they started and then we launched in at the end of 2015.

[19:24] So between around there, yeah, around three or four. Cool. And then you joined right before they launched. We're going to come back to what we were talking about, but just what did you see about that decision of like, now's the time to launch? [19:34] Yeah, I think that's a couple things. So I think the first thing is that the team had been building quietly by themselves in isolation for three years. And that's hard, right? Like, I think that that was a very real part of the decision to get out of stealth was that people have been building for such a long time. We needed momentum. We needed to, like, have a milestone that we were working towards. And we could have just kept building it quiet for a long time more, but it was very demotivating. Right. [20:04] holistically to get out of self but we didn't want to do until we knew it at least be successful but that was a key thing for me like I was working on that messaging positioning that I was telling you like we would have I still have the doc actually whereas like on the projected on the screen and Dylan and showing I picked apart every word of it and sharing with a link and multiplayer is the biggest thing like that's the core differentiator it's really funny I remember I've been from notion was a notions early days he stopped by and was chatting and he's like well you can't launch with I know so I was like [20:34] Everybody was like, that was the core thing. [20:36] But the idea was that we wanted to get out of stealth. We talked to Evan, our CTO, and knew it would take about another year for him to build it. [20:44] And for me, it was like, well, is there enough here to get people excited to start and to get users, get more feedback? Because Evan was kind of building multiplayer. I don't know enough about the engineering, if he was doing it on his own or not, but he was the person doing it. But there are a lot of other things, too, that were being built.

[21:00] could be built through that year. [21:01] And we wanted to get more feedback from people, right? And to start, really get started. And so to me, the things that I wanted to see before just deciding like, okay, so we don't have our key feature, can we still launch? We're... [21:12] Is there enough here for people to get excited? And my first, you know, at least my first three months, especially before we got to get going for the for the launch of the product and probably even after that. [21:23] I would just go around with Dylan and pilot or demo Figma to companies. That was like a lot of what we did. Right. So we'd go to these companies and we'd show them Figma and we'd get their feedback. And I would be kind of driving around on Palo Alto around the city doing that with Dylan. And sometimes people didn't care. They were just like, what is this? You know, I don't I don't I don't want to design online, things like that. [21:47] But what we wanted to see, what I wanted to see was that designers were excited when they saw the tool. [21:52] And once we got enough features, and I saw this pretty quickly, actually, when I joined Figma, is that the people that we showed it to were really interested in it and cared about it. And I remember there were, you know, after Vector Networks came out, after some of our other features. [22:07] There were enough things where people, I remember, they were like, take the laptop out of Dylan's hands. [22:13] when he would start showing it, because they wanted to play with it. And to me, when I started seeing designers do that, even if I wasn't sure if they'd use it as a team, even if I wasn't sure if like, they'd buy it, or they weren't selling it yet, they wanted to try it and they were excited about it. And that kind of emotional reaction

[22:30] of wanting to play with it in these demos was really what gave me confidence that we were ready to launch. And we had a couple of teams, small numbers, and happen to talk about like metrics and how hard it is to deal with metrics at this size. But very small numbers, but we had teams who were using it full time. [22:47] So we knew some people were using it full time and people who weren't were really [22:52] excited to try and were like very impressed with the technical feat of it all and interested and to me that was enough confidence that like okay it's worth it let's get out of stealth [23:01] That story of the... [23:03] Potential customer. [23:04] Pulling the laptop from Dylan is such a good metaphor for product market fit, which people describe as you feel pull. [23:11] Someone's literally... [23:12] pulling it from your hands. [23:14] You talked about metrics that you maybe could share. What could you share there? In these early days, especially with bottoms up and with all these things, and people ask me all the time, like, how do you measure things in an early stage situation? And I maybe have a controversial point of view here. I don't think you can from a metric side. [23:31] Like your numbers are so small. One of the quotes I always like to say, and I say this now to you when we're doing stuff because we're launching new products at the time and it comes up a lot is like you can't optimize your way to product market fit. [23:43] I don't care at the early stages if something's like, [23:47] optimized by 5% from like an email, right? Like that doesn't like fundamentally tell me if something's working or not. [23:53] So like, I think metrics are really hard and signals actually way more important. Like, can you get a couple of people who love it? [23:59] right? Not like a slight improvement of a conversion of a landing page, right? And so I think that metrics are really hard in that way. They can like help you

[24:08] But when the numbers are so small, you kind of have to, again, trust yourself a lot more and have more intuition, but then also find more signal of things that are working, whether it's anecdotal, talking to people, examples. And that becomes much more useful than like hard metrics are sometimes. [24:26] I'm working on a post around product market fit and kind of a step-by-step [24:29] Some of our guide to help people down this path and the way you described it is the way I'm kind of thinking about it is like step one get one company to use your product. Yes. That's really one. That's that was like step one. Like and that's not easy. Right. That's not easy. Right. [24:43] And then it's like get them to continue using your product. And then it's get two companies to use your product. Yes, exactly. And then get someone to pay for your product. Yeah, so there's all these major milestones. [24:52] Along those same lines, I saw an interview with Dylan talking about product market fit, and he had this interesting quote about how, [24:58] He realized first that they had product market fit like a year later, which is when Microsoft, I think, was like, take our money. We want to pay for Figma. And he's like, OK, maybe this is going to work. Is that does that sound about right? [25:11] Well, it's interesting, right? And that goes up to the bottom-set model we could talk about. So we would have, I think the difference, if you think about a company like Microsoft and what this looks like, this is just a really good example of this bottom-set motion in market, right? [25:27] Here's a funny story that I want to add. Our first meeting with Microsoft actually came, and this is the scrappiness of working in an early stage startup, [25:34] because I slid into the DMs of my friend's ex-boyfriend. That's how we got our first meeting with Microsoft. Well done. I know, I know. And I saw that they had signed up for Figma, and I was like, wait a minute, I think I know this person.

[25:48] That's how we chatted with them and first got feedback from them. That's just a funny anecdote. It's going to be a new strategy if everyone's going to try to... You literally do whatever Uber driver, shared lifts. We can talk more about that, but yeah, you got to do whatever you can to get early people to talk to [26:04] to try your product out and get really scrappy. [26:06] But for Microsoft, so over time, we would have, we had like a, I think it was, what was the team that got acquired that went into Microsoft? I'll have to remember the name, but it was like a small team within Microsoft. And they were, Xamarin, it was Xamarin. They were the ones who were using Figma first. And we saw that. And, you know, then, so they were that kind of patient zero at Microsoft. And then we had, slowly over time, more pockets within Microsoft using the tool. [26:28] But again, we've never gone through like Microsoft procurement, Microsoft security. It just started popping up throughout the organization. And we have these really cool node graphs that show this too, [26:37] where you'd have these little pockets of people, and then it would jump to another. They'd have one more collaborator and then jump to another pocket. And there were these really cool maps of how that spread within the organization. [26:47] And eventually we got to the point where like that was a very comprehensive node graph, right? That had this massive thing of all these people. [26:54] from Microsoft using the product, but still, it was only on credit cards. I don't think we even had an enterprise product at this point, right? And so there was no salesperson for them to talk to. [27:03] and [27:04] Microsoft was like, "Wait a minute, we need to organize this." We need security, we need account management, we need to put sure everyone involved. And I think that that's what it was. They wanted to pay for it, right? And they wanted us to have this enterprise product because...

[27:20] they had these requirements and they wanted to have a better control over it because it was just popping up within the organization without their control. And so that's probably a good example of what that looked like as this bottom set motion spread to a really large organization. [27:34] this node graph thing. So is that a tool you built that's like showing, help you visualize within a company how it's all clustering or what is that? Well, our data science team built, I don't know if it's like, yes, I'm sure it's an internal tool. I just remember we would have, there's like a, there was like a website in Node or something that we would use and you could type in an organization's name. You still could do this. It's like within our data analytics system. You type in the name of an organization and it just pulls up everybody. [27:59] And it shows like because Figma is, you know, spreads through new users, but also Gen 1, Gen 2, right? Like these people invite people. And you can see these node graphs of like how somebody started Figma, maybe the center, and then they invited someone else, right? And so you can, and then it shows like how that spread. And so you get these clusters and you can see the clusters are teams. [28:19] But you can see like someone, you know, invited someone in a different org to a file. And then I started like a new... [28:24] center of a cluster, right? And so you they're really interesting and you can pull up you really yeah, you can type in any [28:30] org any org at Figma and see what that node graph looks like but [28:35] They're super interesting to see how those spread. [28:37] That is super cool, and I imagine that's also a [28:39] informs how you go to market. [28:42] by figuring out who spreads to who and who's often-- - Totally, and that's when these internal champions, like that's what the key is, and that's maybe the takeaway of like how important these internal champions are, because--

[28:51] you just need someone to land there, right? And then they pass it up and you can see, [28:57] you can hover over and see this person's at the center of this note graph and all of these people that spread from this one person at the company. [29:05] And that I think was the unlock to be like, oh yeah, these internal champions, they're really the key to all of this. [29:11] I remember it spreading at Airbnb early on. I think Airbnb was one of the early customers, and it was just one designer, a few designers starting to spread to the product managers. [29:19] I was just like, remember on the team being like, "God damn it, we just switched to Sketch? Are we going to switch again?" That was the hardest thing. I feel like I don't want to switch twice. That was definitely something we had to get over. [29:29] But it happened for good reasons. Okay, one last thing that you mentioned that I wanted to follow up on. You said something about shared lifts, and maybe that's a funny story of some sort. Oh, I don't know specifically. Dylan specifically is such a hustler, right? Especially in those early days. And he would just... [29:44] really anyone that he would meet he would talk about figma with them i don't remember who it was but there was definitely a situation where he met someone in a lift and then they became one of our users uh so he used every every angle he could to try to get introduced to new designers especially in his pre-launch days where we like didn't have connections as many connections um to just get people to try it out and get more feedback [30:06] Okay, cool. So let's get back on track. [30:08] We were talking about the go-to-market motion that you executed and modeled at Figma. [30:14] And there's kind of these two steps, right? Step one is, yeah, I cease to love you. And then step two is, [30:19] help it spread from that person. Yep. Okay, cool. Let's start with step one. Okay. Cool. Like I said, obviously, it'd be awesome if somebody loved your product at a company.

[30:29] What did you actually do to make that happen in the early days? - Yeah, and it's interesting when you think about the early days too, right? 'Cause you're like, "All right. [30:35] We don't exist. You get them to love you. And like you literally like they've never heard of you before. Also, like you were saying in your situation, like [30:43] Oh, I used Sketch. I was maybe in Photoshop before that, right? Something else. I just made the switch over to this new tool. We finally got it working. Like, I really don't want to move tools again. So you have that inherent like thing against it there. [30:54] Especially like so I thought about this and I think there are like four main areas that we focused on. [31:00] to make this start, right? To like get it going and then we kind of still do this stuff today. So the first thing is all about credibility and I think in the early days especially, credibility is so important in establishing that initial credibility. [31:13] Again, especially with a technical audience like designers. The second is. [31:18] actually building the product with [31:19] your users. And I know you had shown your podcast and he talked a lot about this to just the customer obsession that we have, the care of especially that editor tool. The third is finding a place where you can like [31:31] in a way that you can build this relationship over time. And maybe that's specifically through a channel where they don't have to come to you because they don't really care about you yet. Right. And like they're probably not going to convert right away or start using you right away. So how do you get them to stick with you over time? So find out the channel where you can do that and then continue to build that relationship with them. And then the four is just being

[32:01] those all sound really fuzzy, so maybe we can go into them specifically. Absolutely. Because they sound really fuzzy when you talk about them. And a lot of stuff is hard like that, where you're like, oh, that just sounds like buzzwords. I can give you some examples of these four things, so maybe it has to be a color to it. [32:14] So let's start the first one credibility. Okay. So I was the first marketer of Figma. I think one of the things I learned right away very quickly was that designers don't want to hear from marketers. They don't want to be marketed to and they have extremely high bullshit here, right? They're like, [32:29] You know, you use a word like, you know, efficiency, collaboration, all of those buzzwords. And there's like, I don't want to hear this right. Traditional product marketing kind of stuff like just doesn't work. [32:42] They wanted to hear technical features. They wanted to understand how technical features work. They want to hear, you know, how am I going to use this? And then they'll see the benefits, but like they don't want to hear from marketers and they don't want to be marketed to. [32:55] And so I think especially with our audience in the early days, one of the things that I did was really try to like not market. And that's so funny as a marketer to say that. But that was really core to build authenticity of people. Right. And so the way that we did that. [33:10] In the early days, what we had was the tool, right? And that's pretty much what we had. And we had a design team and an engineering team. And so we did some cool stuff in the tool. First of all, the tool itself was a technical feat. It was the first time I used video game technology, WebGL, Evans, a prodigy, got a design tool to work on the internet. It was just amazing, right? And so there was a lot of engineering interest there on credibility building of how did you get this to work?

[33:36] So I got him to like make technical content and that I think was number one on Hacker News, right? That people were just interested in him. And then we had a design team and our design team was our target audience. And so we talked a lot about how we chose to build features, all the things that went into it. [33:51] And so many of the primitives of design tools have been like that forever. [33:55] right and so we changed these stuff so like one of them would be like how we did grids or how we did vector networks [34:00] And we'd go into these really deep details of how we chose to make this product decisions, all the craft decisions that went into it. And I remember one of my bars were deciding if something was like hit this or not, if they would be interested, was like, [34:14] Did I understand it? You know, if I understood it, it was probably too basic. Or if I could have written it myself, it was probably too basic. [34:20] Like I remember we did one on grids in the early days and [34:23] we went really deep on Joseph Mueller Brockman and his influence on grids. And I and now I very much know who Joseph Mueller Brockman is because I work with designers. But at the time I had to Google it, I was like, who is this? But that was one of my bars for if something would be good enough for our technical content was, [34:40] Yeah, if I could have written it, it's not good enough. And so that was key for us in building credibility because we had this design team. [34:47] And then when six months after we launched and I, you know, I'm I actually got to hire someone to do marketing with me. The first person I hired was actually a designer advocate. So it was not a marketer. It was someone who was a designer and we brought the designers and the engineers that I was trying to get to help me with stuff. Like also had to design and build the products and have a ton of time. But this is an advocate was.

[35:09] working full time with me on this stuff. And he came from a user base. He was one, you know, one of the very few people in the early days who just like love the product and was very passionate about it. And that became his full-time job was to represent, to meet with users, talk to them, to write content and create content and to, you know, bring that back to the product. And that was what he did. And that designer advocacy positions actually scaled with Figma. And we [35:39] dusty color that we sprinkle on go-to-market to make a lot of our go-to-market function work. [35:43] But yeah, we didn't focus on marketing or marketing, traditional marketing, right? We're very focused on the technical aspects. [35:50] There's so many little lessons there. [35:52] The designer advocate hire reminds me of something that Datadog did where they hired engineers to write their blog posts. That's a great idea. Yeah. Yes, exactly what we did. Yes. [36:03] So ways you build credibility, just kind of mirroring back what you shared, one is writing content, basically putting out blog posts that designers would be like, oh, wow, this is really interesting. [36:12] and started to feel like, oh, Figma keeps coming up in these really interesting pieces of content. Yeah, even if they were using it, I think that that was important, right? So like when we launched, people wanted to test it because it was cool and see what it is. [36:22] But then they might bounce, right? They're like, all right, this isn't advanced enough, I'll come back later. [36:27] which is why we're like, give them reasons to come back. Being like, oh yeah, but like, [36:31] The pen tools always worked like this, but we did it like that. You should test that out. Right. And so we kept giving them his nuggets of reasons to come back in. [36:38] Remember, this is also before multiplayer, and so we couldn't, like, collaborate, right? So it's like, use the tool to do these things.

[36:44] So that really helps people come back into the tool and spend a little bit more time in it. [36:48] How many posts would you say you put out in that first six months just to give people a sense of here's how much? [36:54] It's probably not a ton, right? It's probably some few really good ones. They took a long time. Also, I had to work with an engineer or a designer to do every single one, maybe like 10. [37:04] like at most but those ones that went out like you know we try to get on hacker news we try to get designer news at the time twitter we can jump into that but was also extremely big for us and so we [37:15] It was more about quality than it was about quantity. [37:19] Awesome. Okay, so one is put out great content. People are like, oh, wow, Figma's got some new ideas, and maybe I should pay attention. The other is having someone that's that [37:26] function, actually talk to them. Yes. That was when we started accelerating this much, much more is when we brought in that designer advocate to help us with this full time. [37:35] Cool. Okay, let's move to the next one, which I think is building with your customers. So that one we, you know, I know you talked to Shove, he talked a lot about this, right? This idea of like customer obsession and of building with your customers. And it also goes back to that whole decision that we talked about earlier about like when to come out of stealth. [37:50] Like you can only build so much with your customers when you're in sales because you don't have that many that are about you. But especially even in the early days, we only had a couple of people. We really did listen. And back to also what you're saying earlier about those steps to product market fit, like get one person to use it. That's really what we were focused on, especially in the very, very early days. [38:10] I remember the first one, I think I've told this story before, but was that...

[38:13] we had coda they were our first user and they were based in palo alto uh dylan and i drove down and demoed the product to them and they were the first ones their designer jeremy was like yes we'll take this on full time and i remember we were both like what really he will that was like the first person who said yes to us and so we were like so excited this is like a huge milestone we went to orange hummus in palo also on the way home or on the way back to the office to like bring some back for the team to celebrate um we were just so stoked and then we go back to the office [38:43] from Jeremy being like, "Oh yeah, I tried this gen, this was the lead my engineer, and he can't get the file to open." [38:49] I guess we can't use it." And we were like, "What is it? What happened? We finally got someone." And I remember Dale was like, "Everybody drop everything. We have to fix this." [38:57] And after some, you know, looking at the servers and things, they were like, "Nothing's wrong." And then they realized this problem with Philippe's MacBook. And so Evan had a car, so Dylan had to drive Evan down to Palo Alto to fix the MacBook of Philippe just to get them to use the product. [39:14] So anyway, get them to stick around. That's the first one. But that the building with people, [39:19] The way that we did that was largely through just, you know, each person, we really cared and listened to their feedback, especially when there are only a few people. So one way we did that was I remember we implemented intercom back in the early days and there were so few users and so few of us that everybody was on intercom all day, too. [39:37] And so we get a shot and like, [39:39] I would jump in sometimes, Dylan would jump in, engineer would jump in, and you'd open up a chat with people and they'd like actually like debug the product with this live.

[39:47] They'd be like, "I have this bug." And this engineer would be like, [39:49] let me QA it right now, right? And so that was one example. We all did support back in that day, and the engineers would talk to users directly, get their feedback, and then go immediately fix things like bugs. And so those are just examples of in the early days what that looks like. [40:06] And that just scales a lot over time as you're growing and you're talking to more people. That advocate ended up helping us a ton when they came on board because, you know, some of the stuff, I mean, none of the stuff scales. Right. As your engineer, your engineers can do support forever. And there are other days that becomes really important. But like when we brought that advocate in, their whole job was. [40:26] talking to users, getting them to try to use the product, but then taking the feedback back when it wasn't something that, you know, wasn't working, that that helped us scale a lot. So that became really essential. And then telling people like, oh, we fixed this. [40:40] It made them feel more ownership of the tool too, being like, oh yeah, I asked them to do this, they did it, right? And that's just another way where you just build a strong relationship with people because they feel very invested in their journey with you. [40:53] Which goes back to building credibility. Absolutely. Absolutely. [40:57] There's so many important lessons there. You talked about scaling this, but interestingly this is very much doing things that don't scale. Driving, [41:04] to their office fixing their Wi-Fi on their laptop. Early days, nothing scales in the early days. You just have to do it anyway. Just as a tangent, we're talking about getting people to love your product initially. [41:14] Why is love so important? That's a really high bar. And I imagine you have an interesting insight on just like why it needs to be that level of

[41:21] of appreciation. Yeah, and it doesn't happen over time. These are all things that maybe they just use it first or they're interested. [41:28] But by the time you're getting to the organization level or, you know, the I'm spreading this to my other spheres of influence, like my community, people I know. [41:37] you're kind of putting yourself on the line, right? You're taking a risk when you're doing that, especially if it's your job, you're bringing other people in. [41:45] and you're not going to do that unless you really believe in something [41:48] And so just using it isn't enough to get someone over that stage of, [41:52] going from just like a user to a champion. Right. And so I think it is this love thing becomes important because you don't you just don't get the scalability and spread of someone doing this, doing this for you unless they have that level of passion. [42:08] That's an awesome lesson. I hope people are taking that in. [42:11] You shared the story of Coda and Sho. And actually, he wasn't on the podcast. He wrote a newsletter and he shared all this stuff. I read it. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. People often confuse the two. They assume it's kind of the same thing. [42:22] but he talked about how when he joined Figma, [42:25] This happened. Dylan's like, we need to fix this problem. [42:28] He's like, they're not even paying us. Like, who is this? Why do we need to, we have like real things to build. Why do we have to hop on this bug? [42:34] And then later you realize why that was so important. And that was a big lesson you learned from Dylan of just like, this needs to be taken really seriously. If someone's trying to use your product, [42:41] help them actually be successful. And we have very many of them, right? But it's like, yeah, back to what you were saying earlier, like how do you get one person to actually use it? And so we very much care that that one person's stuff didn't bounce.

[43:11] from top-tier research labs. Product teams that startups and enterprises are using Assembly AI to automatically transcribe and summarize phone calls and virtual meetings, detect topics in podcasts, pinpoint when sensitive content is spoken, and lots more. All of Assembly AI's models, which are accessed through their API, are production ready. So many PMs I know are considering or already building with AI, and Assembly AI is the fastest way to build with AI [43:41] AI, which makes it easy to bring the highest accuracy transcription plus valuable insights to your customers, just like Spotify, CallRail, and Writer do for theirs. Visit assemblyai.com slash Lenny to try their API for free and start testing their models with their no-code playground. That's assemblyai.com slash Lenny. [44:02] So coming back to this go-to-market model that we're talking about, so [44:06] We're kind of still talking about get ICs at a company to love you. So step one was build credibility. [44:12] Step two. I don't know if these are steps or just things you do. [44:15] in some sequence or not. Step two is build with your users. [44:19] What come next? Oh, the next one is so this can take time, right? And that's a big one. And also in the early days, they're not going to necessarily use you right away. Right. And so it might take time. And then also when you do get a couple of people who start to use your product, they're going to also start wondering what other people think about your product. [44:37] And when you're the first only marketing hire, and this is something marketers ask me a lot when they're the only marketer in an organization, is like, how do you focus and prioritize? Because there's so many things you could do. Like,

[44:48] How do you decide what to do? [44:49] And so the thing that I think about a lot in this early phase and thinking about ICs is [44:55] How do you get to them and where can you go where they already are as opposed to making them come to you? [45:00] Because I'm a firm believer. I think now we have spaces where people can come to us. But in the early days, especially like, [45:07] They're not gonna come to your space. They don't know you. They don't care about you. They don't wanna go to your... [45:12] keep like slack channel or something, right? Like you have to go to them and [45:16] And so for us, Dylan really identified immediately that Twitter was the place where that existed. [45:22] And then we had nothing to do with us specifically. Like the design community existed on Twitter way before we did. [45:28] And that's something that they just did on their own and it grew over time. They had this large network on Twitter of influencers, and that's also how people learned about things. [45:38] Also, you know, design is changing all the time. And so people would share best practices, things that they were doing, resources. And that just became kind of a home for designers. So we really went all in on Twitter. That really became a key, our channel that we focused on and really only focused on one. Right. That was it. And we got pretty advanced on how we did this. [45:58] So Dylan is also a great engineer, if you don't know that about him, or a scrappy engineer who can figure things out. And he had this idea and he built this tool or this scraper where he identified a couple of influencers in the design community, like people he thought were like people he wanted to learn from and to talk to. [46:16] and he inputted them into this scraper thing that he made. And then back to this another node graph, he figured out who followed them and who followed those people and also the influence that these people had over other people. It made this massive node graph of these pockets

[46:32] of different topics of design. And when he looked at it, you'd see it kind of cluster, right? So you'd have the cluster of like iconographers, graphic designers, product managers, and you see them all there and you see who the influencers were in those areas. [46:47] And what we did is we found who were most influential to start. And that was another source back to like using whatever you can to get people to try your products. [46:55] That's when we asked for feedback in the early days to just DM them. We were like, hey, Raji, like we love feedback, your feedback on Figma. And that was one of the ways that that's a people. But it's also people who we followed, people who we tried to build this connection with on Twitter in the early days. And that's also where we pushed out that technical content that I was talking about. And then we tried to just like drive and spur conversation about these things. First, it was our launches, but then later is this technical content or whatever it was that we were producing so that we could go to people instead of [47:25] anything that come to us just like in their feed. [47:27] And that became super important to us. [47:30] We'd also interact with people, right? So Dylan has a huge presence, and especially in the early days, and now even has a huge presence talking to users [47:37] We all did show to like our engineering team. And so it wasn't just the brand handle, it was the people. And I think that that's really important to put a personal face behind things, connect with people, answer questions for people live there. And over time, just built this very engaged group of people on Twitter with Figma. And that's still a huge place for us where the design community lives and where we get a lot from our users, too. [48:00] And I think the focus on that and

[48:03] I think why it's so important is it allows people to passively follow you over time without having to invest in you within the tool, you know. So it was our way, especially because we knew it would take a while to build the product and get to a place for people to switch full time for them to follow along with us. [48:19] and build that confidence with us over time and come keep coming back to the tool. [48:23] That Twitter graph story is so legendary. I think Dylan even shared the code online. I'm going to try to find that tweet. Yeah, it's so good. [48:31] We still use it. Like we used it again when we were launching another product because we were like, oh, can we go pull that Twitter graph for like another audience? I don't know how much we ended up using it, but I definitely looked at it and I was like, oh, this is so interesting to see for like developers or whatever it was that we were looking at. [48:45] And also what you just mentioned is really interesting that he wasn't using it to go sell people on the product. [48:51] It was first get feedback on the product, which ends up selling them. Oh, no, we never heard sold the product. Like it was always about feedback. And I think that that's so key to all of this is all about feedback. [49:02] Awesome. [49:03] There's so many lessons here. There's a fourth bullet, I think, around building relationships with users. Oh, just transparency and authenticity. So I think that that really comes in too when you get to the scale part. This is what I'm talking about early days. [49:14] being transparent with your users. And a lot of that does come down to the stuff we talked about, too, about downtime, what that looks like. [49:20] And we just did that naturally with people one on one in those early days. But I think where it gets harder and we stuck with it because it's like in our DNA and how we act. [49:28] is when you get to scale right and you have to like still do that stuff with you know a lot of people who care and who do these things with you but um i think it's just so important

[49:38] that you... [49:40] are honest. Also, they don't hide behind the brand, right? That you're human and authentic and transparent with people. And we can come up with examples. I think the better examples are probably at scale than even in the early days, because that's when it gets harder to do that. [49:52] So let's chat about that. This is about getting started. Yeah. [49:57] How do you do this at scale or does it change completely? Do you continue doing this in a different way? How do you approach it as the company grows? You just totally still do it, right? I think that that's just so important that that's how it stays, right? In the early days, you do this stuff and you kind of get the flywheel going, you get these people, you have these people who love you. But today, that's still how things spread the most, right? We're going into new markets, we're going into new places, we're launching a new tool. And that becomes so [50:27] And so some of those things, the tactics look a little bit different, but the themes are still the same and what that looks like at scale. [50:33] A couple of just examples of that are those advocates, right? That's, I think, a huge one. When I was a marketer, that advocate was just my partner. He gut checked everything that I did. He'd be like, "No, that's too thirsty." Or, you know, like, "You're using a fluff word again." You know what I mean? Also, he was how we pitched the company. He was the people we talked to. He'd go to lunch at Etsy or whatever and just get feedback on things. [50:58] And that function has really grown with Figma. [51:01] So now that's a whole team at Figma. It's a, it's a large team and it's scaled with us, with every product that we launched. So now we have developer advocates, gym advocates.

[51:10] and regionally so like we go into a new region and they're part of the landing team like we're in [51:16] We need to find the Japan, now we have two of them, the Japan Designer Advocate, right? Because it's just so core to how we do things. [51:23] And we've scaled that. [51:25] So I think on the credibility side, like I think that those those advocates and scaling as advocates are like the magic dust that I always call them the magic dust that like make sure that we are able to build those relationships and stay authentic. [51:38] throughout everything we do. [51:40] And these advocates, again, they're just [51:42] like their background as designer, and then they end up being an advocate designer. Or now developer, big jam person. But they're passionate, their profile is [51:50] They're passionate users. [51:52] who oftentimes they find us and find them, right? You couldn't just like post this job online and go source for it. It's like this will kind of emerge from the community. [52:00] And then they love it so much and they know the products so well. They're technical experts. But yes, they were for the designer ones. They were all previously product designers. Awesome. [52:10] Is there anything else you want to share around kind of at scale, how these things change? You mentioned transparency ends up being really important. What else there do you think is really important? I think there's two examples. The one is building with users, because I think this is a good one that I like to get into because you're like, how do you scale that? You get so many bug requests. You go to our feature request page on our forum and it's just so many. [52:30] But also, like as you're building product, you're always like, oh, well, I can go do all of these fixes and bug updates. But I also have to go build new stuff right to grow. And that's always a tension with any company as you're looking at a roadmap. One of the ways that we saw like done that and still continue to focus on.

[52:47] things that people care about that's so related to the craft and quality is through quality weeks with engineering. And then we decided a couple of years ago, we had this idea where we're like, oh, when we package all of those quality updates up, it's one thing and launch them together. And we could even show like the tweet or the, you know, form request that spurred us to do this. And that was where idea of LittleBigUpdates came, which is a launch that we do every year at Figma. [53:17] The engineers can just go and like look at Twitter, talk to our support team, get all these small things that annoy people to fix them. And they just fix them all and they get so many done. And then we launch them all together. And that's so like one of our most popular launches that we always that we do because people are like, yes, I care about this. This improves my quality of life every single day. [53:37] Back to that discussion of like two clicks versus one click and things like that. They're that small. [53:41] but we still do it. And I love that little big update one. I think Airbnb did something like that too with the 100,000. [53:47] 100 updates thing on their website. Yeah, Airbnb has shifted fully to that, which is only big launches. [53:53] just wait twice a year and launch a bunch of stuff. That's exactly, that's fully how they operate. That's another way that we do like the building with. And I think that even giving the engineers, we give them the [54:03] the ability to pick them, right? So they're like, "Oh, yep, this tweet, "I wanna fix this bug." - That's gotta be so satisfying. - Yeah, exactly. And like, in the marketing even, we'll pull examples. Like, "Oh, that's the one that you, "the person who said that." So that one's big. And then let's share the transparency side.

[54:18] You know, I think where this gets hard at scale is, [54:22] yeah all of a sudden you have a lot of people who care about your products and i think it's really easy as a brand [54:28] because you are a brand at this point as you're getting bigger to be like, Oh, [54:32] I can hide behind my handle or my my you know the figma handle or do I really have to say something about this? Right? And so just two examples of things like that where you just you know, we've chosen to be transparent when wouldn't have to be or like, [54:46] you know, you might not are downtime. Downtime is always a big deal. And I remember there was a specific instance, I think it was last year, maybe two years ago, where there was like this issue with these servers and like an AWS cluster went down and we didn't know what was going on. And so we had downtime like multiple times in a week and people were pissed, right? Things were not going well. Again, back on Twitter, we built the double edge sort of Twitter is like, you build a strong communication channel, their users, and they communicate right back to you. [55:16] It's inundating us. [55:18] And I remember we did a public postmortem and we always do that. If something happens or something goes wrong, we're like, yeah, that was bad. Here's what happened. And here's the technical reason. And here's how we fixed it. And then we like tweeted that and promoted it. [55:32] and took just full accountability for it. And, you know, we always choose to make those choices when they're hard. [55:39] And that was just one example. But I think that the hardest example, and back to your question of like the most stressful days at Figma, [55:46] The true most stressful thing for me was the day that we announced the acquisition. That was probably one of the harder moments of my career where I run social. That's like my job is running social. And all of a sudden you have this onslaught.

[55:59] on social and you have to figure out what to do. And I remember the way that we announced it was we just retweeted Dylan. That was like all that we had said. Raji on our team, I remember I was talking to him about it and he was like, [56:11] we've got to talk to our users. Like we just have to talk to them directly. We have to show we're the same company. We just have to like not hide behind the brand. And, you know, he was totally right. And so I remember we decided that day that the next day we just had to. [56:26] have an open public forum where we could talk directly with our users and let them ask us any questions. [56:31] And so we'd have the Twitter space the next day with Dylan and show Raji and Tom. [56:36] And we just had it open and people could ask us anything they wanted. And we were able to be just like really honest and transparent with that about everything that we could. [56:44] And I think that that is just a really good example of how [56:48] Even when it's really, really, really, really hard, you still have to just be transparent. And I think that that's when the tide started to turn of people giving us a chance to like prove that everything would be great. Even when it's like the highest stakes and the hardest thing of still listening to people, maintaining that connection and not hiding behind the brand. [57:10] It feels like transparency is core to the values of Figma. Have you codified your values, and is that one of them? Is there anything to do there? Interesting. We have codified our values. It isn't explicitly listed out, which is interesting. But I think of it as our value, especially with our users. We think about our value a lot as run with it, build community.

[57:31] Love your craft and all those definitely come through. Play. Maybe this should be one because I think it's so core to how to make decisions in our framework of when we have a decision. [57:41] you know, which way we're going to go. [57:43] And also, we mentioned Sho a couple times, but on Twitter, he's always... [57:46] asking people, "What do you need in the editor? Here's what's going great." Absolutely. It's still how we get so much feedback, right? Is that is talking to people directly and [57:55] and Chris will come on when people have bugs and just respond to them like he's our CTO. Like people are just actively on there. [58:02] listening to people fixing bugs responding. [58:06] I want to shift to... [58:07] Kind of the second step of the go-to-market motion. But before I do that, I have a couple things I wanted to touch on briefly. [58:13] One is... [58:14] You even mentioned config, this conference that you ran, which is a good example, I think, of scaling a lot of the things you're talking about. It used to be Twitter, social graph, [58:21] find people on Twitter now, it's like this epic conference that I think people just love. I was on Twitter the days of config, and it's just my whole feed was just like, [58:29] Oh my god, config is the best thing. So many toxins. [58:33] So many people. Config is such a good example. I remember I happily talked about config. The way that we do config, I think... [58:41] I'd never run a conference before. Maybe that's probably part of it. And I brought somebody on, but she and I were both sitting together and being like, [58:48] Okay. Like, so yeah, we're doing a conference, like, [58:51] "How do we get the content for this conference? What do we do?" And we didn't know. And so, we just decided, "Oh, so much of what we do is listen to our users. Let's put out this call for proposals and see what they want to talk about." And so, that's how we got and get a lot of our content for the conference. And a lot of it comes back to what I was talking about earlier, which is very technical, deep,

[59:15] content, it targets individual contributors who are the practitioners of a tool. And through that process, we build these relationships with these speakers. Our advocates help them shape their talks. And then I think that we do produce really strong technical content through that process and through config. And we're also able to, with these people that we work with, help them grow their own profiles. And that also helps them stay more connected to us, helps them become thought [59:45] Oh, so many different people. [59:47] who are the practitioners and the ICs because we're not just putting thought leadership out there. We're talking directly to [59:54] how to use the tool and the things that individual contributors are still dealing with. [59:58] Yeah, it's kind of a lot like this podcast in my newsletter. It's like, [1:00:01] How to actually do stuff, not just a bunch of big ideas. Really? Yeah, no fluff. I remember seeing a tweet about it where someone filmed being inside of it, and they're like, "It's like a rock concert. It's not a conference." Oh, that too. We also just have fun. That's another big part of it as well. Yeah, I remember literally saying, "How can I make this more fun?" So that was a big part of it. Sounds like another value. Yes. [1:00:21] Okay, let's talk about step two of this go-to-market motion that you've developed, which I think if I were to just simply describe it as help people spread it within the organization. Is that right? Yep. Cool. All right. How do you do that? All right. So again, I've got four things here and I'll list them out and then we can go through them. The first is make it easy to try the tool and to share it without a lot of gates, right? So that you can do this. The second is those DAs. I want to talk about how those DAs work in our sales process. Oh, designer advocate.

[1:00:51] Yeah, sorry, that's our acronym for them, Center Advocates, because they are so core to how we sell and how this works. The third is finding the operational thing. [1:01:02] that like allows you to scale. For us, that's design systems. The thing that like was the biggest blocker to somebody using Figma and turning it into like your biggest reason to adopt. And the last one was much more was still about maintaining and growing that connection with those internal champions over time. [1:01:21] So those are the four things. And again, it looks different, similar concepts with different ideas. We look at that in the early days versus what we do today with it with scale. [1:01:30] Awesome, let's get into it. - All right, cool. So the first one's making the products easy to try and share. So we talked about this a little bit, but... [1:01:37] If you go to figma.com today, it's very easy to sign up for a free account, right? I have a free account myself on my personal side for designing my house, which is the other thing I used to do before. But you just go and you can try the tool. And I think that's so important for us to allow someone to use it over time for a long time until they have confidence enough to be able to want to spread it within their organizations. [1:02:01] But then it's also... [1:02:03] pretty easy to create a free team and share stuff with your organization. [1:02:08] In the early days, you could just share a link and that was it. You could use the tool and everything was free. Once we implemented pricing, which was about two years after we launched, we had this thing called a starter team. This is actually something that was switched. Initially, the way that it worked was our starter team.

[1:02:27] was that you could have [1:02:29] like unlimited files, but only collaborate with two or three people. [1:02:33] And that was like the starter team and he wanted to add more people to collaborate with. And then, you know, you hit the paywall. We realized that, wait a minute, like that's hurting us. And so we switched it. And now it's like you can have three files. [1:02:48] but unlimited collaborators. [1:02:49] And that was huge for us. And you can not suppose where you can see it in the metrics very clearly. [1:02:54] right, where it was like, oh, this is really easy for people now to share before they just start paying. This is huge, right? And so then you get to start using it for free with their teams, and the team's getting confidence in it before then they all have to start [1:03:10] uploading it like their procurement team or whoever it is to start paying for it. [1:03:14] So not introducing payment too fast, right? And like giving people that time to build that advocacy and to try it out with their teams, with people before they have to pay, I think is huge there. [1:03:24] That's such a good and important topic. [1:03:27] that I want to pull a thread on a little bit. So what you discovered there is [1:03:30] You don't want to get in the way of the growth engine of the product. If it's going to grow through people spreading it, you don't want to cut it off at three. That seems like a monumental decision that changed everything. Any sense of just like how you came about to realizing that or is it just like obvious? Okay, of course, we need to change this. Well, I think it was intuitive and it was more about the change management process of how to do that. When people at this point were using the tool and using that starter tier and like setting people or what that looks like.

[1:04:00] drafts and just share a link to and we wanted to like shut that down. So it was like a bigger decision on just change management. [1:04:07] But I think we intuitively knew it. And it was much more about, yeah, the change management, how to make that happen. [1:04:13] Is there anything else you learned about what should be in free? [1:04:16] and paywalled versus what should be in freemium, just like [1:04:19] broad thoughts. Well, I think the other interesting thing is too, and I think I said this, but like so much of ours is like, so we have a couple of tiers. We have a free tier and then we have a pro tier and then we have our org tier. [1:04:30] And the free tier, you can just, it's free tier includes this like free starter team. And so you can just do that. Go to the thing.com and go do that. Pro is all enter credit card. And then org as you talk to sales, Oregon enterprise, you talk to sales. [1:04:42] And so I think the other key thing here is like we get a lot of [1:04:47] upsells to org from pro, right? And so it's not like it's also a thought of like what you put in org versus pro. [1:04:56] Right. So that's like the other decision because PROS also relatively inexpensive. So that, that grows a lot too, really quickly. And it's still very important to us, but still most of our like marketing qualified leads that are sales leads. [1:05:08] likely come from pro or from free, right? And so it's like the decisions that we think about are like, okay, what do you want to sell on? And it has to go from free to pro. It has to be pretty natural because you don't have any people involved, right? And so it's like they have to just like do that on their own. [1:05:22] And then when you go from pro to org or enterprise, [1:05:26] It's more about the organization and like the scale. And that's where that design systems conversation comes in that we could talk about. But that was the thing that we really indexed on for Oregon Enterprise of like why you would want to upgrade from pro to org.

[1:05:40] So it's like, it is like this multi-step process, but it's also nice because, you know, you can like increase your investment in the process, in the product as you're building your own confidence in the tool. [1:05:51] The other really important nuance in the way that you structured pricing [1:05:54] It's unlimited viewers, but it's just editors that you charge for. Yes, so true. You know, so many people, especially if you're a designer and you're working with a product manager, you can comment. [1:06:04] right? And so, so much of this is to, yes, you can spread it and you can use stigma, [1:06:09] for free for a really long time because you can just comment on the tool. And it also gets us through many more places with the organization and helps us be more useful to more people. Because, yeah, editors or viewers are free. [1:06:21] This one topic could be a whole podcast, and I have so many questions. Let me ask maybe one more, and then I'll move on. [1:06:26] How often do you revisit the packaging and pricing? [1:06:29] at this point, and do you have any device there? - Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because the product's still growing, right? Like, we just launched variables in dev mode back in config this year, and that influenced pricing and packaging, and it still is, right? And so FigJam, too, [1:06:43] And so I would say the core foundations aren't something we revisit a lot, but we're continually adding new features and we have to think about [1:06:50] What tiers should they go in? What does that look like? So those things influence that all the time. [1:06:56] By the way, I recently upgraded to the non-free pack because I hit that limit of three with the designer that I work with. Yeah. It's also just kind of annoying because you have to keep moving things in and out of drafts. That's exactly what I did. It's like, oh, this is worth $12 a month or whatever just to not have to bother with it.

[1:07:11] Yeah, once you realize like, okay, yeah, it is not that much in the scheme of things. I'm just going to do it. [1:07:16] But it's interesting how it's not that much, but I still like, nah, I don't really want to pay that. Oh, for sure. We all do that, right? Especially because so many people have... [1:07:25] individual pro accounts, right? Because it's not necessarily a business or maybe it's a small business or you're an individual, but it's very different from an organization where someone else is paying for it. Yeah, so funny. [1:07:34] Okay. [1:07:36] Step two is around designer advocates. Talk about that. Yeah, so I just think these DAs, I'm so sorry, I keep calling them DAs because that's what we call them internally. It's cool, now we know. Advocates are just so special and such a big part of Figma. And like I said, it took us so long to [1:07:52] to start charging or bringing a sales team. And when we first hired our first salesperson and our first sales rep, [1:07:58] was the same day that our next designer advocate started, who eventually the first designer advocate left and did something else. And we brought in another designer advocate and he started on the first day that the sales team started. And at this point, more people were using Figma. We'd had that pro tier going for a while. [1:08:13] And Tom, who is still here today and is leading that team, Tom Lowry, he was a passionate Figma user, but he was a passionate Figma user who brought Figma to his organization. For the first one, you know, we were so early, we didn't have an organization to bring it to, he just loved the product. But Tom, he was the internal champion at his company who got his company to adopt Figma. And so when he joined Figma, that was really the mindset that he brought to this was also like, how do you use this as a team?

[1:08:42] And why I think this is so special and so foundational that they started together is that they would go talk to users together. [1:08:50] and they would bring him into the sales process. But he was never a salesperson, never had a quota, doesn't live on the sales team. [1:08:57] technical expert who has such a deep passion and a deep, deep, deep, deep understanding of the tool that he would come in and just help explain the products to other designers. And it goes back to that same theme that I talked about earlier with marketing, where I realized that I would never have the credibility with designers that a designer has. [1:09:16] Same is true with sales. They're never going to know the product as well as a designer will. And so Tom being there and Tom being able to be like, [1:09:24] oh, I understand exactly what you're talking about and what your problems are. Here's how this works, or here's where you're blocked, or here's an idea or best practice of how to use this. Like that just became so powerful and so useful. [1:09:37] for them and for the sales team, that they ended up calling it the Tom Factor, like wouldn't even join stuff, 'cause it wasn't necessarily like a structured process at the beginning, they'd just be like, "Hey Tom, can you come?" [1:09:47] "Help talk to this company with us, or help show them how this works." But then they called it the Tom Factor because he was so powerful, and their deals were so much more likely to close if he joins the calls. [1:09:58] But it wasn't a full time job either. Like he also is connected to the product because he's like this special person who was a designer, was a four years of the product and then talks to hundreds of customers. And so he's like has the best way of synthesizing product feedback and then bringing back to the product team because he has all of that context.

[1:10:19] Right. And so I think that that role is just so special and it's something that we've actually chosen to scale because it's just so valuable in the same way it's valuable for marketing. It's valuable for sales. [1:10:29] I think we're going to spur a lot of companies building these teams with this conversation. I can't speak highly enough about it. We think of it as we're scaling this role, we're like marketing product and sales. That's where... [1:10:39] you know, these people come in. And I think when you have a technical IC audience, [1:10:43] I don't see how else you build any credibility or get anywhere with people if you don't have someone who deeply understands that integrated in marketing and sales. [1:10:52] Who does this team report to? Me. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we're talking about how to help. [1:11:00] your product spread within an organization. You talked about developer advocates, you talked about making it easier to spread. What else? [1:11:06] Let's talk about design systems. So let's say you're a designer and you know, you're designing an app and [1:11:12] that you need a button, right? Rather than going in and making a new button every single time, you need a library of the button, right? With the color, the spacing, the padding, all that stuff already predefined. Maybe it's tied to code, maybe it's not, but you just wanna pull that in, and then maybe there's someone on the design system, and there's brand designer or someone who's like, oh, we changed this from this font to that font. [1:11:34] that you know that and it just updates everywhere, or a padding change and updates everywhere. And that's like the most simplistic version is a button, but this stuff gets way more complex, right? This turns into like, here is our welcome screen, here is our header bar, all the different components.

[1:11:50] that then become like whole pages. [1:11:52] And it's a huge efficiency thing, right? If you have a very robust design system, you're just pulling in [1:11:57] all of those components instead of having to design those from scratch every single time. And it's consistent. Like you have hundreds of designers in an organization, they're all making buttons, like they're going to be slightly different. And then engineering is like, [1:12:10] Wait, what patting do I use? And so it's very inefficient. So most, a lot of organizations use these design systems and they become very advanced over time. [1:12:18] But Figma did not have design systems in the early days, right? Or if we did, we may have had them at the file level, but we couldn't share them with other people. And so that was a huge blocker for us for a really long time. These big companies are like, oh, yeah, this is cool, but I need a design system. How am I supposed to work with engineering? Because this is so big in engineering, too, because when you're able to... [1:12:38] you know, identify all these different buttons and these components in advance, you can tie them to code and then it's easier for them because they don't have to inspect it every time. [1:12:46] Right. So it's like way better for everybody. So it was our biggest blocker. But then we decided like, no, we're going to focus on this. And in the early days, that was just like meetups still. And it's like we need to do. [1:12:56] "Design Systems Meetups," and we were all like, "What are design systems?" or I'm just like, "What is design systems?" And then I went and read a pattern way of thinking and Brad Frost's "Atomic Structures" design systems and started learning about it. But anyway, so in the early days, we just like literally brought, there's a community of design systems people, right? And we brought all of them together, met with our product team, met with Dylan, started just having these really informal meetups around design systems.

[1:13:20] to learn from these people and start just learning, like hearing from them. And then we started building out more features from it. And then we just started really leaning into the technical, like aspects of how companies use and scale design systems. Because while design systems are so important, it's also very hard to get an organization to do it because it's like an efficiency thing that they also have to like invest in, but it's immediately connected to a launch that day. [1:13:42] Right. And so every company is at a different phase of maturity of where their design system is. But we really leaned into the content, into the features, into eventually showing how people do it in Figma. [1:13:52] both at the beginning level, but then at the very advanced level to really lean into that. And that also went into marketing, right? So that was, we have designsystems.com, it's like a Figma property. We had a whole conference around it in the fall called Schema, [1:14:06] where we just bring in these advanced design practitioners, and they just show you how they're working. [1:14:12] And that's so important too, because design systems are one of the main reasons you upgrade. [1:14:16] from protocol org or enterprise. [1:14:18] right is like you're at this phase where you're getting more organized and more advanced your bigger company [1:14:23] And so that's one of our big gating features for Upgrade. And so that became just the key thing we leaned in on. [1:14:30] And that's bottoms up specific because these people are not, the people making the design systems are not like the VP still, right? Like the next phase of bottoms up are the ICs and then the design systems people. And now those internal champions are largely design systems people too. [1:14:47] They're either the biggest blockers or the biggest champions, depending on if you win them over.

[1:14:51] I love just that lesson of nothing that is blocking you from being adopted. See if you can turn that into an advantage. Totally. Totally. [1:14:58] Feels like looking at Figma, it's like, wow, so many advantages for a product to spread. It's single player, you can use it on your own. It's got multiplayer, you can invite people. [1:15:07] It gets better as more people are using it versus, I don't know, a company like Slack where it's useless on your own. Yeah. I guess, is there anything there about just... [1:15:17] these lessons you're sharing are most helpful for a product that is useful on its own or is it [1:15:22] or it could be useful for all kinds of products, anything there. That's what I was talking about with the IC, right? An IC has to get a lot of value out of this on their own. [1:15:30] And I think it has to be technical, or that's a hypothesis that I have. It's certainly easier if it's a technical product, right? Like you get a lot farther because people want to talk much more about the product, they care so much about the craft, and like they want to spend a lot of time [1:15:45] learning and understanding it. And I think that's true with designers, that's true with engineers. That's not true with every audience, right? Like not every audience is deeply cares about [1:15:55] wanting to learn the craft in the best way possible for a specific thing. So I think that one of the requirements, but things that makes us a lot more likely to be successful, is that your ISE, there's a tool and they can use it on their own. [1:16:09] And it's technical. I think that helps a ton. Coming back to [1:16:13] the strategy of helping Figma spread within an organization. I think you mentioned there's one more item around champions. Oh, yeah. So just the last thing there is, you know,

[1:16:24] you have to keep that relationship going with those champions forever. They don't go away. And sometimes they get mad at you too. Right. So like, [1:16:33] I remember there's one, I think it was at one of our companies, one of our bigger companies, and he was upset about something and he tweeted it and then we immediately had to go talk to him and understand what he wanted and what was wrong. And so they don't go away, but then also I think a lot about how, [1:16:50] through the process of maintaining a relationship with those people, we're actually able to help them. [1:16:55] and what they get out of it beyond just the tool. Especially over time, especially as we have a larger platform, I think a lot about how can we help them grow, whether that's growing their careers, because they brought on Figma. [1:17:09] you know, we get a promotion or whatever that looks like, but we have more direct control over things like, oh, you're going to speak at one of our events. We're going to amplify you on social. We're going to promote you and make you a thought leader. And it works really well for everyone, because [1:17:23] These people also have the deep technical expertise to say, to show other people like here's how I'm full of my design systems. [1:17:29] Here's how I do this. [1:17:30] and some people want to learn from them, and we have the platform to be able to amplify them. [1:17:35] And so I think a lot about like, yeah, how can we help these people grow in their own careers and get something out of this to beyond just the love of the tool? [1:17:42] And then that... [1:17:43] builds back into building credibility for Figma because now there's all these additional designers. Totally. It's all a circle. It's all connected. Flywheels within flywheels. All connected. All connected. [1:17:53] Maybe just the last question along these lines, what changes as you scale? So a lot of these are things you did early on. What changes as you grow as a company in this bucket of helping the product spread?

[1:18:02] Yeah, I think the key thing is that you have to keep doing it. So one of the things that I feel like I my role now at Figma that I think a lot about is like how I can keep advocating for this stuff when we are starting to implement more. [1:18:13] top-down motion and [1:18:15] having to really prove ROI or, you know, thinking about how do you scale the sales team and all these things. [1:18:23] And so a lot of what I'm doing, too, is thinking, like, OK, how do we keep this going? [1:18:28] and keep this model successful as the company is still growing because it's not necessarily as intuitive. [1:18:34] as you are starting to add in more of these, some of the more traditional [1:18:38] methods and motions, right? And so that's kind of something that I think about quite a bit. Things like that conference that I talked about, Schema, that's a big one. Config, that's a big one. Scaling our DA team and really like having them grow with the company across regions and across products is really big. [1:18:54] And so it's how do you keep not keep protecting those things? Because it's not immediately obvious when you bring in just a ton of new people. [1:19:03] Right. It's easy to break the thing that was working. Totally. And you have to do new things too, right? You have to layer on new things. How do you... [1:19:11] not just walk away from this thing that got you to where you are as well. [1:19:14] Is this a fit for everyone, this sort of approach? Let's say every B2B SaaS company, what are maybe prerequisites for who should apply this sort of approach in this motion? Yeah, I find a lot of this about myself, actually, because Figma's also has new products, right? So I think to myself, like, oh, can I replicate this? [1:19:32] Like FigJam, like FigJam is one of those examples. And DevMode, all of a sudden we're working with developers. So I thought about this a lot. And, you know, I don't know if there's like, oh, you have to have this or you have to have that. But I think there's certainly things that make it easier. And they're both true on like the market side of like the type of the audience and then also on the team side.

[1:19:50] Within the market, I already mentioned it, but I think it really helps if people are technical. [1:19:54] and you have this technical audience of people who really care about the craft and they get a lot of value out of the tool by themselves. [1:20:00] because that just allows them to really learn something and really build confidence in something before they have to spread it or start collaborating. And it gives you something to talk about with them that's not collaboration, because like I said, no one wants to talk about collaboration. It's like nobody wants to talk about it. And so you have other things you can talk about, even though collaboration is so important. [1:20:19] no one wants to talk about it. So being technical is important. And then yeah, caring about your tools. That's another one that I think a lot about. As a marketer, I don't know how much I care about my tools. Some of them I do, but a lot of them I don't. Even if you're like, "Oh, Claire, you have to move from Dropbox paper to Google Docs," they'd be like, "Oh, fine." Right? Maybe that's their personality, but designers specifically, and I think engineers are the same way, just as examples, [1:20:44] have deep passions for their tools, probably because they're in it eight hours a day. And so they're using them all the time. [1:20:49] And so it certainly helps if you these people already care, care digitally about what their tools are. [1:20:55] Another thing that helps is that you have a community that exists within the [1:21:00] the kind of target audience already. And we had that with designers. Like, yes, we grew it a lot and have grown with it a lot. But like I said, like that Twitter community that existed without us, that was there before we were there. And so it made it a lot easier for us to get started because we didn't have to make something to bring people to us. We had a distribution channel already in place that we could kind of work through. So that helped a ton.

[1:21:21] And I think the last one was that the that poor I see audience. [1:21:25] has a lot of connection points within the organization. Like designers are so collaborative. Like you were saying you work with, as a PM, you were working with designers. They work with everybody, right? Like if you're building something, you need comments, you need feedback. [1:21:36] And so it was really natural for them to be like a super spreader because their role was such that they were collaborating with a lot of people. [1:21:43] And again, when people are hearing this, they're like, of course, Figma did so well. They had all these advantages. [1:21:48] But, [1:21:49] I think people forget how many disadvantages that also led to, right? Like convincing a designer to switch to a new tool very hard. What I hear with stories there is that when we launched Desider News, which was a popular forum back in the day, the first response was, "If this is the future of design, I'm changing careers." Because designers do not want to be collaborative. There was like this process where people were like, "Oh no, I want to like do my work on my own and then present when I'm ready." It was like a massive shift in getting them to think in a different way. [1:22:16] to do this. So even to me, it was intuitive, but of course you'd be collaborative, but designers did not want to be all of them right away. I think it's only like, [1:22:24] a clearly successful product only after the fact. [1:22:28] This reminds me of another story Sho shared with me about Uber, which was also very classically not collaborative and very siloed. [1:22:34] and there was a big push to adopt Figma to help encourage more sharing because that was against the culture. Yes, that was a key problem and still a key problem with a lot of design organizations is that they're siloed. [1:22:47] And that's an organizational shift to get people to be collaborative. What sort of team do you need to have in place to approach growth and go to market in this way? What did you find was really important? The most important thing there is that you have an executive and a leader who believes in this. Like, I did not start this deal and started this, right? Like, he was the core person who believed in this and who drove a lot of this. And he continues to. And he's built this up to be like a culture of our team.

[1:23:17] and make everyone believe in it. And then I think the other thing is through that, is that you, that thing that we're talking about earlier with metrics, [1:23:25] Like, I think so much of this is people being like, that doesn't scale. How do you measure this? And yes, [1:23:31] We are working on all those things, but it's not immediately clear. [1:23:37] The metrics don't immediately show you if something's working or not. It goes back to signal over metrics. And I think that that's so important and having leaders who believe in that to are able to trust their own intuitions and their own guts is so important. [1:23:51] And it's so interesting too, because I was just like thinking when I was just now that, I was talking about earlier about how trusting yourself and trusting intuition is like the hardest part, the most stressful part in the early days. But even here, like it's the thing you need the most to be successful. And so I don't know what kind of how that connects back, but it just feels [1:24:08] Like that's just so important in this type of model. And with just being at a startup is that you're able to believe in it and have the confidence and then trust yourself. [1:24:16] I'm going to quickly summarize this model just for people to have a very clear, succinct explanation and then comment on anything I'm forgetting and missing. I'll keep it really brief. [1:24:26] and then we'll get to our very exciting lightning round. So the idea here basically is step one, make individual contributors at a company love your product. Step two is get them to help spread you within the company. And to get people to love your product, [1:24:39] the four keys that you shared is build credibility for your product [1:24:42] Build a product with your users, focus where you can connect with your users one to many, in your case it was Twitter, and build a relationship with users so that they can start to trust you and transparency is a big part of that.

[1:24:54] Before I move on to step two, anything I missed there? Nope, that's it. Okay, cool. Then step two is help them spread that product within the organization and what you found was really important there. [1:25:04] One is make it easy to share the product and try it for free. Two is designer advocates being involved in the sales process of the Tom Factor. [1:25:11] um, [1:25:12] find and target the operating thing that spreads adoption. And so in this case, I think it was design systems you mentioned mostly. [1:25:19] And then the final piece is shine a light on champions and help them be successful, make it help them in their career. Yep, that's it. Awesome. [1:25:27] Well, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Yes. [1:25:31] What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? I recommend management books to lots of people. The other piece of this that we didn't touch on at all is scaling a team and all the things that go into management. That'll be our next step, our next podcast. Teaching and also growing new managers. Radical Candor, Dare to Lead, to be honest, are the ones I recommend the most because I do a lot of coaching new managers and helping them learn how to manage. Those are the first two I start with because they're so good. [1:25:58] What is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've recently watched and really liked? [1:26:02] So I just watched 100 Foot Wave on HBO and I watched it because I'm going to Portugal next week. And that's a place where they have like the biggest waves in the world. And it was just really interesting to learn all about Nizar and Portugal and all the waves and the surfing culture that's grown there. So that was just a fun one that I watched recently. [1:26:21] And is your plan to do a 100-foot wave? No, because I'm expecting. So there will be less surfing for me. Oh, wow. Congratulations. I know. I hope I'm doing yoga on the beach when my partner serves. Amazing. We just had a kid. I know. That's a whole other podcast. That's a whole other podcast.

[1:26:38] This podcast just... [1:26:40] Parenting starts to come up again and again. Isn't that interesting? [1:26:43] Okay, we'll keep going. [1:26:44] What is a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you love? Okay, so you might cut this because it's a little promotional, but FigJam, in the last couple of months especially, I spent a lot of time having to create strategies and files and explanations, and I spent in meetings, and I spent all of my day in FigJam, like literally all of my day. And I work with Figma, I use the products, and I was using Figma for a long time, but FigJam, for me in my role, was a great product. [1:27:14] Literally use it every single day and now I cannot imagine living without it. [1:27:18] It replaces so many different tools for me. Great pitch. We will not be cutting that. Great. I'm also a big fan of Fitch. And it's true. It's very true. I'm in there all the time. I think I'm the most active FigJam user. I had to go validate that in the metrics, but I'm in FigJam all the time. [1:27:31] Next question, what is a favorite life motto that you like to repeat to yourself that you share with people, something that comes up when I ask that? [1:27:39] When I was younger, I really was, I mean, I've always been motivated, but like, oh, I have to get this thing right now, right? Whether it was my career or I was an athlete growing up, so I really wanted to, like, perform and do well on things. And I just put a ton of pressure on myself. [1:27:53] But I recently got, or not recently, last like maybe five years, got this motto of like consistent pressure over time as being more of my motto. And like taking some of the pressure off of having to do things immediately or get to a certain place too fast, kind of maybe it's more like atomic habits or things like that. But I've just much more in this mode of like.

[1:28:12] you're not gonna get everything done. It's a startup, a career, like whatever. It's not gonna happen immediately. You just have to like keep working at it and not giving up and having that grit to keep going and keep pushing over time is way more important [1:28:24] than any immediate accomplishments. That's so good. I just added this question to lightning round and these answers are so good each time. [1:28:31] Consistent pressure over time. I so get that. Reminds me of [1:28:34] how I think about the newsletter. It's just like, keep at it. Keep at it. It doesn't have to be the best thing ever every single time. Just don't give up. Great answer. Final question. What's your favorite use case of Figma that you never expected? [1:28:46] So I think I kind of mentioned this a little bit, but I use it for home renovation, FigJam especially. So I, I renovated a house with my partner and we're doing another one right now. And I couldn't do renovations without it. I copy and paste like, I start with Pinterest, like get ideas, but then I pull them all up to like mood board on FigJam and then like circle things. And this helps me communicate with my partner. I'll send it to him and get, you know, comments from him on stuff. [1:29:12] links, [1:29:13] And so, yes, we also like will draw rooms and model things up and have it on the iPad. So, yeah, interior design and home renovations on FigJam. [1:29:23] Claire, we've talked about making people love your product. I think people will love this episode. Hopefully they also spread it within their organization. [1:29:30] Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out? And how can listeners be useful to you? [1:29:37] I guess Twitter, like I'm not active per se, but that's probably the I don't look at LinkedIn. So definitely the place. I'm just Claire T. Butler there. And then helpful to me. You can tell me your feedback on Figgem and DevMode. That would be really helpful to me. And then I guess the other thing is parenting tips with work. Like I'm a little nervous about that.

[1:29:57] Right? Like I love my job, love my career, and I'm going to be a mom soon and need to figure out how to make that work. So I want to hear other people have done that. [1:30:06] I can give you two quick tips right now. [1:30:08] One is there's a guest post during my pet leave that Tamara, I forget her last name, wrote. Okay. Which is a... [1:30:14] Basically a leave guide, like a guide to setting yourself up. Oh, I need this. I'm working on this right now. I need this. Okay. I will send this to you and I'll link it in the show notes. [1:30:22] Also, right before I went on PatLeave, I had Noah Weiss on the podcast who was just leaving PatLeave. [1:30:27] and he gave me this awesome advice [1:30:29] of don't overextrapolate every moment. This is less about getting ready for paternal leave and more just being in it, which is don't overextrapolate things that are going on. That one thing that's bothering you or is a problem is not going to continue necessarily. [1:30:43] Let it go. Good one. I love it. All right. Well, that was a parenting podcast a little bit. [1:30:50] which is totally cool. [1:30:51] Claire, thank you again so much for being here. Yeah. Thank you. That was really fun. That's my KPI for this podcast. Great, great, great. Bye, everyone. [1:31:02] Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

[1:31:21] See you in the next episode.