An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire)

22:36And we had a couple teams, small numbers. And that happened to talk about metrics and how hard it is to deal with metrics with this size. But they're small numbers, but we had teams who were using it full time. So we knew as some people were using it full time, and people who weren't, were really excited to try and were very impressed with the technical fee of it all and interested. And to me, that was enough confidence. They're like, okay, it's worth it. Let's get out of stuff. That story of the potential customer pulling the laptop from Dylan is such a good metaphor for product market fit, which people describe as you feel pulled.

23:11So literally pulling it from your hands. You talked about metrics that you maybe could share with what could you share there? At least early days, especially with bottoms up and with all these things. And people ask me at the time, how do you measure things in an early stage situation? And I maybe have a controversial point of view here. I don't think you can from a metric side. Like, your numbers are so small. One of the quotes I always like to say, and I say this now to you when we're doing stuff because we're launching new products, I think, but then it comes up a lot. It's like, you can't optimize your way to product market fit.

23:43Right? I don't care at the early stages of something's like optimized by 5 % from like an email, right? That doesn't like fundamental late tell me if something's working or not. So like, I think metrics are really hard and signals actually way more important. Like, can you get a couple of people who love it, right? Not like a slight improvement of a conversional landing page, right? And so I think that metrics are really hard in that way. They can like help you. But when the numbers are so small, and you kind of have to, again, trust yourself a lot more and have more intuition, then also find more signal of the things that are working whether it's anecdotal, talking to people, examples, and that becomes much more useful than like hard metrics are sometimes.

24:26I'm working on a post -around product market fit and kind of a step -by -step somewhat of our guide to help people down this path and the way you describe it as the way I'm kind of thinking about it is like step one, get one company to use your product. Yes, step two. We're really one. That was like step one. Like, and it's not easy, right? That's not easy. Right. And then it's like, get them to continue using your product. And then it's get two companies to use your product. Yes, exactly. And then get someone to pay for your product. Yeah, so there's always be your milestones. Along the same lines I signed an interview with Dylan talking about product market fit and he had this interesting quote about how he realized first that they had product market fit like a year later, which is when Microsoft, I think, was like, take our money, we want to pay for Figma.

25:06And he's like, okay, maybe this is going to work. Is that sound about right? Well, it's interesting, right? And that goes up to the bottoms of modeling to talk about. So we would have, I think the difference, if you think about a company like Microsoft and what this looks like, this is just a really good example of this bottoms up market or motion and bottoms up motion in market, right? So here's a funny story that I want to add. Our first meeting with Microsoft actually came and this is the scrappiness of working in a nearly state startup because I slid into the dns of my friends ex -boyfriend.

25:38That's not our first meeting with Microsoft. Well done. I know, I know. And I saw that they had signed up for Figma. And I was like, wait a minute, I think I know this person. And that's how we chatted up them and first got feedback from them. So that's just a funny anecdote. It's gonna be a new strategy. Everyone's gonna try to call it. You literally do whatever Uber driver, like shared lifts. I can be talking more about that, but yeah, you got to do whatever you can to get early people to talk to, to try and product out. You get really scrappy. But for Microsoft, so over time, we had a good, I think it was the team that got acquired that we went into Microsoft.

26:13I have to remember the name, but it was like a small team within Microsoft. And they were, Xamarin, Xamarin. They were the ones who were using Figma first. And we saw that and then, so they were that kind of patient zero of Microsoft. And then we had slowly over time, more pockets within Microsoft using the tool. But again, we've never gone through like Microsoft procurement, Microsoft security, and just sort of popping up throughout the organization. And we have these really cool no graphs that show this too, where like you'd have these like little pockets of people and then it would like jump to another, like they'd have one more collaborator and then jump from another pocket.

26:44And there are these really cool maps of how that spreads in the organization. And eventually, back to the point where like, that was a very comprehensive node graph, right? They had this massive thing of all these people from Microsoft using the product, but still it was only on credit cards, right? They were, I don't think we even had an enterprise product at this point, right? And so there was no sales person for them to talk to. And Microsoft was like, wait a minute, like we need to organize this. They get to put the convenable, we need security, we need a count management, we need to put your win and vault.

27:14And I think that that's what it was, is like they wanted to pay for it, right? And they wanted us to have this enterprise product because they had these requirements and they wanted to have a better control over it, because it was just popping up with a new organization without their control. And so that's probably a good example of like what that looked like if as in the spot and some motion spread to a really larger organization. There's node graph things. So is that a tool you built that's like showing help you visualize within a company, who how it's all clustering or what is that? Well, data science team built it.

27:43I don't know if it's like, yes, and I'm sure it's an internal tool. I just remember we would have, there's like a website in like a node or something that we would use and you could type in an organization's name. You still could do this. It's like within our data analytics system, we type in the name of an organization and it just pulls up everybody. And it shows like, because BigMaz, you know, spreads through new users, but also Gen1, Gen2, right? Like these people who went by people. And you can see these node graphs of like how somebody started BigMaz, would be the center and then they invited someone else, right?

28:13And so you can, and then they shows like, how that spread and so you get these clusters and you can see the clusters are teams, but you can see like someone, you know, invited someone and a different org to a file and then they started like a new center of a cluster, right? And so you, they're really interesting and you could pull up, you know, yeah, you could type in any org, any org at BigMaz and see what that node graph looks like, but they're super interesting to see how those spread. That is super cool. And I imagine that's also a, informs how you go to market by figuring out who spreads to who and who's often.

28:44Totally. And that's what these internal champions, like that's what the key is, and that's maybe the takeaway of like, how important these internal champions are because you just seem to let someone to land there, right? And then they pass it enough and you can see, you can hover over and see this person's at a center of this node graph and all of these people that spread from this one person at the company. And that I think was the unlock to be like, oh yeah, these internal champions, they really, they're really the key to all of this. I remember it spreading it there being veerly on. I think it was one of, there being veer was one of the early customers and it was just one designer, if you designer starting to spread to the product managers.

29:19I was just like a member on the team being like, cut down, we just switched a sketch, we're gonna switch again to a new program. That was the hardest thing. I feel like I don't want to switch twice. Yeah. It was definitely so that we had to get over. But it happened for good reasons. Okay, one last thing that you mentioned that I wanted to follow up on, you said something about shared lifts and maybe that's a funny story of some sort. Oh, I don't know specifically. I should like Dylan specifically is like such a hustler, right, especially those early days. And he would just really anyone that he would meet, he would talk about Figma with them.

29:48I don't remember what was, but there was definitely a situation where he met someone in a lift and then they became one of our users. So he used every angle he could to try to get introduced to new designers, especially in his free launch days where he didn't have connections, there's many connections to just get people to try it out and get more feedback. Okay, cool. So let's get back on track. We were talking about the good market motion that you executed and modeled at Figma. And if there's kind of these two steps, right, step one is, yeah, I see still love you. And then step two is a help with spread from that person.

30:21Right? Okay, cool. So let's start with step one. Okay. Like I said, obviously it'd be awesome if somebody loved your product at a company. What did you actually do to make that happen in the early? Yeah, and this is interesting when you think about the early news, too, right? Cause you're like, all right, we don't exist. You get them to love you when you're literally like, they've never heard of you before. Also like you were saying in your situation, like, oh, I used to get, I was maybe in Photoshop before that, right? Something else. I just made this switch over to this new tool. We finally got it working.

30:50Like I really don't want to move tools again. So you have that inherent thing against it there, especially like, so I thought about this and like, I think there are like four main areas that we focused on to make this start, right? So like get it going and then we kind of still do this stuff today. So the first thing is all about credibility. And I think in that early days, especially credibility is so important and establishing that initial credibility. Again, especially with the technical audience, like designers. The second is actually building the product with your users. And I know you had shown your podcast and he talked a lot about this too.

31:23Just the customer session that we have, the care of, especially that editor tool. The third is finding a place where you can like, in a way that you can build this relationship over time. And like maybe that's like, just basically through a channel where they don't have to come to you because it only care about you yet, right? And like, they're probably not gonna convert right away or like start using you right away. So how do you like get them to stick with you over time? So find out the channel where you can do that and then continue to build that relationship with them. And then the four is like just being extremely transparent and honest to build that relationship with people.

32:01So I know it's all soundly fuzzy so maybe we can go into them specifically. Because they sound like fuzzy when you talk about it. And I saw a lot of stuff in his heart like that where you're like, oh, that's just sounds like buzzwords. We have real, I can do some examples of these more things to maybe host a personal colleague to it. So let's start the first one, credibility. Okay, so I was the first marketer of Figma. I think one of the things I learned right away very quickly was that designers don't wanna hear from markers. They don't wanna be marketed to and they have extremely high bullshin reader, right?

32:28They're like, you know, you use a word like, you know, efficiency, collaboration, all of those buzzwords and there's like, I know I wanna hear in this, right? Traditional product marketing kind of stuff, like just doesn't work. They wanted to hear technical features. They wanted to understand how technical features work. They wanna hear, you know, how am I gonna use this? And then they'll see the benefits, but like they don't wanna hear from marketers and they don't want to be marketed to. And so I think especially with our audience in the early days, one of the things that I did was really try to like not market and that's so funny as a marketer to say that, but that was really cool to build authenticity with people, right?

33:08And so the way that we did that in the early days was what we had was the tool, right? And that's pretty much what we had and we had a design team and an engineering team. And so we did some cool stuff in the tool. Like first of all, like the tool itself was a technical feat. Like it was the first time, like these video game technology, web GL, Evans, a prodigy, like the puppet got a design tool to work on the internet, was just amazing, right? And so like there's a lot of engineering interest there on creditability building of like, how did you get this to work? So I got him to like make technical content and that I think what's the number one on HyperNews, right?

33:41That people were just interested in him. And then we had a design team and our design team was our target audience. And so we talked a lot about how we chose to build features, all the things that went into it. And so many of them, it was a design tool, so they've been like that forever, right? And so we changed these stuff. So like one of them would be like how we did grid, so how would it vector networks? And we'd go into these really deep details of how we chose made this prod decisions, all the craft decisions that went into it. Now remember, one of my bars were deciding if something was like, we hit this or not, if they would be interested, was like, did I understand it?

34:15You know, if I had known it was probably too basic, or if I could have written it myself, it was probably too basic. Like I remember when I'm grids in the early days and we went really deep on Joseph Mueller Brockman and his influence on grids. And now I very much know who just looked for mine because I want both designers. But at the time I like kind of Google it. I was like, who is this? But that was one of my bars for if something would be good enough for our technical content was, yeah, if I could have written it, it's not good enough. And so that was key for us in building credibility because we had this design team.

34:47And then when six months kind of after we launched and I actually got to hire someone to do marketing with me, the first person hired was actually a designer advocate. So it was not a marketer. It was someone who was a designer. And we brought the designers and the engineers that I was trying to get to help me with stuff. Like also I had to design and build the products within them ton of time. But this designer advocate was working full time with me on this stuff. And he came from a user base. He was one of the very few people in the early days who just love the products and was very passionate about it.

35:20And that became his full time job was to represent, meet with users, talk to them, to write content and create content and to bring that back to the product. And that was what he did. And that designer advocacy positions actually scaled with Figma. And we still have it today. It's one of its extreme, I think it's kind of the magic dusting. I'll let that whisper cool. I'm going to market to make a lot of our go to market function work. But yeah, we didn't focus on marketing or marketing, like traditional marketing, right? We're very focused on the technical aspect. There's so many little lessons there.

35:52The designer advocate, hire reminds me of something that data dog did where they hired engineers to write their block posts. That's a great idea. Yeah. Exactly what we did. Yes. So ways you build credibility, just kind of mirroring back what you shared. One is writing content, basically putting out block posts that designers would be like, oh wow, this is really interesting. And starts if you like, oh, Figma keeps coming up and he's really interesting pieces of the content. Yeah, even if they were using it, I think that that was important, right? So like when we launched people like wanted to test it, so it was cool and see what it is.

36:22But then they might bounce, right? They're like, all right, this isn't advanced enough. I'll come back later, which is why we're like, give them reasons to come back. They're like, oh yeah, but like the pen tools always work like this, but we did it like that. You should test that out, right? And so we kept giving them and it's not gets a reason to come back in. And remember, this is also before multiplayer. And so we couldn't be like collaborate, right? So it's like use the tool to do these things. So that really helped people come back into the tools and a little bit more time in it. How many posts would you say you put out like event for six months, just to give people a sense of like, here's how much?

36:53Like it's probably not all time, right? It's probably some few really good ones. They took a long time. Also like we, they were, you know, I had to work with an engineer or designer to do every single one, maybe like 10, like at most. But those ones that went out like, you know, we try to get on hacker news, we try to get at designer news at the time, Twitter, we can jump into that. But it was also extremely big for us. And so it was more about quality than it was about quantity. Awesome. Okay. So one is put out great content. People are like, oh wow, Figma's got some new ideas and maybe I should pay attention.

37:24The other is having someone that's that function actually talked to them. Yes, that was when we started accelerating this much, much more is when we brought in the designer advocate to help us with this full time. Cool. Okay. Let's move to the next one, which I think is building with your customers. So that one we, you know, I know you talk to show, he talked a lot about this, right? This idea of like customer obsession and building with your customers. And then also this back to that whole decision that we talked about earlier about like when to come out of self. Like you can only build so much with your customers when you're in self.

37:54Okay. Because you don't have that many that are about you. But especially even in the early days, when you only had a couple people, we really did listen and back to you also what you were saying earlier about those tests, the product market fit, like get one person to use it. That's really what we were focused on, especially in the very, very early days. I remember the first one, I think I've told this story before, but was that we had Koda, they were our first user and they were based in Halo Alto, Dylan and I drove down and demoed the products then. And they were the first ones. Their designer Jeremy was like, yes, we'll take this unfold time.

38:26And I remember we were both like, what? Really? Well, that was like the first person who said, yes, yes. And so we were like so excited. This is like a huge milestone. We went to Orange Homes in Halo Alto on the way home or on the way back to the office to like bring us back for the team to celebrate. We were just so stoked. And then we got back to the office and I think Dylan gets a text from Jeremy being like, oh yeah, I tried this chance to believe my engineer and he can't get the file to open. So I guess we can't use it and we're like, what is it? What happened? And this is fun that got someone and I remember Dylan was like, everybody dropped everything we have to fix this.

38:57And after some, you know, looking at the servers and things, they were like, nothing's wrong. And then they realized there's a problem with Philippe's MacBook. And so Evan, Evan had a car. So Dylan had a drive. Evan told me to allow to fix the MacBook of Philippe just to get them to use the product. So anyway, get them to stick around. That's the first one. But that the building with people, the way that we did that was largely through just, you know, each person, we really cared and listened to their feedback especially when they're only a few people. So one way we did that was, I remember we implemented Intercom back in the early days.

39:32And there were so few users and so few of us that everybody was on Intercom all day too. And so we'd get a chat and like, I would jump in sometimes, Dylan would jump in, and engineer would jump in, and he'd open up a chat with people and they'd like actually like debunk the product with this live, right? They'd be like, I have this bug and this engineer would be like, let me QA it right now, right? And so like that was one example. We all did support back in that day. And the engineers would talk to users directly, get their feedback and then go immediately fix things like bugs. And so those are just examples of in the early days what that looks like.

40:06And that, you know, just scales a lot over time as you're growing and trying to more people that advocate and then a toughiness of time when they hear them on board because, you know, some of the stuff, I mean, none of the stuff scales. Right? That is your engineer's skills you support forever. And the early days that becomes really important, but like when we brought that advocate in there, the whole job was talking to users, getting them to try to use the product, but then taking a feedback back when it wasn't something that, you know, wasn't working, that helped us scale a lot. So that became really essential and telling people, like, oh, we fixed this.

40:40And made them feel more ownership of the tool too. And being like, oh, yeah, I asked them to do this. They did it, right? And that's like just another way where you just build a strong relationship with people because they feel very invested in your journey with you. Which goes back to building credibility. Absolutely, absolutely. There's so many important lessons there. You talk about scaling this, but interestingly, this is very much doing things that don't scale, driving to their office, fixing their Wi -Fi on their laptop. Early days, nothing scales in the early days. You just have to do that anywhere.

41:10Just as a tangent, we're talking about getting people to love your product initially. Why is love so important? That's a really high bar. And I imagine you have an interesting insight. I'm just like, why it needs to be that level of appreciation? Yeah, and it's just an opportunity. It's a good time. But these are all things that maybe they just use it for. So they're interested. But by the time you're getting to the organization level, or the, I'm spreading this to my other spheres and influence like my community, people I know, you're kind of putting yourself on the line, right? You're taking a risk when you're doing that, especially if it's your job, you're bringing out of people in.

41:45And you're not gonna do that unless you really believe in something. And so just using it isn't enough to get someone over that stage of going from just like a user to a champion, right? And so I think it is this love thing becomes important because you just don't get the scalability and spread of someone doing this, like doing this for you, unless they have that level of passion. That's an awesome lesson. I hope people are taking that in. You shared this story of Coda and show. And actually, he was on the podcast. He wrote a newsletter and he shared all the stuff. I read it. Yes, yes, yes. People often confuse the two.

42:21They assume it's kind of the same thing. But he talked about how when he joined Figma, this happened, Dylan's like, we need to fix this problem. He's like, they're not even paying us. Like, who's this? Why do we need to, we have like real things to build? What do we have to hop on this bug? And then later, he realized why that was so important. And that was a big lesson you learned from Dylan. And just like this needs to be taken really seriously. If someone's trying to use your product, to help them actually be successful. And we don't have very many of them, right? But it's like, yeah, back to what you were saying earlier, like how do you get one person to actually use it?

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44:05So we're kind of still talking about get ICs at a company to love you. So step one was build credibility. Step two, I don't know if these are steps or just things you do in some sequence or not. Step two is build with your users. What come next? Oh, the next one is, so this can take time, right? And that's a big one. And also in the early days, they're not gonna necessarily use you right away, right? And so might take time. And then also when you do get a couple of people who start to use your products, they're gonna also start wondering what other people think about your products. And when you're the first, you're the first only marketing hire.

44:39And this is what something marketers ask me a lot when they're the only marketer in an organization is like, how do you focus and prioritize? Because there's the only things you could do, how do you decide what to do? And so the thing that I think about a lot and this early phase and thinking about ICs is, how do you get to them? And where can you go where they already are as opposed to making them come to you? Because I'm a firm believer. I think now we have spaces where people can come to us, but in the early days, especially like, they're not gonna come to your space. Like they don't know you, they don't care about you.

45:10They don't wanna like go to your, keep like slack channel or something, right? Like you have to go to them. And so for us, Dylan really identified immediately that Twitter was the place for that existed. And then we had nothing to do with us specifically, like the design community existed on Twitter way before we did. And that's something that they just did on their own and that grew over time. They had this large network on Twitter of influencers. And that's also how people learned about things. Also like design is changing all the time. And so people would share best practices, things that they were doing, resources.

45:45And that just became kind of a home for designers. So we really went all in on Twitter. That really became a key to our channel that we focused on and really only focused on one, right? That was it. And we got pretty advanced on how we did this. So Dylan is also a great engineer if you don't know about him or a scrappy engineer who can figure things out. And he had this idea and he built this tool or this scraper where he identified a couple influencers in the design community. Like people he thought were people he wanted to learn from and to talk to. And he inputted them into this scraper thing that he made.

46:20And then back to another node graph. He figured out who followed them and who followed those people and also the influence that these people had over other people. It made this massive node graph of these pockets of different topics of design. And when he looked at it, you'd see a cluster, right? So you'd have the cluster of like iconographers, graphic designers, products managers, and you'd see them all there and you'd see who the influencers were in those areas. And what we did is we found people who were most influential to start and that was another source back to like using whatever you can to get people to try your products.

46:55That's what we asked for feedback in the early days too. Just DM them. We were like, hey, Raji, I like this love feedback. You're feedback on Figma. And that was one of the ways that that's a people. But there's also people who we followed, people who we tried to build this connection with on Twitter when the early days. And that's also where we pushed out that technical content that I was talking about. And then we tried to just like drive and spur a conversation about these things. First it was our launches, but then later as this technical content or whatever it was that we were producing so that we could go to people instead of making that come to us just like in their feet.

47:28And that became super burned us. We'd also not have to people, right? So Dylan has a huge presence and especially in the early days and now even has huge presence talking to users. We all did show too like our engineering team. So it wasn't just the brand handle. It was the people. And I think that that's really important to like put a personal face behind things, connect with people, answer questions for people, live there. And over time, we just built this very engaged group of people on Twitter with Figma. And that's still a huge place for us where the design community lives and where we get a lot from our users too.

48:00And I think the focus on that and I think why it's so important is it allows to put a passively follow you over time without having to invest in you with the tool, you know? So it was our way, especially because we do it take a while to build a product and get to a place where people would switch full time for them to follow along with us and build that confidence with us over time and keep coming back to the tool. That Twitter graph story is so legendary. I think Dylan even shared the code online. I'm gonna try to find that tweet. Yeah, it's so good. We still use it. Like we used it again when we were launching another product because we were like, oh, can we pull that Twitter graph for like another audience?

48:38I don't know, we had an abuse it how much we ended up using but I definitely looked at it and I was like, oh, this is so interesting to see for like developers or whatever it was that we were looking at. And also what you just mentioned is really interesting that he wasn't using it to go sell people on the product. It was first get feedback on the product which ends up selling them. Oh, no, we never hurt sold the product. Like it was always about feedback and I think that that's so key to all of this is all about feedback. Awesome. So many lessons here. There's a fourth bullet I think around building relationships with users.

49:08Oh, it just changed fantasy and authenticity. So I think that that really comes into when you get to the scale forward. Like I'm talking about early days being transparent with your users and a lot of that does come down to the stuff we talked about too about downtime or the what that looks like. And we just did that naturally with people one on one in those early days but I think where it gets harder and we stuff with it because it's like in our DNA and how we act is when you get to scale, right? And you have to like still do that stuff with a lot of people who care who do these things with you.

49:36But I think it's just so important that you are honest. And also you don't hide behind the brand, right? Then you're human and authentic and transparent with people. And we can go with examples. I think the better examples are probably at scale than the even in that early days because that's when it gets harder to do that. So let's shout about that. Just so this is about like getting started. Yeah. How do you do this at scale or does it change completely? Do you continue doing this in a different way? How do you approach it as the company grows? You just totally still do it, right? I think that that's just so important that that's how it stays, right?

50:09In that early days you do this stuff and you kind of get the flywheel going and you get these people that you have these people who love you. But today that's still how things spread the most, right? We're going into new markets, a great new place, we're launching a new tool and that becomes so important to how we still drive adoption. And so some of those things, the tactics look a little bit different but the themes are still the same and what that looks like at scale. A couple of just examples of that are those advocates, right? That's I think a huge one. When I was a marketer, that advocate was just my partner.

50:41Like he got chunked everything that I did. He'd be like, no, that's too thirsty here. You know, like you're using a fluff word again. What do you mean? Also he was how we pitched the company. He was the people we talked to, we got to launch it at C or whatever and just get feedback on things. And that function has really grown with Figma. So now that's a whole team at Figma. It's a large team and it's scale with us with every product that we launched. Now I have developer advocates, Fajima advocates and regionally. So like we go into a new region and they're part of the landing team. Like we're in Japan.

51:15We need to find the Japan. Now we have two of them. This is the Japan Designer Advocate, right? Because it's just so core to how we do things. And we've scaled that. So I think on the credibility side, like I think that those advocates and scaling those advocates are like the magic dust. I always call them the magic dust. That like make sure that we are able to build those relationships and see authentic throughout everything we do. And these advocates again, they're just, like they're background as designer and then they end up being an advocate designer. Or to now develop a big jam person. The passionate profile is the passionate users who oftentimes they find us and find them, right?

51:55You couldn't just like post this job online and go source for it. It's like this people kind of emerge from the community and then they love it so much and they know the product so well. They're technical experts. But yes, they were for the designer ones. They were all previously product designers. Awesome. Is there anything else you want to share around kind of at scale, how these things change? You mentioned transparency and so being really important. What else there do you think is really important? I think there's two examples. The one is building with users. Because I think this is a good one that I like to get into because you're like, how do you scale that?

52:24Like you don't have, you get so many bug requests. You go to like our feature request page on our forum and it's just like so many. But also like as you build a product, you're always like, oh, well I can go do all of these fixes and bug updates, but I also have to go build new stuff, right? To grow and that's always attention in it with any company as you're looking at a roadmap. One of the ways that we saw like done that and still continue to like focus on things that people care about that's so related to the practice quality is through Witte Quality Weeks with engineering. And then we decided a couple of years ago we had this idea where we're like, oh, when we take package all of those quality updates up, it's one thing and launch them together.

53:03And we could even show like the tweet or the forum request that spurred us to do this. And that was where idea of Little Big Updates came, which is a launch that we do every year, Figma. They come from these quality, when you see some engineering guys where the engineers can just go like, look at Twitter, talk to our support team, get all these small things that annoy people to fix them and they just fix them all. And they get so many done and then we launch them all together. And that's so like one of our most popular launches that we always do because people are like, yes, I care about this.

53:35This improvement quality of life every single day. Backspat discussion of like two clicks versus one click and things like that, they're that small, but we still do it. And I love that Little Big Updates one. I think Airbnb did something like that too with the 100 updates staying on their website. Yeah, Airbnb is shifted fully to that, which is only big launches, just way twice a year in launch a bunch of stuff. That's exactly, it's fully how they operate. That's another way that we do the building with. And I think that even giving the engineers, we give them the ability to pick them, right? So they're like, oh, yep, this tweet, I wanna fix this one.

54:06That's gotta be so satisfying. Yeah, exactly. And like when the marketing event will pull, we'll pull examples like, oh, that's the one that the first news said that. So that one's big. And then let's share a transparency side. You know, I think where it gets hard at scale is, yeah, all of a sudden you have a lot of people who care about your products. And I think it's really easy as a brand, because you are a brand at this point, as you're getting bigger, to be like, oh, I can hide behind my handle, or my, you know, the signal handle, or they really have to say something about this, right? And so just two examples of things like that, where you just, you know, we've chosen to be transparent when we didn't have to be, or like, you know, you might not are downtime.

54:49D downtime is always a big deal. And I remember there is a specific instance, I think it was last year, maybe two years ago, where there was like this issue with these servers, and like a AWS cluster went down, and we couldn't, we didn't know what was going on. And so we had downtime, like multiple times a week. And people were pissed, right? Things were not going well. Again, back on Twitter, we built, the double edge sort of sort of Twitter is like, you build a strong communication channel, they're users, and they communicate right back to you. They're not happy, right? So it's in them dating us.

55:18And I remember we did a public post mortem, and we always do that. If something happens, or something goes wrong, we're like, yeah, that was bad. Here's what happened, and here's the technical reason, and here's how we fixed it. And then we like, tweeted that and promoted it, and took just full accountability for it. And we always choose to make those choices when they're hard. And that was just one example. But I think the hardest example and back to your question of like the most stressful days at Figma, the true most stressful day at Figma for me was the day that we announced the acquisition.

55:51That was probably one of the harder moments of my career, where my run social, that's like my job is running social. And all of a sudden, you have this onslaught on social and you have to figure out what to do. And I remember the way that we announced it was we just retweeted Dylan. That was like all that we had said. At Rodgie on our team, I remember I was talking to him about it, and he was like, we've got to talk to our users. Like we just have to talk to them directly. We have to show where the same company, we just have to like not hide behind the brand, and you know, he was totally right.

56:22And so I remember we decided that day, that the next day, we just had to have an open public forum where we could talk directly with our users and let them ask us any questions. And so we'd help the Twitter space the next day with Dylan, and show Rodgie and Tom, and we just had it open. And people could ask us anything they wanted, and we were able to be just like really honest and transparent with that about everything that we could. And I think that that is just a really good example of how even when it's really, really, really hard, you still have to just be transparent. And I think that that's when the tide started to turn of people giving us a chance to like prove that everything would be great.

57:02Even when it's like the highest days and the hardest thing of still listening to people, maintaining that connection and not hiding behind the brand. Feels like transparency is core to the values of Figma, is that, have you codified your values and is that one of them and is there anything that you could do there? The app codified our values. It isn't explicitly listed out, which is interesting. But I think of it as our value, especially with our users, right? We think about our value a lot, is fun with it, build community, love your craft and all those definitely come through play. Maybe it's true people, because I think it's so core to how to make decisions in our framework of when we have a decision, which way we're gonna go.

57:43And also just we mentioned show a couple of times, but on Twitter, he's always asking people, what do you need an editor? Here's what's going great. Absolutely, it's still how we get so much feedback, right? Is talking to people directly and crystal come on and people have bugs and just respond to them. Like these are CCO, like people are just actively on there, listening to people fixing bugs, responding. I want to shift to kind of the second step of the good or market motion, but before I do that, I have a couple of things I wanted to chat briefly. One is, you haven't mentioned config this conference that you ran, which is a good example, I think of scaling a lot of the things you're talking about.

58:19It used to be Twitter, social graph, find people on Twitter now, it's like this epic conference that I think people just love. I was on Twitter the days of config, and it's just my whole feet was just like, oh my God, config is the best thing, so many talks and so many people. Config is such a good example. I remember I definitely talked about config. The way that we do config, I think I'd never run a conference before, maybe that's probably part of it. And I brought somebody on the line, but you and I were both sitting together and being like, okay, I like, so we're doing a conference, like how do we get the content from this conference?

58:54Like what do we do? And we didn't know, and so we just decided, oh, like so much of what we do is like listen to our users, let's put out this call for proposals and see what they wanna talk about. And so that's how we got and get a lot of our content for the conference, and a lot of it comes back to what I was talking about earlier, which is very technical, deep content. The target's individual contributors where the practice shows up a tool. And through that process, we build these relationships with these speakers, our advocates help them shape their talks. And then I think that we do produce really strong technical content through that process and through config.

59:32And we're also able to, with these people that we work with, help them grow their own profiles. And that also helps them stay more connected to us, helps them become thought leaders in their own right. And so I think we're able to just draw so many different people who are the practitioners and the ICs, because we're not just putting thought leadership out there, we're talking directly to how to use the tool and the things that individual contributors are still dealing with. Yeah, it's kind of a lot like this podcast that I use later. It's like, how do I actually do stuff, not just a bunch of big ideas?

1:00:03Yeah, no fluff. I remember seeing a tweet about it where someone filmed being inside. And they're like, it's like a rock concert. It's not a conference. Oh, that's true. We also just have fun. That's another big part of it as well. Yeah, we remember literally saying, how can I make this more fun? Sounds like another value. Yes. Okay, well, let's talk about step two of this good market motion that you've developed, which I think if I were to just simply describe it as help people spread it within the organization, is that right? Yeah, yeah. Cool. All right, how do you do that? All right, so again, I've got four things here, and I'll listen now and then we can go through them.

1:00:38The first is like make it easy to try the tool and to share it without a lot of gates, right? So that you can do this. The second is those DAs. I want to talk about how those DAs work in our sales process. Oh, designer advocates. Yeah, sorry, that's our acronym for them, designer advocates, because there are so far seeing how we sell and how this works. The third is finding the operational thing that allows you to scale for us as design systems. The thing that was the biggest blocker to somebody using Figma and turning it into like your biggest reason to adopt. And then the last one was much more up, was still about maintaining and growing that connection with those internal champions over time.

1:01:22So those are the four things. And again, it looks different, similar concepts with different ideas. Let me look at that in the early days, versus what we do today with the wood scale. Awesome. Let's get into it. All right, cool. So the first one's making it the product easy to try and share. So we talked about this a little bit, but if you go to Figma .com today, it's very easy to sign up for a free account, right? I have a free account myself on my personal side for designing my house. I was just the thing I used to do before. But you just go and you can try the tool. And I think that's so important for us to allow someone to use it over time for a long time, until they have confidence enough to be able to want to spread it within their organizations.

1:02:02But it's also pretty easy to create a free team and share stuff with your organization, right? In the early days, you could just share a link and that was it, right? And you could use the tool and everything was free. Once we implemented pricing, which was about two years after we launched, we had this thing called a starter team. And this is actually something that was switched. So initially, the way that it worked was our starter team was that you could have unlimited files but only collaborate with two or three people. And that was like the starter team. And he wanted to add more people to collaborate with.

1:02:37And then you hit the paywall. We realized that wait a minute, that's hurting us. And so we switched it and now it's like you can have three files, but unlimited collaborators. And that was huge for us. And you can, that's what you can see in the matchups is very clearly, right? Where it was like, oh, this is really easy for people now to share before they just start paying. This is huge, right? And so then you get people to start using it for free with their teams and the team's getting confidence in it before then they all have to start uploading it to their procurement team or whoever it is to start paying for it.

1:03:14So not introducing payment to facts, right? And giving people that time to build that app and to see it and to try it out with their teams of people before they have to pay it and get used to it. That's such a good and important topic that I wanna pull a thread on a little bit. So what you discovered there is you don't wanna get in the way of the growth engine of the product. If it's gonna grow through people spreading it, you don't wanna cut it off at three. That seems like a monumental decision that changed everything. Any sense of just like how you came about to realizing that or was it just like obvious?

1:03:43Okay, of course we need to change this. What is intuitive and it was more about the change management process of how to do that when people at this point were using the tool and using that starter tier and like setting people or what that looks like. And for a long time, you could also kind of get around that and just collaborate with people in drafts and just share a link to who wanted to shut that down. So it was like a bigger decision on just change management. But I think we two to lean knew it and it was much more about yeah, the change management how to make that happen. Is there anything else you learned about what should be and free and pay walled versus what should be and free me just like broad thoughts?

1:04:21When the other interesting thing is too, and I think I said this but like so much of hours is like, so we have a couple tiers. We have a free tier and then we have a pro tier and I mean, we have our work tier and the free tier. And it's freaks here includes this like free starter team. And so you can just do that though to the thing we're not coming back to do that. Pro is all enter credit card and then org as you talk to sales, org an enterprise, you talk to sales. And so I think the other key thing here is like we get a lot of upsells to org from pro, right? And so it's not like we, it's also a thought of like what to put in org versus pro, right?

1:04:56So that's like the other decision because press also relatively inexpensive. So that that grows a lot too really quickly and it's still very important to us but still most of our like marketing qualified leads, there are sales leads likely come from pro or from free, right? And so it's like the decisions that we think about are like, okay, what do you want to sell on? And it has to go from free to pro. It has to be pretty natural because you don't have any people involved, right? And so it's like they have to just like do that on their own. And then when you go from pro to org or enterprise, it's more about the organization and like the scale and that's where that design systems conversation comes in that we could talk about.

1:05:32But that was the thing that we really indexed on for org and enterprise of like why you would want to upgrade from pro to org. So it's what it is like this multi step process but it's also nice because you know, you can like increase your investment in the process in the product as you're building your own confidence in the tool. You have a really important nuance in the way that you structured pricing. It's unlimited viewers. Yes. But it's just editors that you charge for. So true. You know, so many people, especially if you're a designer and you're working with a product manager, you can comment, right?

1:06:04And so so much of this is to yes, you can spread it and you can use stigma for free for a really long time because you can just comment on the tool. And it also gets us through many more places with the organization and helps us be more useful to more people because yeah, editors are a viewer's free. This one topic could be a whole podcast and I have so many questions. Let me ask maybe one more in the home of one. How often do you revisit the packaging and pricing at this point and do you have any advice that? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because the product's still growing, right? Like we just launched variables and dev mode back in that config this year and that influence pricing and packaging and it still is, right?

1:06:41And so FIGGEM too. And so I would say the core foundations aren't something we were revisited a lot, but we're continually adding new features and we have to think about what tiers should they go in, what does that look like? So those things influence that all the time. By the way, I recently upgraded to the non -free pack because I hit that limit if three with the designer that I work with. Yeah, it's often instead of annoying because you have like new, keep moving things in an app like drafts. Yeah, that's exactly what it's like. But the guy who has a worthwhile $12 a month or whatever just did not have to bother with it.

1:07:11Yeah, once you realize like, okay, yeah, it is not that much in the scheme of things I'm just going to do. But it's interesting how like it's not that much but I still like, not I don't really want to pay that if I'm - Oh, for sure. We all do that, right? Such a good so much of pro like, so many people have individual pro accounts, right? Because it's not necessarily a business or a business or your individual, but it's very different from an organization where someone else is paying for it. Yeah, so funny. Okay, step two is around designer advocates. Talk about that. Yeah, so I just think this day at D .A., so sorry, I keep calling them D .A.

1:07:43It's because that's what we call them internally. It's cool now we know. Advocates are just so special and such a big part of Figma. And like I said, it took us so long to start charging or bring a sales team. And when we first hired our first sales person and our first sales like REV, was the same day that our next designer advocate started who eventually the first designer advocate left and did something else and brought in another designer advocate and he started in the first day, but the sales team started. And at this point more people were using Figma. We had that pro tier going for a while.

1:08:13And Tom, who is still here today and leading that team, Tom Larry, he was a passionate Figma user, but he was a passionate Figma user who brought Figma to his organization. For the first one, you know, we were so early, he wouldn't have an organization to bring it to be just a lot of the product. But Tom, he brought, he was the internal champion at his company, who got his company to adopt Figma. And so when he joined Figma, that was really the mindset that he brought to this was also like how do you use this as a team? And why I think this is so special and it's so foundational that they started together is that they would go talk to users together and they would bring him into the sales process, but he was never a sales person.

1:08:55Never had a quota, it doesn't live on the sales team. Technical expert who has such a deep passion and a deep, deep, deep, deep understanding of the tool that he would come in and just help explain the products to other designers. And it goes back to that same theme that I talked about earlier with marketing where I realized that I would never have the credibility with designers that a designer has. Same as true sales. Like they're never going to know the product as well as a designer will. And so Tom being there and Tom being able to be like, oh, I understand exactly what you're talking about and what your problems are.

1:09:28Here's how this works or here's where you're blocked or here's an idea or best practice how to use this. Like that just became so powerful and so useful for them and for the sales team that they ended up calling it the Tom factor with the Bitcoin stuff. Because it wasn't necessarily like a structured process at the beginning, they just, if they came to me, come help talk to this company with us or like help show them how this works. But then they called it the Tom factor because he was so powerful and they're sealed for so much more likely to close his he joins. The problems. But it wasn't a full time job either.

1:10:00Like he also is connected to the products because he's like this special person who was a designer, was a foreuser of the product and then talks to hundreds of customers. And so he's like has the best way of synthesizing product feedback and then bringing back the product team because he has all of that context, right? And so I think that that role is just so special and it's something that we've actually chosen to scale because it's just so valuable in the same way it's valuable for marketing and it's valuable for sales. They bring a spur a lot of companies building these teams with the foundation.

1:10:32I can't even see anything highly enough about it. Like marketing product, like we think of it when as we're scaling this role, we're like marketing product and sales like that's where these people come in. And I think when you have a technical IC audience, I don't see how else you've built any credibility or get anywhere with people if you don't have someone who deeply understands it, integrated in marketing and sales. Who does this team report to? Me. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we're talking about how to help your product spread within an organization, talked about developer advocates, you talked about making it easier to spread, what else?

1:11:06Let's talk about design systems. So let's say you're a designer and you know, you're designing an app and that you need a button, right? Rather than going in and making a new button every single time, you need a library of the button, right? With color, the spacing, the padding, all that stuff, already predefined, maybe it's tied to code, maybe it's not, but you just want to pull that in and then maybe there's someone on the design system and there's brand designer or someone who's like, oh, we changed this from this font to that font that you know that and it just updates everywhere or a padding change and updates everywhere.

1:11:38And that's like the most simplistic version is a button, but the stuff gets way more complex, right? This turns into like, here is our welcome screen, here is our header bar, like all of the different components that then become like whole pages and it takes, it's a huge, efficient thing, right? If you have a very robust design system, you're just pulling in all of those components instead of having to design those from scratch every single time and it's consistent. Like you have hundreds of designers at an organization, they're all making buttons, like they're gonna be slightly different and then engineering's like, what padding do I use?

1:12:12And so it's very inefficient. So most a lot of organizations use these design systems and they become very advanced over time. But Figma did not have design systems in the early days, right? Or if we did, and they had them at the file level but you couldn't like share them with other people. And so that was a huge blocker for us for a really long time was like these big companies were like, oh yeah, this is cool, but like, I, you gotta work, I need a design system. Like how else am I supposed to work with engineering? Because this is so big in engineering too because when you're able to identify all these different buttons and these components in advance, you could tie them to code and then it's easier for them because they don't have like, inspect it every time, right?

1:12:47So it's like, wave in and for everybody. So it was our biggest blocker, but then we decided like, no, we're gonna focus on this. And in the early days, that was just like meetups. Still, it was like, we need to do design systems meetups and we were all like, what are designs? Or the office like, what is design systems? And then I went and read a pattern with the gang and atomic, Brad Frost, atomic structures, design systems, and started learning about it. But anyway, so in the early days, we just like literally brought, there's a community of design systems people, right? And we brought all of them together, met with our product team, met with Dylan, started just having this really informal meetups around design systems to learn from these people and start just learning, like hearing from them.

1:13:24And then we started building out more features from it. And then we just started really leaning into the technical like aspects of how companies use and scale design systems. Because while design systems are so important, it's also very hard to get an organization to do it because it's like an efficiency thing that they also have to invest in that is immediately connected to a launch that day, right? And so every company is at a different phase of maturity of where their design system is. But we really leaned into the content, into the features, into eventually showing how people do it in Figma, well, at the beginning level, but then at the very advanced level, to really lean into that.

1:13:57And that also went into marketing, right? So that was, we have design systems .com, it's like a Figma property. We had a whole conference around it and the fall called schema, where we just bring in these advanced design practitioners and they just like show you how they're working. And that's so important too, because design systems are one of the main reasons you upgrade from product or enterprise, right? It's like you're at this stage where you're getting more organized, you're more advanced, you're a bigger company. And so that's one of our big, like gaining features for upgrade. And so that became just the key thing we leaned in on.

1:14:30And that's bottom's up specific because these people are not, the people making the design systems are not like the VPE still, right? Like the next phase of bottoms up are the ICs and then the design systems people. And now those intro champions are largely the design systems people too, right? They're either the biggest blockers or the biggest champions if they're on a field in them over. I love just that lesson of, nothing that is blocking you from being adopted, see if you can turn that into an advantage. Totally, totally. Feels like looking at figments like, wow, so many advantages for a product to spread.

1:15:03It's single player, you can use it in your own. It's got multiplayer, you can invite people, it like gets better, it's more people are using it. Versus like, I don't know, a company like Slack where it's useless on your own. Yeah. I guess is there anything there about just these lessons you're sharing are most helpful for a product that is useful in its own or is it, or it could be useful for all kinds of products, anything there. That's what I was talking about with the IC, right? And IC has to get a lot of value out of this on their own. And I think it has to be technical, or that's a hypothesis that I have.

1:15:34It's certainly easier if it's a technical product, right? They did a lot farther because people want to talk much more about the product, the care so much about the craft. And like they want to spend a lot of time learning and understanding it. And I think that's shoot designers, that's shoot engineers. It's not truth every audience, right? Like not every audience is deeply cares about wanting to do the blur in the craft in the best way possible for a specific thing. So I think that one of the requirements, but things that makes this a lot more likely to be successful is that your IC, there's a tool and they can use it on their own.

1:16:09And it's technical. I think that helps at time. Coming back to the strategy of helping Figma spread within an organization, I think you mentioned there's one more item around champions. Oh yeah. So just the last thing there is, you know, you have to keep that relationship going with those champions forever. They don't go away. And sometimes they get madty too, right? So like I remember like there's one, I think it was that one of our companies, one of our bigger companies, and he was upset about something and he tweeted it and then he had to go talk to him and understand what he wanted and what was wrong.

1:16:45And so they don't go away. But then also I think a lot about how through the process of maintaining a relationship with those people, we're actually able to help them and what they get out of it beyond just the tool, right? So like, especially over time, especially if we have a larger platform, I think a lot about like how can we help them grow? Whether that's growing their careers, like they, because they like brought on Figma, they, you know, we get a promotion or whatever that looks like. But we have more direct control over things like, oh, you're gonna speak at one of our events. We're gonna amplify you on social.

1:17:18We're gonna promote you and make you a thought leader. And it works really well for everyone because these people also have the deep technical expertise to say to show other people like here's how I'm filled with my design systems. Here's how I do this and to people who want to learn from them and we have the platform to amplify them. And so I think a lot about like, yeah, I can help these people grow in their own careers and get something out of this too beyond just the level of the tool. And then that builds back into building credibility for Figma because now there's all these additional designers who are talking about Figma.

1:17:48It's all circles. It's like meals within flywheels. Off and exit all connected. Maybe just the last question along these lines, what changes as you scale? So a lot of these are things you did early on. What changes as you grow as a company in this bucket of helping the product spread? Yeah, I think the key thing is that you have to keep doing it. So one of the things that I feel like, I, if I may roll now at Figma, that I think a lot about is like how I can keep advocating for this stuff when we're starting to implement more top -down motion and having to really prove ROI or thinking about how do you scale the sales team and all these things.

1:18:24And so a lot of what I'm doing too is thinking like, okay, how do we keep this going and keep this model successful as the company is still growing because it's not necessarily as intuitive as you are starting to add in more of these some of these more traditional methods and motions, right? And so that's kind of something that I think about quite a bit. Things like that conference that I talked about, schema, that's a big one, config, that's a big one, scaling our DA team and really like having them grow with the company across regions and across products is really big. And so it's how do you keep, not like keep protecting those things because it's not immediately obvious when you brand just a ton of new people.

1:19:03Right, it's easy to break the thing that was working totally. And it has to do with things too, right? Like you have to layer on new things that how do you not swap away from this thing that got you to where you are as well? Is this a fit for everyone, this sort of approach? Let's say every B2B SaaS company, what are maybe prerequisites for who should apply the sort of approach in this motion? Yeah, I feel like this not myself actually because FIGM is also has new products for me. So like I think to myself like, oh, can I replicate this? Like FIGGEM, like FIGGEM is one of those examples and DevMode, all of a sudden we're working with developers.

1:19:37So I thought about this a lot and I don't know if there's like, oh, you have to have this or you have to have that. But I think there's certainly these that make it easier and they're both true on like the market side of like the type of the audience is then also on the team side. Within the market, I already mentioned it, but I think it really helps if people are technical and you have this technical audience of people who really care about the craft and they get a lot of value out of the tool by themselves because that just allows them to really learn something and really put confidence in something before they have to spread it or start collaborating.

1:20:08And it gives me to talk about with them that's not collaboration because like I said, no, let's talk about collaboration. It's like nobody has to talk about it. So you have other things you can talk about even though it collaboration is so important, no one wants to talk about it. So being technical is important and then the caring about your tools. That's another one that I think a lot about. As a marketer, I don't know how much I care about my tools, some of them I do, but a lot of them I don't. You would have to be in like, if you're like, oh Claire, you have to move from paper, drop box paper to Google Docs, they'd be like, fine, right?

1:20:38Maybe that's a personality, but designers specifically, and I think engineers in the same way, just as examples, have deep passions for the tools probably because they're in it eight hours a day and so they're using them all the time. And so it certainly helps if you, these people already care, care to just believe out with their tools are. Another thing that helps is that you have a community that exists within the kind of target audience already that we had that with desires. Like, yes, we grew it a lot and have grown with it a lot, but like I said, that Twitter community that existed without us, that was there before we were there.

1:21:11And so it was a lot easier for us to get started because we didn't have to make something to bring people to us, we had a distribution channel already in place that we could kind of work through. So that helped a ton. And then I think the last one was that the, that core IC audience has a lot of connection for it within the organization. Like designers are so collaborative. Like you were saying you work with, as a Piami were working with designers, they work with everybody, right? Like if you're building something, you need comments, you need feedback. And so it was really natural for them to be like a super spreader because their role was such that they were collaborating with a lot of people.

1:21:43And again, people are hearing this. They're like, of course, Figma did so well that all these advantages, but I think people forget how many disadvantages that also led to, right? Like convincing a designer to switch to a new tool very hard. What I hear with stories there is that when we launched a designer news, which is a popular forum back in the day, the first response was, is this is the future of design and changing careers? Because designers do not want to be collaborative. There was like this process where people were like, oh no, I want to like do my work on my own and then present when I'm ready.

1:22:13It was like a massive shift in getting them to think in a different way to do this. So even to me, it was intuitive, but of course you'd be collaborative, but designers did not want to be all of them right away. I think it's only like a clearly successful product after the fact, only after the fact. This reminds me of another story show shared with me about Uber, which was also very classically not collaborative and very siloed. And there was a big push to adopt Vigmut to help encourage more sharing because that was against the culture. Yes, so yes, that was a key problem and still a key problem with a lot of design organizations is that yeah, they're siloed and that it's an organizational shift to get people to be collaborative.

1:22:51What sort of team do you need to have in place to approach growth and go to market in this way? What did you find was really important? The most important thing there is that you have an executive and a leader who believes in this, like I did not start this deal and started this, right? Like he was the core person who believed in this and who drove a lot of this and he continues to and he's built up this up to be like a culture of our team. And since he believes in it, he's able to help bring more people on board and make everyone believe in it. And then I think the other thing is through that is that thing that we're talking about earlier with metrics.

1:23:25Like I think so much of this is people being like that doesn't scale, how do you measure this? And yes, we know what metric we are working on all those things but it's not immediately clear. The metrics don't immediately show you if something's working or not. It goes back to signal over metrics and I think that that's so important and having leaders who believe in that too or able to trust their own intuitions and their own guts is so important. And it's so interesting too because I was just like thinking when I was just now that I was talking about how trusting yourself and trusting intuitions like the hardest part of stressful part in the early days.

1:24:01But even here, like it's the thing you need the most to be successful. And so I don't know what kind of how that connects to that but it just feels like that's just so important in the state of model and with just being at a startup is that you're able to believe in it and have the confidence and then trust yourself. I'm gonna quickly summarize this model just for people to have a very clear succinct explanation and then comment on anything I'm forgetting and missing, I'll keep it really brief. And then we'll get to our very exciting lightning rounds. So the idea here basically is step one, make individual contributors at a company love your product.

1:24:33Step two is get them to help spread you within the company. And to get people to love your product, the four keys that you shared is build credibility for your product, build a product with your users, focus where you can connect with your users one to many in your case it was Twitter and build a relationship with users so that they can search, trust you and transparency is a big part of that. Before I move on to step two, anything I missed there? Nope, that's it. Okay, cool. And then step two is help them spread that product within the organization and what you found was really important there.

1:25:04One is make it easy to share the product and try it for free. Two is designer advocates being involved in the sales process, have the Tom Factor, find and target the operating thing that spreads adoption. And so in this case, I think it was design systems you mentioned mostly. And then the final piece of Shana Light on Champions I hope they'll be successful, make it, help them in their career. Yep, that's it. Awesome. Well with that, we've reached our very exciting lighting round. Are you ready? Yes. What are two or three books that you recommended most to other people? I recommend management books, lots of people.

1:25:37The other piece of this that we didn't touch on at all is scaling a team and like all the things that go into management. That'll be our next step, our next podcast. Teaching and teaching also grow in new managers and so, rather book handler and dare to lead. To be honest, are the ones I recommend the most because I do a lot of later coaching new managers and helping them learn how to manage and those the first two I start with because they're so good. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've recently watched and really like? So I just watched 100 -foot wave on HBO and I watched it because I'm going to Portugal next week and that's a place where they have like the biggest waves in the world.

1:26:10And it was just really interesting to learn all about the business bizarre and portable and all the waves and the surfing culture that's grown there. So that was just a fun one that I watched recently. And is your plan to do 100 -foot wave? No, because I'm expecting something from being a surfing for me. Oh, wow. Yes, I know. I hope that you all got in the beach with my partner serves. Amazing. We just had a kid and - I know. I want to do the whole other podcast. That's a whole other podcast. This podcast just, parenting starts to come up again and again is interesting. Okay, we'll keep going.

1:26:44What is a favorite product that you've recently discovered and I've never heard of it. You love. Okay, so you might cut this because it's a little promotional but Thick Jam in the last couple of months, especially, I spent a lot of time having to create strategies and files and explanations and I spent in meetings and I spent all of my day in Thick Jam, like literally all of my day. And I, you know, I'm a, I work with Figma. I use the products and I was using Figma for a long time but Thick Jam for me and my role, literally use it every single day and now I cannot imagine looking without it. Averklist is so many different tools for me.

1:27:20Great picture. We will not be cutting that. I'm also a big fan of - In a trio. It's very true. I'm in there all the time. I think I'm the most active Thick Jam user. I had a good Andy Govality that in the metrics but I'm in Thick Jam all the time. Next question. What is a favorite life motto that you like to repeat yourself that you share with people, something that comes up and asks that? When I was younger, I really was, I mean, I was always been motivated to like, I have to get this thing right now. Whether it was my career or where I was an athlete growing up so I really wanted to perform and do well on things and I just went to pressure myself.

1:27:53But I recently, or not recently lost, maybe five years, got this motto of consistent pressure over time as being more of my motto and taking some of the pressure off of having to do things immediately or get to a certain place too fast. Kind of maybe it's more like atomic habits or things like that but I've just much more in this mode of like, you're not gonna get everything done. Is it start up a career or whatever? It's not gonna happen immediately. You just have to like keep working at it and not giving up and having that grid to keep going and keep pushing over time is way more important than any like immediate accomplishments.

1:28:26That is so good. I just added this question to lightning round and these answers are so good at each time. Consistent pressure over time. I so get that reminds me of how I think about the newsletter. It's just like, keep at it, keep at it. It doesn't have to be the best thing ever every single time. Just don't give up. Great answer. Final question. What's your favorite use case of Figma that you never expected? So I think I kind of mentioned this a little bit but I use it for home renovation, FIG Jam especially. So I renovated and house with my partner and we're doing another one right now and I couldn't do renovations without it.

1:28:59I copy and taste like, I start with Pinterest like get ideas but then I pull the molds like a mood board on FIG Jam and then I circle things and this helps me communicate with my partner. I'll send it to him and get you know, comments from him on stuff, links. And so yes, we all feel like we'll draw out rooms and model things up and have them on the iPad. So yeah, interior design and home renovation is on FIG Jam. Claire, we've talked about making people love your product. I think people love this episode. Hopefully they also spread it within their organization. Thank you so much for being here.

1:29:32Two final questions. Work in folks finding online if they want to reach out and how can listeners be useful to you? I guess Twitter, like I'm not active per se but that's probably the, I don't look a lint in. So Twitter, definitely be the place. Just Claire T Butler there. And then helpful to me, you can tell me your feedback on FIG Jam and Dev Mode. That would be really helpful to me. And then I guess the other thing is parenting tips with work, like I'm a little nervous about that. Right? Like I love my job, love my career and I'm gonna be a mom soon and need to figure out how to make that work.

1:30:04So I want to hear other people have done that. I can give you two quick tips right now. One is there's a guest post during my Pat leave that Tamara, I forget her last name wrote, which is basically a leave guide, like a guide to send you some of your stuff. Oh, I need the somewhere on this right now. I need this. Okay, I will send this to you and I'll link it in the show notes. Also right before I went on Pat leave, I had Noah Weiss on the podcast who was just leaving Pat leave. And he gave me this awesome advice of don't over extrapolate every moment. This is less about getting ready for Pat or for paternal leave and more just being in it, which is don't over extrapolate things that are going on.

1:30:39Like you're not that one thing that's bothering you or is a problem is not gonna continue necessarily. Let go. Good one. I love it. All right, well that's a parenting podcast a little bit, which is totally cool. Claire, thank you again so much for being here. Yeah. Thanks you, that was really fun. That's my KPI for this podcast. Great, great. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

1:31:16You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com. See you in the next episode.