As AI accelerates software development, basic functionality becomes table stakes. Figma's CEO contends that differentiation and winning now depend entirely on design, craft, and a strong point of view, as 'good enough' products will no longer succeed.
Dylan Field finds that pushing AI models to their limits and getting them to say weird things helps him learn how to structure professional prompts more effectively. This playful exploration builds intuition for controlling model behavior in a work context.
A month before launch, Figma's whiteboarding tool, FigJam, felt undifferentiated. In a high-stakes meeting with the team and board, they pivoted strategy to focus entirely on making it 'fun.' This led to features like cursor high-fives that gave the product its soul and market distinction.
Figma's expansion into multiple products (FigJam, Slides) wasn't based on abstract strategy but on observing users pushing the main design tool to its limits for unintended use cases. Identifying these 'hacks' revealed validated market needs for dedicated products.
Figma's CEO likens current text prompts to MS-DOS: functional but primitive. He sees a massive opportunity in designing intuitive, use-case-specific interfaces that move beyond language to help users 'steer the spaceship' of complex AI models more effectively.
Instead of asking designers to create mockups from a verbal brief, PMs can use AI tools to generate multiple visual explorations themselves. This allows them to bring more concrete, refined ideas to the table, leading to a richer and more effective collaboration with the design team.
Figma's CEO argues that AI has expanded the definition of a product's surface. It's no longer just your owned domain (e.g., your .com) but includes any platform, like ChatGPT, where users can invoke and interact with your product's capabilities.
To gain global user insights, Dylan Field would organize informal Figma meetups whenever he traveled for personal reasons. This low-cost, high-impact approach provided crucial one-on-one context about regional needs, like localization in Southeast Asia, that group settings often miss.
In Figma's early days, CEO Dylan Field actively sought out his idols in the design community via cold emails. He didn't ask for praise; he asked them to critique the product harshly. This direct, high-quality feedback was a 'blessing' that accelerated improvement and built crucial industry relationships.