Designing the Future: Dylan Field on AI, Collaboration, and Independence

0:05Hi, listeners, and welcome to another episode of No Priors. Today we're in for a treat, talking with a longtime friend and business partner to both me and Alad, Dylan Field. Dylan is the founder and CEO of Figma, the beloved and dominant design collaboration tool. Figma's been working on making it possible to design and build digital products on a single multiplayer canvas. And we're excited to talk about the world after Adobe, FigJam, DevMode, and their first AI products. Welcome, Dylan. Thank you. Glad to finally be on No Priors. We've been trying to make this happen, and I'm stoked. Let's do it.

0:39Dylan, you've now been working on Figma for more than 10, 11 years. What was the original vision? Well, it's actually even longer. It's like coming from 12 years, which is totally wild. But yeah, original vision was to eliminate the gap between imagination and reality. and back in August 2012, 2013 timeframe, when I tried pitching people that, they were pretty confused and thought it was very vague. We had a lot of challenges recruiting people. And so we thought, okay, how about a North Star, like make design accessible to all. And we've tried to make this tool that's very powerful, but also is one where you can easily learn it.

1:29And that said, I think that the idea of what design is, is growing beyond just pixels and software. And at the same time, now you see all these amazing demos and ideas, but forth of how you can actually, actually eliminate the gap between imagination and reality, like we would originally set out to do. And so I feel like those two kind of visions are converging. It's an interesting moment. I want to come back to AI and like new opportunities for creative expression in a bit. We have to talk about what's been in the news. And I think what has been preoccupying at least part of Figma for a while.

2:08You guys were on track to be acquired by Adobe, but the merger was recently called off due to regulatory scrutiny. You're coming out the other end of that with independence and a billion dollars. Like, tell us about it. How do you manage that process emotionally in terms of decision making? The original decision to say, let's go do this with Adobe, it was obviously one that we thought very deeply about. And at the time seemed like a one-way door. You know, there's the classic meme of there's one-way doors and two-way doors in business and really think deeply about the one-way doors. It turns out sometimes one-way doors can be two-way doors too.

2:48But we thought really deeply about it. And we thought this is a way to just accelerate our vision and be able to do what we want to do just so much faster if we're at Adobe. And I thought that the team there I'd learn a lot from as well. I mean, it's an incredible group of people over there. unfortunately regulators were not fans and 16 months later we kind of at some point said okay we got to call it and that was late December talked to my team about that it was actually the first day of break that I called the team back and I was like hey it's not going through here's this means for us immediately and here's sort of the timeline from here and what we got to think about next.

3:34We had, you know, communicated along the way, hey, this is looking harder. The path is narrowing. The path is narrow. But still, I think some of the people were excited about, of course. And that said, I'm just so thankful to start the year with clarity. Yeah, it's kind of interesting because if you look historically in the 90s, Microsoft tried to buy into it for, I think it was a billion or one and a half billion dollars. and that got blocked from a regulatory perspective. And now Intuit's$178 billion company as of today. I just looked it up. And, you know, when you hear stories of that time period, it sounded like it was a similar journey where you get kind of wrapped up in all the regulatory stuff and it's uncertain and it's stressful and all the rest.

4:18And I feel like in recent conversations, you've been really re-energized. Like when I talk to you, I feel the energy and the excitement in terms of building Figma and building future products and roadmaps. And, you know, it really feels like you're in it in a really strong way. I'm just a little bit curious, like, what are some of the things you're excited about from a roadmap perspective and sort of looking ahead with the company? Yeah, so much. I don't think the excitement ever waned, you know, but it is definitely draining to be part of a regulatory process like that for such a long period of time and to not have that clarity.

4:47But I'm very thankful because, you know, all the work we did as a team, it set us up for where we're at now. And I think we're in a really good place. And, you know, we kind of just kept our foot on the gas and kept moving quickly. One of the things that I guess I was a little bit surprised by is after the Adobe deal was announced, I expected you to be celebrating for more like more than a day or so. And then you're like, OK, I don't know about a lot. I didn't see that much of you for about a year and a half. I know some of that was regulatory, but you all kept pushing pretty hard, which seems smart now.

5:22But what was what was behind that and sort of, you know, trying to lead that way? Well, partially there was travel for regulatory, of course. But I think that, yes, I mean, we were all really heads down and focused. And we knew exactly what we needed to do in terms of improving the platform. And really, if you think about Figma's platform today, there's sort of three different areas. There's FigJam, which is ideation, brainstorming, imagination, and diagramming. And then there's the design element with Figma Design. and there's dev mode where you try to turn designs into actual working code. And so much more we can do as we kind of think about that software value chain.

6:03But, you know, if you go back to when the acquisition agreement was signed, like dev mode wasn't even announced even. And the platform, there was like very key parts of the platform that were not there yet. Over the past, you know, 16, 17 months, there's just been so much that we've sprinted at in order to kind of create the right foundations and get them in place. and now as we think about the roadmap ahead, yeah, there's so much exciting stuff that we can do, whether it's thinking about how do you use AI to go across as abstraction boundaries from idea to design to code, or it's thinking about what we can do to better serve developers, which are almost a third of our users, and I think that there's still so much more we can do for them.

6:51DevMode is just the start as it is today, And I think that there's a lot to evolve there, but also a lot more we can offer. Or just going back to the basics, how do you make Figma even simpler? Again, if that goal is to democratize design, how do you make it so that you're able to bring more people into the design process and also make it so that it's less intimidating? After building for designers for so long, what triggered the decision to expand to brainstorming and diagramming, which is like broader teams, and then expanding focus to developers with DevVip? So I think we have a pattern of just sort of following the use cases that are already happening in Figma.

7:34Figma design is just this wonderfully broad platform. And so many people do so many different things in it. And with brainstorming, ideation, whiteboarding, diagramming, those were all use cases we saw in Figma basically since it started. It's hard to put exact numbers on it, but I do know that qualitatively, it seemed like there was a big increase in how much that was happening as the pandemic occurred. More teams were going from in-person to hybrid or remote and trying to figure out how do we still communicate, collaborate in that time period. It's actually a tool for whiteboarding that I think is useful whatever your work context is.

8:22But I think people kind of have the aha moment of we need something to bring us together, some space to go ideate in during the time. And so we started going, okay, we have to make some easier version of Figma, some version that's more scoped towards this use case and really just push super hard to get that built. We did in record time from the start of the project to shipping a beta. I mean, it was like six to eight months and like that. It was really fast. And the differentiator is fun. And at the time, I think that the team was a little skeptical of that. Like, really? Are differentiators going to be fun?

9:00Like, are we sure that enterprises care about that? But it turns out that that's a really important part of that agent process is this feeling of safety, of play. and if you can make people feel more at home, even through silly things sometimes like stickers or emoji reactions or waving your cursor around and high-fiving people, cursor chat is another good one that people love. Little things like this make us that more people feel like they can speak up in a team meeting and they're energized to give their opinion. And if you can get more of those thoughts, then hopefully you can get to a better outcome.

9:34Yeah, as someone who has never been a designer, but was still a very early handful of Figma users person, I'd always used it for visual thinking. And then, you know, we hired new folks during the pandemic, like most others did. And one of the biggest concerns I had was, how is this person going to feel like they are part of the team? And two of the big things for me was I was going to go on a weekly walk with my hires. And also using FigJam and getting people to do something that actually did feel more fun was huge. It's interesting because over time, people sort of evolved their use cases of how they use FigJam, too.

10:15And at least inside of Figma, one of the things that we see is it kind of evolves into a better way to run a meeting. And it's not just a brainstorm. A lot of times they're decision-making meetings. And we have a lot of things that are laid out almost like a document or a knowledge base inside of FigJam. It's in a more visual way. It solicits input, but it also drives towards an outcome. and that's a big part of the AI strategy for FIGGIM is how do we help people set those things up faster. Amongst the different products that you've rolled out recently, one of them is DevMode. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

10:54Absolutely. DevMode is a way for developers to better consume designs in Figma. We have almost a third of our users in the Figma platform that are engaged on a weekly basis, almost a third are developers. And going back a few years, we realized that we were just not creating enough value for these users. As we surveyed them, they were often lower NPS. They were not as happy. And then you dug into the reasons why. And we did a lot of research around this and spent a lot of time. We actually acquired a company called Visley and they helped work through this. And it was really a bunch of pivots along the way.

11:33But some of the core problems were things like, you know, I just built the wrong things. or I don't know how to work in Figma, or I don't know how to navigate Figma in the proper way. And then we started digging in deeper around cogen, around what are the other things that developers want to use alongside Figma via plugins, and also how do you want to actually map design systems from design to code and keep things consistent? And as we kind of explore all these areas, that's where dev mode came from. And so it's a great way to know exactly what you should build, but also get the relevant information via annotations, via properties that are exposed in the right way.

12:23But it also helps you keep track of changes, understand what's going on, and you can bring everything around the development process into dev mode with you. And so if you have certain plugins you want to use, for example, Jira or custom plugins, you can bring those in as well. And we have a lot more thinking ahead around how do we enable even better workflow as well as map better to design systems and looking forward to sharing that with the world. Yeah, the extensibility of Figma, I think, is one of the key things about it. I mean, I've also used it effectively for slides or for visual display of information or things like that.

12:57So it seems like there's lots of directions it can go. So, and to your point, one of the really interesting, exciting areas is really how do you adopt AI and the context of Figma and really start using it in deep ways. And so I'm a little bit curious about when you first started thinking about this wave of generative AI and then how you're starting to think about incorporating it into different aspects of what Figma does. Yeah, absolutely. I was fortunate to be surrounded by futurist thinkers like yourself at the onset of this era. and as even it was kind of coming up, you know, everyone else was talking about crypto and folks like Elad and Sarah were saying, hey, have you seen the scaling laws that are happening right now?

13:36It's pretty wild. Something might be happening here. And of course, with diffusion models improving, you know, I think we all had the aha moment. But I think it's interesting to kind of ask the question of, when do you want like sort of an LM versus diffusion model, uh, solution for something and design is maybe you can define it as like art applied to problem solving. Uh, there's many different definitions of design. Uh, but I love that one. It's, it's one that I've been thinking a lot about recently because it's like, okay, well, you know, if diffusion models go mapped to art, but like LM is mapped to problem solving, you know it kind of highlights how a hybrid might be important here it sounds like a good like 10 pages end book or something like I'm serious you should do like a slim volume if you're really neat there you go I'll have a you know gpt4 help me out to take my one sentence and and sort of make it 10 pages but there is a lot we can do in terms of generation of designs and I'll be honest like we've really tried to take our time and make sure that we're shipping something that's excellent here or at least useful.

14:55Maybe we shouldn't hold the bar at excellent, but we should at least hold the bar at useful. And I think we're on track to deliver that and excited to share more in the future about it. Are there any aspects of design that you think are going to be most impacted holistically by AI? Is it more about changing the role of a designer? Is it changing the skill sets? Is it experience set? Because you look at, for example, something like MidJourney, and it's mainly sort of an image generation tool, but it's used pretty broadly in terms of different aspects of images used for all sorts of purposes. And in some cases, professional use cases, in some cases, individual.

15:34But the main thing it's done is it allowed a large class of people to suddenly become creators. And in the context of Figma, you have the sort of UI generation. There's the brand assets. There's actually writing the code. there's so many different things that could occur. I'm just sort of curious about which aspects you're most excited about or how you're thinking about things holistically. Yeah, I think that there's a ton you can do in terms of lowering the floor and making it so that more people can start to do design work. And if we can make that happen, I think it'll be really important for the industry and allow more people to be part of that conversation.

16:06But I also think there's more you can do in terms of making it so that designers can be more efficient. There's so many repetitive tasks that you do as a designer. and if you can make it so that you don't have to do as many of those and you have a great way to interface the tool via AI, that could be very powerful. And yeah, of course, we're thinking about, again, all those transition states between idea to design, design to code. And I think there's a lot more you could do there too, whether it's on the platform made by us or through partnerships. One thing that's underexplored when it comes to AI is how much are agents going to be crossing boundaries and in different data areas i think that you know we're all kind of just trying to figure that out right now but it's still very early are there any aspects of an ai and design that have surprised you i'll give you an example something i thought that was kind of neat was like the first time i saw crea and as you're typing things that literally will uh change the generation of the the image right it's sort of real-time adaptation to a prompt or other uh inputs all right is there anything that you've seen and you're just like whoa that's really cool it may not be quite ready for primetime, but it's kind of a glimpse of the future.

17:13When you see tools that leverage direct manipulation like that, it's something that you can viscerally touch, change something around, change a prompt, and get a response back. And I think that's very powerful and creates a great loop with the user. I think that there's some things that are coming out in a 3D space, for example, that are letting designs be defined more parametrically, which I think are sort of similar. Like if you could generate a 3D design and have some of the variables that define that design be parametric and then be able to use a slider, for example, to change that input and thus change the actual generated form.

17:57That's another example of something that's direct manipulation, AI generated, and I think is really cool. But I think it is that loop between the human and the agent or AI or whatever you want to call it, the model, that ends up really mattering. The faster you can make that loop happen, the better. And I think there's so much more to explore there in terms of different interfaces to let people just kind of wade their way through latent space. like I mean there's no way that having to remember all these different sort of like magical phrases uh to summon the right image via diffusion model is the end state right and yeah maybe there's something where you draw some shapes and you add a prompt but like that still seems so primitive compared to where we're going to get to uh and I just think it's like if you think about any vector, for example, what if you could say, okay, there's a sort of a vector on one side, it's optimistic and the other side is pessimistic.

19:01And somehow you can define what that means that a traversal space for an image, and you can nudge something more towards optimism or pessimism or, you know, pick your polarities. You know, that's another example of like, what can you do if you can start to nudge images in a certain way or outputs in a certain way? That's really cool. Yeah. Basically, you're moving from a human-to-human collaboration company to a human-to-AI collaboration company over time in some sense, because what you're describing seems like a really interesting way to have co-pilots augment humanity or augment creativity. Are there other ways that you've thought about the substantiation of that sort of creativity augmentation or how AI really interacts with human creative potential?

19:46all. Well, and these are just examples of things that I have seen or thought about that I think could be cool in the creative space because you asked about, but I think in the design context, one thing that really matters a lot is the iterative loop and being able to keep going back and forth to an agent and give more instructions over time. If you just kind of like go to first principles here, there's so much that you're not able to communicate via a prompt. Like if you think about great design, it often captures something about the culture, the ethos of the moment. It captures something about the temporal aspect of the sequence of interaction someone's having or the context they will have mentally.

20:31Something about affordances, what people are used to in terms of the language of design, which is sometimes similar and dependent on the platform. But oftentimes there's something about emotional state too. uh there's you know videos that the designers probably watched or or in-person research interviews they've conducted and so i think like fitting all that plus the product requirements um plus visual style into a prompt that's hard even if you could just get unblocked by an ai helping you brainstorm and thinking through problems you know that's your first sort of draft and from there you can keep iterating from there you can keep evolving things i think that could be very, very interesting as a, as a first step.

21:14What's your response to people who worry that, um, AI like in every role are going to, you know, eliminate the need for designers. For all the reasons that is mentioned around, you know, emotions, uh, user context, uh, knowing how flows go, um, having that history of interactions and whatnot. I think it's unlikely that that's like the world we're seeing in the short term. I think no one knows what's happening in the long term. You know, if we have, you know, superhuman intelligence, like I don't know what it means for any of us on this call podcast or anyone listening. If we don't try to ask about what that case looks like and instead ask about, okay, if we assume that there's continued improvement, what does it mean for design?

22:05I think design's actually in a really good place. probably before you see potential replacement of any part of the design role, you instead see augmentation and you see access. You see efficiency so that designers can get more done. And I think probably a lot of engineers put more of their time towards design than they put towards what we consider coding tasks today. And the abstraction level of coding changes. There's probably still a human loop for engineering, but I think that it's not clear to me that humans are going to write like every line of code in a year, three years, five years. Obviously already we have co-pilot, but I think that you could go even further than that.

22:45And a lot of companies are trying to do that. I mean, I can't make multi-year bets in the current environment, but my expectation would be that we, maybe it's because I'm an optimist, but I think we're just going to get better and more software and better designed software versus fewer designers or engineers. Yeah, I definitely think that as a metric, like number of pieces of software that will be created will go up tremendously. And it's interesting, like there's some visions out there of the future where people interpret the capabilities of AI to mean that you won't have any interface at all.

23:25I think it's really cool to see this explore, like the rabbit we've talked about, Sarah. I haven't used it yet. I think you did. Is that right? But I think it's a really cool vision. And I think that there will be so much more software in a year, two years or five years from now than there is today. Like both could be true that there's demand for that and there's just way more software. So I guess one of the repetitive tasks that designers often complain about is interacting with product managers. So I don't know if you've considered automating that away or, you know, creating a bot for each designer to respond to PM pings or things like that.

24:00But I'm just throwing it out there as an idea. You can use it if you want. Okay. I'll take it back to the team. You know, it's so funny. We had at the last config, Chesky from Airbnb, you know, he was talking, I think, really about sort of their unique structure and set up at Airbnb and how they have more of a program management function, kind of like Apple. but he kind of had this throwaway line of like, we don't have product managers. If you look at the capability of product managers, I don't think is even true. But in any case, you know, it kind of got misinterpreted and all the designers were like, yeah, no product managers.

24:38There was real attachment to that claim. Yeah, that's usually the reaction. I actually worked as a PM for much of my career. And so before becoming a startup CEO, so I definitely mean it tongue in cheek. Well, you know, it's funny because product is such a hard role to define. And I think that's why you get these jokes. But the reality is if you have people who are deeply in tune with user needs, who are really strategic and are able to understand technical requirements, but also dive into the design details, that's a very powerful role to have on the team. And I mean, I'm so lucky. We have an amazing chief product officer at Figma, Yuki.

25:18And he's just incredibly design-oriented and an amazing thought partner on all the things. I mean, I talked to him so much. I'll try to stop slacking you late at night, Yuki, but anyway. You should make Yuki GPT. You can just create an embedding and just start chatting with them. Speaking of chat, how do you think about the shift in UI in general that's going to come with AI? A lot of things are kind of collapsing in the short run into chat interfaces. There's a lot of people talking about a future agentic world, which does away with most UI altogether, and it's just all programmatic stuff happening in the background.

25:53How do you think about where UI is going in general right now? I mean, I kind of think this kind of comes back to the rabbit point I was making earlier. Yes, there's a lot of innovation happening in terms of agents. But I think like in terms of the way that we use UI to interact with agents, we're just the beginning. And I think that the interfaces will get more sophisticated. but also even if they don't, I suspect that it's just like any new media type when it's introduced, it's not like the old media types go away, right? Just because you have TikTok doesn't mean that you no longer watch YouTube.

26:31Even if it's true that a new form of interaction is via chat interfaces, which I'm not even sure I believe, but even if we take that as a prior on the No Priors podcast, then I think that you still have UI. And actually, I think you have more UI and more software than before. Do you have any predictions in terms of multimodality? Like, do you think there's more need for voice? Like, so, you know, a lot of the debates people have is like, when are you going to use voice versus text versus other types of interfaces? And, you know, you could imagine arguments in all sorts of directions in terms of, you know, when do you use what and things like that.

27:10And a lot of people are, not a lot, some people are suggesting because of the rise of multimodal models, you'll have like more voice input or more things like that because you'll be able to do real time sort of smart contextual semantic understanding of like a conversation. And so you have more of a verbal conversational UI versus a text-based UI. And so it kind of changes how you think about design. So I was just curious if you have any thoughts on that sort of future looking stuff. There's all sorts of contexts where a voice UI is really important. And I think that it might be that we find that voice UIs start to map to more traditional UIs because it's something that you could obviously do in a more generalized way.

27:56But yeah, I mean, personally, I don't want to navigate the information spaces that I interact with every day, all day via voice. I also don't want to do it in minority report style on the vision pro exactly either uh maybe with a keyboard and mouse and like an amazing vision pro monitor setup or oculus like that could be cool but I don't want to do the minority report thing and so it's it's interesting so I think that we get these new glimpses at interaction patterns that are really cool and the natural inclination is to extrapolate and say they're going to be useful for everything And I think that they have like sort of their role and it doesn't mean that they're going to be ubiquitous across every interaction we have.