Figma CEO on Design, Product, Engineering: Blurring the Lines in the AI Era | Dylan Field | E276

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Oct 23, 2025

Dylan Field, Co-founder and CEO of Figma, discusses transforming the design landscape by evolving Figma into a versatile platform for design and collaboration. He emphasizes the necessity of integrating AI into design workflows, making tools accessible for non-designers, and the strategic importance of design in product success. Dylan shares insights on building user communities, refining product features through feedback, and the playful inception of FigJam during the pandemic, all while balancing hands-on involvement with product development.

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ANECDOTE

Founding Community By Cold Emails And Meetups

Dylan built Figma's community by cold-emailing designers and learning from their brutal feedback.
He ran local meetups worldwide to understand regional needs like localization in Southeast Asia.

ADVICE

Schedule Dedicated Product Days

Protect regular product days to stay hands-on and give useful feedback to your team.
Use night and weekend experiments to prototype and learn from new models yourself.

INSIGHT

Model + Orchestration Drives Product Leaps

AI model improvements and better orchestration compound product improvements.
Bridging AI-generated content with editable design surfaces is the key long-term goal.

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In this episode, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia interviews Dylan Field, Co-founder and CEO of Figma, the collaborative design platform powering the product development process at companies like Microsoft, Google, and Airbnb. Since launching in 2012, Figma has grown from a browser-based design tool into a multi-product ecosystem spanning design, whiteboarding, presentations, and AI workflows.

Dylan shares the product and org strategy behind Figma’s evolution—from a single design surface to a platform that now includes Figma Make, Slides, Dev Mode, Sites, Draw, and more. He explains how Figma is building toward a world where anyone—not just designers—can move from idea to execution faster, and why “good enough is no longer enough” when it comes to design in the AI era.

In this conversation, Dylan goes deep on building communities around products, the value of product leaders embracing design as a strategic differentiator, and how Figma is thinking beyond prompts to redefine human-AI interaction. He also shares lessons from product expansion, building for non-designer users, and how he still carves out time to jailbreak LLMs and test prototypes hands-on.

What you’ll learn:

How Dylan shaped Figma into a multi-product platform that merges code, design, and collaboration.
Why FigJam's “fun” factor was a deliberate strategic decision—and how it saved the product.
How Figma is integrating with ChatGPT and third-party data tools to redefine surface area and workflow.
The case for design-led thinking across every function of a modern product team.

Key Takeaways 👇

Design as Strategy: Why Dylan believes design is at the top of the software value stack—and how product leaders can use it to differentiate and win.
From Prompt to Platform: Figma’s vision for bridging AI-native workflows, intuitive UX, and agent-powered collaboration.
Org Design for Multi-Product Teams: Lessons in org structure, adoption measurement, and how to know when a feature becomes a standalone product.

Credits:
Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Dylan Field

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