10 things I learned from 10 years at Figma
A love letter to scaling from 10 to 1400 people and 0 to millions of users over a decade as Figma’s first marketing and business hire
“If this is the future of design, I’m changing careers.” That was the top comment when we launched Figma. Ten years, 1400 employees, and millions of users later I just ended my time at the company that defined my career.
I remember when I met Figma’s CEO Dylan in April 2015.1 He whipped out his laptop to show me the product he was working on and he just was so… excited. But I wasn’t convinced. I wasn’t a designer. I secretly didn’t even care much about design. The company had no revenue, no users, not even a website—just nine people coding quietly in a small office attached to the rental Dylan shared with his co-founder Evan. But the idea made sense: why were all our other tools collaborative and online while design remained stuck in file versions and email attachments?
That leap of faith turned into a decade of growth and building something I’m deeply proud of. I started as the first marketer and business hire doing mostly product marketing then grew our community, events, social, advocacy, Figma for Education, developer marketing, and brand marketing functions as we figured out and then scaled our unique go-to-market motion.
How do you boil down a decade of growth into one succinct list of learnings? Here’s my best try.
1. Write your own playbook
I was intimidated when I joined Figma. Although I had just spent four years launching products at a company acquired in what was at the time its industry’s largest deal; design was new territory. I quickly learned design is more than a job, it’s core to a designer’s identity. That means a designer’s bullshit meter is really high and the traditional B2B SaaS tactics I knew weren’t going to work.
As a product marketer I’d been trained to lead with “benefits over features,” but with designers that didn’t work. They cared about what the tool could actually do. They’d believe the benefits once they experienced them.
Traditional demand generation was also useless. You couldn’t target executive buyers, gather MQLs, and drip-nurture them to purchase. You needed one individual contributor (IC) designer to try the tool (for free), love it, and convince their team to adopt. And that could take a long time and countless touch points.
Credibility was everything. I knew as a marketer I’d never have that credibility myself. No matter how much I googled Josef Müller-Brockman or read A Pattern Language, I’d never know—or care— as much as our users did about the 8-point grid.
So we led with the practitioners. We met Bryn, our first designer advocate, when he showed up at our first meetup (aka lunchtime pizza). He too was so … excited about Figma. I realized he was one person all of the time—in work and in his personal life. He genuinely loved talking about design. He created extremely niche content and built relationships with IC designers (his friends) in ways I never could. He even evaluated our website copy, reviewed emails, and wrote social posts despite having no formal marketing experience. His favorite critique: “that’s too thirsty.” And it worked.
💡 Lesson: If you’re doing something new, start by understanding your audience and building a playbook just for them.
2. Growth happens one human connection at a time
We knew that designers were different and that we had to earn their trust—one by one. And the entire design community was highly skeptical at first (see that “changing careers” comment). Eek.
So we went manual. We dropped everything to drive two hours to fix a font installation error of an early customer. Everyone moonlighted as support through our in-tool chatbot. We took our harshest critics seriously and addressed their concerns directly.
This wasn’t just an early-days approach. Our CTO still monitors Twitter and debugs the tool with users himself. Our advocacy team dissects problems teams have implementing design systems and takes them to our product team.
I know this doesn’t sound scalable, but this is how Figma has scaled. One happy IC became an internal advocate. Then they brought on their team. Then they convinced their old coworker to also try Figma. Then they tweeted about us. Then they advocated that the team upgrade to Enterprise. Then they spoke at our conference. Then they hosted a meetup. Then they defended us online. This is Figma’s community-led, bottom’s-up go-to-market model in a nutshell. This is the way.2
💡 Lesson: Unscalable human connection creates scalable advocacy.
3. Learn to navigate your intuition
When you’re doing something new there’s no roadmap. And metrics don’t help because what good is +x% when you need to 10x, 100x, 100000x? All you have is intuition. That used to terrify me.
But I got to know my intuition, both its strength and limits. Our brains gather data points all the time—through customer conversations, social media, new information— recognizing patterns and making connections behind the scenes.
Some things I knew right away. Hours into my first day, I learned the team planned to name the product “Summit.” Every instinct screamed that was wrong. (You can’t build equity in two brands! Summit is not an ownable name!) So I shared that gut feeling, made a quick presentation, and the entire branding direction was scrapped by day two.
But I also learned how to recognize when my intuition hit its limits. This was especially important with our technical audience. In those times I leaned on our internal designer advocates—like Tom, Rogie, and Miggi. I learned to read their energy; killing ideas they weren’t excited about and doubling down on seemingly minor features that sparked their interest. Like when they lit up about quality improvements during a quiet release cycle and we turned those updates into a social campaign. I was skeptical - these updates were really small, like making it so you needed to do one less click to accomplish a task- but they were so excited that I figured if they were excited, our users would be excited too. Our community loved it.
Eventually their intuitions shaped mine. And that intuition became my north star as I launched new channels, teams, and projects from zero to one.
💡 Lesson: Get to know your intuition—its power and its limits. Trust it when it’s strong and build a circle of other people’s intuition you trust when it’s not.
4. Don’t worship metrics
I was lucky to have leadership who believed in doing things that couldn’t be measured. This became harder as we got bigger and faced more metrics pressure and as more people joined who were skeptical of that perspective.
As you grow, sure, metrics matter—ARR, sign-ups, active users. But metrics are tools that can be wielded for good or for evil. They become dangerous when they replace thinking, leading people to optimize for what’s measurable rather than what’s important. What if you’re measuring the wrong thing? What if those metrics are lagging indicators of what’s really happening?
Community and Figma for Education are perfect examples of this. We knew they were important. We tried measuring their business impact and connection to the holy ARR, but neither was ever quantified to their true impact. But Dylan believed in them, so everyone else did too. That belief gave us cover to do what was right, not just what was quantifiable.
💡 Lesson: Metrics are a tool, not the end game—but you need leaders who believe that too.
5. Strategy comes from action, not planning
Most people are taught to define strategy first then execute. But when you’re creating something entirely new this often leads to anxiety, slow movement, and getting stuck.
I’ve found the better path is to start by doing. Make small decisions that build toward the bigger picture. These micro-decisions are practical tests, making them easier to evaluate. Then the larger strategy emerges.
That’s how Config started. We had talked about doing a conference for years, but we were overwhelmed. So step one was to commit and book a venue. (Too small, it turned out—thousands applied, forcing us to change venues two months out.) Then we had to figure out our speakers. What to do… aha source from the community. And too many people applied, who should attend? Make the application annoying enough to filter for the truly excited. From those choices, our strategy became clear: for the community, by the community. But if we’d waited to get it perfect on paper, it never would’ve happened.
💡 Lesson: When you’re stuck, commit to action. Strategy will follow.
6. Ambulance projects over OKRs
As companies grow they naturally develop processes, roles and responsibilities. It’s easy to get consumed by the day-in, day-out grind asking “how does this scale” or “what are the OKRs.” And yes, that’s important—but sometimes you need to drop everything, put all hands on deck, wipe away the DACI, and focus on the single most important thing for the business.
We called these “ambulance projects”—all other work had to pull over so the ambulance could pass. I loved these projects: the focus, teamwork, suspension of traditional roles, accomplishing something huge in a short timeframe.
One of my favorites was our first brand campaign. Our social leader Yo convinced me we needed to add a Times Square billboard just a few weeks before the campaign was supposed to start. We had an idea to feature customers in 40 different videos, but no idea how to produce variable content at that scale or convince customers to participate on such short notice. We assembled a crew of advocates, designers, and customer leads who dropped everything to make it happen. That Times Square activation made our campaign the thing everyone talked about. It was messy, but it moved the needle. And it was fun.
💡 Lesson: The daily grind will consume all of your time if you let it. But dropping everything to focus on the one thing that matters the most is often where the magic happens.
7. Do things just because they're fun
Some of our best ideas came from pure joy. I learned to make space for projects just because the team was excited about them. Their excitement would translate to our community. Fun exudes outward and builds brand love. We did this kind of thing a lot.
Like during COVID, when we streamed a 24-hour live Config from our office. Around 2 AM Dylan popped in to say hi and “Between two Figs” was born. Another time, design legend Pablo Stanley made a telenovela spoof called “Figma Maria,” and we changed our Twitter handle for the day to stay in character. Our developer advocate Jake coded up a teaser site for Config—complete with throwback solitaire animations. Why? Because it was fun.
These are the type of things that get optimized out in “efficient” teams, but they became the stuff of Figma lore—both internally and externally. They made people feel like they were part of something special.
💡 Lesson: Fun is contagious and builds genuine brand love.
8. See the good, not just what could be better
When Amanda joined as our Chief Customer Officer in 2018 and became my boss, she gave me the gift of perspective. She saw how rare it was to have passionate users who loved the tool and company. I’d been so focused on growing that community of people I hadn’t zoomed out to appreciate how special it was. All I saw were problems.
She pushed us to zoom out. To appreciate what was working. And to protect it.
This is a lesson I had to keep learning. But when I learned to balance critique with appreciation, it changed my leadership approach and made me a better manager. Showing I believed in us and in what we were doing gave people a shared sense of purpose and meaning. It could look like little things—making up a Mandalorian-themed presentation about protecting baby Yoda, celebrating our work publicly, or simply acknowledging that “what we are doing is unique and special and we should be proud.”
In the hard times, spend even more time appreciating the good. This last part actually reminds me of motherhood—things are hard and exhausting but when they’re over, they’re over, and you miss them.
💡 Lesson: Notice what’s good and special around you, not just what needs improvement.
9. Your biggest risk is burnout, but it is within your control
It’s easy to get caught in politics at a growing company, especially as the first business hire constantly “giving away your legos,” as Molly Graham puts it. When I joined Figma at 27, I was the most competitive person I knew. I never befriended coworkers. I didn’t have fun. I grinded.
And I burned out. After two years I quit. Or tried to. Encouraged by Dylan I took a short break, focused on my mental health, and returned to do eight more years and some of the best work of my life.
During those subsequent years I didn’t work any less hard. Early-stage startups and hyper growth companies demand hard work and long hours. There is no getting around that. But I learned that hard work itself doesn’t cause burnout. Lack of fulfillment does. You can grind or you can approach work differently.
I stopped seeing my coworkers as competition and started seeing them as my team. I leaned into the joy of building together. That shift changed everything. Work became a rich part of my life. The difference was meaning. I’m leaving with friendships and memories I will always cherish, not only accomplishments.
💡 Lesson: You’ll work hard either way, but you can choose to do it in the way that fills you up.
10. Know when the chapter’s over
I’ve experienced many “tours of duty” at Figma; as Reid Hoffman describes them mutual pacts between employee and company with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Each time my role changed, my manager changed, or the company’s scale shifted I paused, assessed, and recommitted to my next tour.
This time when my latest tour concluded my intuition signaled something different. The pull to stay was strong—history, relationships, comfort—but I’ve learned to trust that knowing. My time at Figma had come to its end.
I don’t have all the answers for what’s next. What I do know is that it’s important to honor and process the end of this chapter. One way I’m going to do that is through writing (like this!) If you’re part of the Figma community know that I’ll always be grateful for how you shaped both the product and my own path. While I won’t be at Figma anymore, I’ll always be cheering you on.
💡 Lesson: Your intuition will tell you when a great chapter has ended—and when it’s time to start writing the next one.
If you made it this far, thanks! And maybe consider subscribing, if you don’t yet or leave a comment on what you found useful and what else you’d like to see from me in the future. See ya next time ✌️
Huge thanks for all of the feedback I got on this post, especially from Carly Ayres, Azra Daniels, Cris Valerio and Michael Dean.
Footnotes:
I was introduced to Dylan even though Figma was still in stealth via my former boss Greg Smirin who became an EIR at Index Ventures and introduced me to Danny Rimer, who led Figma’s seed round. Thanks Danny and Greg!
I talked about Figma’s bottoms-up, community-led GTM in depth on Lenny’s Podcast. I used “This is the way” internally as a rallying cry with our advocacy team to spread this type of work as we scaled.
Loved reading this! Will take these notes into my PMM career
congrats!!
And thanks for sharing your amazing insights.