Dylan Field live at Figma's Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design

Key ideas

Field describes intuition as a hypothesis generator, simplicity as a system-level fight, shipping as a trade among quality, features and deadline, and the best PMs as framework builders.

From a machine transcript of the audio. Quotes link to the moment they are said.

1. 1

   Treat intuition as a hypothesis generator

   Field says intuition produces hypotheses that you put forward, debate and test against data until you reach a working hypothesis. He says he looks everywhere for what people say about Figma and asks follow-up questions, because someone asking for X may really want Y or Z.

2. 2

   Bring something concrete to change minds

   Field says concrete artifacts and examples are what move him, and that when his follow-up questions have no answers yet, he asks people to go find them. If a decision won't be fatal, he gives his skepticism and lets a trusted person go ahead. He says users overruled him on pages, which he remains skeptical of as an implementation.

3. 3

   Fight complexity at the system level

   Field says that the more you add, the harder it is to stay coherent, and that making Figma more powerful without making it more complex is extremely hard. He describes parts of the product where every local decision was right yet the whole became too complex, so the system itself had to be revisited. Asked who owns this, he says everyone is responsible for simplicity.

4. 4

   Ship sooner, and name your trade-off

   Field calls Figma's long road to launch too long, saying faster release brings feedback sooner, as with FigJam and Slides, though dev mode needed more iteration to understand developers. Crediting his co-founder Evan, he frames a launch as a trade-off among quality, features and deadline. He notes software can be improved after shipping, but says that sometimes you need a minimum quality bar, and that you have to know what a minimally awesome product will take.

5. 5

   Expect PMs to bring a point of view

   Field says the lines between PM, designer and engineer are blurry, and each should understand some of the others' work. He thinks PMs fall down when they treat the job too much as process, and that the best talk to users, hold a strategy, and give everyone a shared framework for the destination. He expects all three roles to continue, even as everyone learns a bit more of each other's job.

In Dylan’s words

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