Dylan Field

Dylan Field is co-founder and CEO of Figma, the collaborative design tool. Founded Figma in 2012 with Evan Wallace; took 3.5 years to launch and ~5 years to a paying customer. Former child actor; interned at LinkedIn, Flipboard, and Quora before founding Figma. Has grown Figma to over 1,000 employees.

Key ideas

• Intuition as hypothesis generator: product intuition generates hypotheses to be tested and debated, not verdicts. The job is to winnow many hypotheses down to a working one.
• Simplification as ongoing discipline: irreducible complexity means every addition can reduce overall coherence. The principle: “keep the simple things simple, make the complex things possible.”
• Minimally awesome product: quality, features, deadline — choose two. Ship iteratively but do not abandon quality in the iteration phase.
• Community-first go-to-market: scraped Twitter social graph (Gephi) to identify influential designers; reached out as a fanboy-learner rather than a salesperson. Resulted in early evangelist base.
• The PM role: the best PMs create frameworks with point of view and strategy that give everyone shared headspace about destination and path.

Appearances

See also

• Dylan Field on Figma and Product Taste
• Dylan Field 2.0 on Figma
• Product Taste
• Brian Chesky on Airbnb and Product