6 Lessons from 6 Months at Figma
This edition comes to you from Italy, where I'm currently on work-cation!
I’m watching the Italian Alps skip briskly across the horizon as the high-speed train makes short work of the journey from Milan to Turin. Traveling outside America, particularly in Europe or East Asia, is always a happy reminder for me that public transportation can be affordable, clean, and convenient. While living in the Bay Area is comfortable for the most part, we still only dream of the interconnectivity of rail and metros that are an everyday accommodation in these other parts of the world. But I digress..
Six Months
A few days ago marked my first six months at Figma, and I can safely say that, as is often the case with startups, it feels like twice as long. The company has grown by roughly a third again since I’ve joined, and the rapid pace of hiring continues.
In case you don’t know, Figma is a software company that develops Figma Design, a browser-based screen design tool geared at software companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, and their ilk. Figma also develops FigJam, a digital whiteboard collaboration tool that launched last year. In a few short years, Figma has grown to dominate the digital design industry, making it the de facto standard for in-house and agency designers the world over.
Figma made headlines a few weeks ago as Adobe announced its intent to acquire Figma for $20 billion; this represents a handsome payout for investors and early employees (for those asking, I’m happy about this but joined too late to really reap the rewards) and certainly underscores the level of disruption Figma has brought to the design industry. Of course, this comes with a significant degree of up-front cost and execution risk, which led to a swift plunge in Adobe’s stock price. Assuming regulators don’t intervene, though, Figma and Adobe’s future will soon be tied at the hip.
What attracted me to Figma? I’ve always been interested in design as a discipline, and having spent the past few years at Uber and Instagram focused on consumer-facing products, it’s a nice change of pace to think of a professional audience, and to be immersed in an environment that takes time to truly, deeply obsess about the quality and craft of our product. I’d also heard great things about the company leadership, and, missing the experience of working in a (relatively) smaller company, it seemed like a truly well-rounded opportunity.
I’m happy to say that working at Figma has fit me like a glove since I’ve joined, and the rate of learning for me — having joined to support the technology organization as the first Technical Program Manager, reporting to the Chief Product Officer, has been incredible. While six months isn’t a particularly long tenure by any standard, I’d like to take a moment to take stock of my growth and share six lessons I’ve picked up in my time thus far. These are pretty specific to my role — tech-adjacent, communications heavy — but hopefully you find them interesting.
1: The medium carries the message; choose carefully!
Figma is a company that creates tooling for creatives, so of course our internal workflows are highly visual in nature. We dogfood our products extensively, meaning Figma is itself designed in Figma, and many of our product workflows — such as planning, brainstorming, and product reviews — happen in FigJam. However, we also have documentation spread across Dropbox Paper, Notion, and Asana, when project tracking comes into play.
Whether synchronous or asynchronous, collaboration is shaped largely by the medium in which it happens. Meetings and reviews can be made or unmade by the quality and format of the presentation. Assigning action items in emails vs documents vs tasks in a task management system like Asana all carry different weight and connotations.
Be thoughtful about your goals, your audience, and the culture you work in. Figure out what the norms are for at your company, or what your stakeholders expect, and make sure you’re working in accordance with them.
2: Communication has a cost. Make it worth it.
We all have the same amount of time in a day. We all have a certain amount of mental capacity to devote to work and productivity. The amount of time your stakeholders spend reading and parsing your communications — emails, Slack messages, bug reports — is temporally and mentally expensive. A few tips I’d share in this vein:
Generally, prefer punchy bullet points over prose.
The busier your audience, the more they appreciate you getting straight to the point — it’s okay to keep pleasantries short.
Always provide context to your audience to help them prioritize your message or request, especially when talking to leadership.
3: If not you, then who?
I’ve seen this reflected as a “core value” in just about every company I’ve worked at, but it’s so important that it bears repeating. Take ownership of problems you encounter! This is one of the most straightforward heuristics I’ve used to grow my skills and career: if you see something that needs doing, or that can be improved, do something about it. Don’t assume that it has to be that way; take it upon yourself to learn about the problem, or why it is the way it is. And if something can be done about it, don’t simply wish for it to get better, do whatever you can to tackle it!
Note that this doesn’t mean you have to fix it yourself. Sometimes it just means bringing something up to the proper authority, and following through to see if it was resolved. But even in doing so, you can expand your knowledge and network in surprising ways.
(Also note that it’s possible to take this to an extreme, so it’s still important to be choosy in prioritizing what you’re working on. It’s the spirit of ownership that counts.)
4: It’s your job to take notes.
This is fairly specific to meeting culture in tech — often, people will assume that someone is taking notes for a meeting. Just as often, nobody is actually taking notes. You can take responsibility regardless of your title or seniority; in fact, note-taking is the most important thing you can do to increase the effectiveness of any forum.
Memory is far too fallible an instrument to rely on for a historical record or decision-making, so take it upon yourself to write down what you’re hearing, and what next steps people are agreeing to. You, and many of your partners, will be thankful for it.
5: Who is this for?
We often hear that successful companies attribute their success to a culture of “customer obsession”, and how this attitude permeates the entire organization to create wildly successful business outcomes. I think that’s great in theory, but a bit too non-specific to put into practice.
In the spirit of “customer obsession”, I do think that success always starts from understanding who you’re doing something for. It’s always pertinent to clarify your audience in the context of anything you are working on or being asked to do. If you’re being asked to write a document, or create a presentation: who exactly is going to consume it? In what forum? What will they do with that information? It’s too easy to charge ahead without the requisite clarity, so take the time to understand the ask, starting with “for who?”
6: Don’t be afraid to ask the simple questions.
Something I’ve observed in my interactions with very senior leaders at Uber, Instagram, and Figma: they aren’t afraid to ask questions that seem very elementary. They’ll stop a discussion to clarify the meaning of an acronym or revisit a fundamental, simple-sounding assumption. This is because they understand that you can’t develop a sophisticated understanding of a problem by glossing over the simplest logical building blocks.
Early in your career or in a new role, don’t be afraid to ask questions that seem obvious or that you feel you should know the answer to already. Realistically, nobody will judge you for it, and in the end you’ll always be glad you asked.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! Whether or not you’re working in the tech industry, I hope you found at least one of these lessons valuable, and I plan to share more about my journey in the months to come.
Very thoughtful! Thanks for sharing your experience and observations!