Loading summary
Transcript57 lines
- [00:00]
A
She said, you can't blame the computer if the music has no soul. If the music has no soul, it's because nobody put it there. That is the case with AI as well. AI is a tool, but your responsibility is to bring the heart to it. How will AI change what people are able to imagine? And how do we evolve FIGMA in that direction? The idea, like putting the soul in the music, putting yourself into your design, is the message that I give everyone right now.
- [00:26]
B
Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid, and this is where designers never stop learning. This week's episode is with Lordana Creshon, who's the chief Design Officer at figma. And we're going to do a deep dive into everything that launched at config 2026 and what it all means for designers. Honestly, it paints a really exciting picture about the role that AI plays in the future of our craft. But before we get into all of the details, I wanted to dig in to Lordana's unique background and the ways that it's influenced how she thinks about and taste.
- [01:05]
A
I'm Romanian. I grew up there, and my parents were both engineers, like material engineers, pretty nerdy folks. When I was six, my mother asked me if I wanted to play piano. I said yes. And then I did not stand up from the. In front of the piano for something like 20 years. This was mostly classical piano. But around kind of my teenage years, I rebelled against classical music by starting to prototype and my study prototype at that point, like, record and experiment with house, techno, rock, and music production in general. So my first job ever was to be a sound engineer at the recording studio. I did that for quite a bit of time. And honestly, what music teaches you that translates across honestly, any medium is what it feels like to be a master of your craft, how much time you need to put in to develop that embodied intuition. We talk a lot about expertise right now, about judgment, about taste, but people don't realize how much of that is just what you sense, like, in your body. It's not your brain, it's how you see. It's what your eyes actually lock into. And so that was the same for me with music. My. My ear learned how to hear sounds in a certain way. My fingers learned how to express a sound that was only in my head. And, like, creating that system for yourself, where you feel in complete control of your tool, is what really brings out your heart, your soul into, like, what you're producing. This is why I love tools in general. Like, my first tool was a keyboard. It evolved to something a lot more complicated, like an SSLJ console with like many, many faders and buttons and stuff and gear that was in a different room that you had to, like, make sure that you get sound through. And then, very interestingly, I was in San Francisco at that time and a lot of the customers that were coming in, the clients of the studio were working at startups. They would talk about startups and technology, and the Silicon Valley bug sort of creeped in. And at some point I had to decide whether I would go to LA and like, really focus on my music career as a music producer, you know, forever, or do this crazier thing, which is join a startup and see where else it could lead me. And so my first role at a San Francisco startup was to help them prototype audio interfaces for an assistant like, experience. The technology wasn't there at the time, but that allowed me to design in my medium and sound. It was something that was very new and very comfortable at the same time. I've repeated this story many times throughout my career and like, I generally when somebody asks me for career advice around expansive thinking and like, taking on more, it's always about, like, have some something that you're really good at and then pick up the adjacent area that could help you craft something that's even more meaningful. So I remember being at that startup and we did a user research study with an external vendor and that person asked who designed this experience? And we all kind of looked at each other because it was a little bit unclear. And then I realized that I designed it and design was not in my vocabulary at that point. It wasn't even a job that I was fully aware of. I was just making something. And what's really cool about it is that we're still all making something. We're talking a lot about, like what design is, how roles are blurring, et cetera. Just make something real quick message and
- [04:40]
B
then we can jump back into it. If you still haven't tried Paper, even though it kind of feels like everybody on this podcast is talking about it lately, they just made it way easier to get started. Because you can now copy and paste from Figma directly into Paper's canvas. All of the layers and their properties, including images and SVGs, are imported in an instant. It's pretty big deal. And you can try it out today. Just head to Dive Club Slash Paper to get started. Framer 3.0 just launched and it is exactly how I want to build pro websites. You can get the power of working with AI agents, but directly In a canvas that is tailor made for shipping production sites. For example, I have like 5 different CMS for dive, which isn't exactly my favorite thing to deal with. But now I can have the framer agent do all everything related to CMS management directly inside of framer. And of course you get SEO, staging links, localization and everything else that you'd expect. But honestly, at the end of the day, the thing that I love most is just being able to explore design and build with agents all inside of framer. And if you head to dive club slash framer, you can get 30% off framer pro to start building today. Now onto the episode. I think a lot about what the little interests and skills that I could add to my own repertoire to make something that is truly me, makes people feel something. And for me, actually the thing that almost is like my little mini frontier that I want to explore next is sound design. So my secret hope is that your DNA spills over to the rest of the org and that when we have the config 2027 release, we're talking about your sound design panel that you get added to the file.
- [06:24]
A
So I would love that so much.
- [06:25]
B
I want to talk a little bit about taste because I appreciate some of the parallels that you're drawing. And in order to get at more of what you believe, I'm going to temporarily put on my design Twitter skeptic hat a little bit that sometimes I wear in these episodes. And the first is that, well, okay, if we look at your background as somebody, I mean you 20 years of reps playing piano is. Is crazy. Like I took probably 10 or 11 years of piano and just, it's an unimaginable amount of practice and scales and drills and everything. And with AI, it's almost like we're compressing the speed at which we can get those reps by an order of magnitude or more. And so one sentiment might be, well, taste is actually not defensible because everybody's getting these reps so quickly that your experience matters less.
- [07:20]
A
Really good performance expertise requires time. Nobody, even somebody with incredible aptitude or biological aptitude towards a task still needs to put in the work to get to the mba. To be a brilliant pianist, to be an incredible designer, and taste is a shorthand for this person has it and they're miraculous. They somehow were born with it. It's very, very much not true. And the question becomes to me is like, how do you get to it if it requires a lot of time, invest it. And oftentimes it's just the love of what you do. Are you drawn to it every single day? Is it. When you have a free hour, what do you do with it? Do you scroll some, like, social network, or do you try to learn something else about your craft? Do you love making more than you love, like, sitting and watching something? And so for me, taste equals care from that perspective and the experiences that we recognize as tasteful, things that we recognize as good, they actually are experiences that are just very, very intentional. I sometimes compare design to throwing a party. And if you think about, like, the best party that you've ever showed up for, that person, whoever threw it thought about everything. You came into the door and there was a place to put your coat. The music was just the right volume. The flow of the house was, like, perfectly prepared. The food. Consider there are many people, and, like, they have, like, different restrictions. All of that stuff is care. It's taking the time to anticipate, to simulate, to consider how other people might feel, to put yourself in other people's shoes. And yes, like we say it's taste at the end, but it's just hard work.
- [09:07]
B
Okay, I'm gonna keep pushing onto this a little bit because I love the party metaphor. The where I think potentially it might start eroding in the long run is there's no equivalent to copying and pasting a party, right? Like, it's always going to require a level of manual effort. But this world that we're kind of sprinting at from all angles is you can make something that's absolutely beautiful, it's rooted in your personal passion and experience, and then somebody can just replicate it. And it's harder to stay unique when you have these trend cycles collapsing because of what our tools are making possible. How do you reconcile that with your thoughts around, like, the value of taste in the long run?
- [09:49]
A
I actually think that what happens when everyone has the power to build is. Is actually it elevates the need to stand out. You know, another metaphor that I often think about, because I believe in this responsibility of the designer to create something that bakes in their point of view and makes something that feels authentic to people. You could buy those pretty funny or, you know, soulful congratulatory cards, birthday cards, whatever cards, and they have the message written inside, and it's a great message. Do you just give somebody that card? You could, but that's. That's not what you do. If you're a good friend, that's not how you show up. And so I think that the more software is getting created, the more articles are being written. Basically we're in a place where everything is getting produced at such high, high rate. And we, we already had trouble consuming what was already there. And so what we're going to try to do is like look for even more authenticity. I don't know if you, if you've come across this, but when people realize that something is developed by AI, only AI. So again, AI is a tool in the process to help you create what's in your head. Very much a fan of AI is the output very much kind of down on. So when people realize that what's being put in front of them is inauthentic and it's just created by AI, they disengage. Research says this very, very clearly. So this is why I think it's not, it's not taste, it's like just your point of view, your human intuition. Like what you want for that experience needs to come through. And then the tools that we build are very much important to help you drive that.
- [11:25]
B
I love that. And it even ties back to what you were starting with, with the music analogies. Because it's like there was this moment in time with the synth, right, where people just wrote it off. It's like you can't make that with your hands, therefore it is not art. And yet it allowed people to express a sound or an idea that maybe was in their head that was previously otherwise not possible. Like when AI is used that way, it's beautiful, then it's an instrument.
- [11:50]
A
There is a beautiful quote by Bjork on, on this, because you're right. The world of music was like, absolutely not. These are not real. Sounds like don't care about them. She was saying something that really stuck with me where she said, you can't blame the computer if the music has no soul. If the music has no soul, it's because nobody put it there. That is the case with AI as well. AI is a tool, but your responsibility is to bring the heart to it.
- [12:17]
B
Okay, let's talk a little bit about how you guys brought the heart into what you shipped with config.
- [12:22]
A
I believe that technology changes the world mostly by changing what we're able to imagine. So if you think about patterns in time, like, you know, writing was initially created to help capture who owed money to whom. But in reality, where we took it, as with our human imagination was all the way to Shakespeare, or if you consider photography, it was invented to capture reality. And now think about whatever crazy output comes out of nanobanano Pro because we've decided that the world that is already here is interesting, but the one that we imagine is even more so. The question for us with Figma at this moment was, how will AI change what people are able to imagine? And how do we evolve Figma in that direction? So it's really, really important for us to give people the tools to dream and expand what they're able to do. And so the set of releases that we landed on are very AI forward in one regard, but also very, very much expressive on the other. And so this is why it probably feels like they spammed the gamut. But in reality, you have a design agent that is increasingly able to hand off control to you. You have the ability to use code as a creative medium. Now that is an expansion that allows designers to express themselves using more interactivity data as behavior, and ship their vision all the way to production. That was always the dream. We could now do it. And you have more expression with motion as an example, something that helps your product stand out in a world that is increasingly uniformitized by just like, what the models can produce.
- [14:10]
B
I want to zoom in on the word control, because that's something that I've been thinking a lot about, and I think it is the answer to another chunk of audience and design community that views AI as almost the giving up of control in many ways, because they're used to every single thing being directly manipulatable in a canvas, and anything else feels the opposite of that. And what I really appreciate about this set of releases is this idea of, okay, I can kind of build my own tools, I can achieve the outcome that is in my head and actually give myself the parameters to do so. So I'm wondering if maybe you can unpack a little bit around, like, okay, given that technology, what are not only some of the things that you are now capable of imagining in terms of what's possible, but what are the behaviors that you're even seeing internally at figma in terms of how you're making the most of this increased level of control and creativity?
- [15:03]
A
Basically, I think the premise for, for some of our releases, as an example, the shader effects that you could prompt yourself and the tools. The premise is that AI could get you to 70%, and this is true with motion. You could prompt your frame and then you will get the first animation set up, but then from there you need to make it yours. So it's almost like AI sets up the workspace, it gives you the parameters, but then you are the one that makes that thing and so it was really important to me to move away from AI gives me something and then I try to describe how it should be different. That part is actually very slow. I talk about, you know, dictating a painting over the phone. It's very, very hard. Like I have an organic shape that I, you know, have in my head and I could easily manipulate it myself to like, get to what I want. It's almost impossible to describe if there is a color that I want to put in my design. A color wheel will never be replaced by a prop to, you know, so there are moments where you just want to take, take control yourself. So what we're doing with shader effects as an example, we're allowing you to prompt the effect that you want, be very clear with what parameters you might want. AI will surprise you by giving you extra, but you're back and forth, just developing kind of the tool and the layer at the same time. And once you have it, then you could actually tweak all of the variables in it. So if it's motion, you could decide the speed of it or the responsiveness. If it's a gradient, for example, that creates that shader, you can tweak all of its values. And it's an interesting way of working because increasingly as design designers, I believe were creating systems, not just screens. This is very true with Weave as well, and probably we'll get to it. But at that point, that layer has the tool that created it and you're able to share it and tweak it with all of the people on the team. And this is one of the really important parts of design as well. Design is never done alone. Design is evolved through critique. It's a place where one of the tools of design is other people. And so it's really fun to be able to have AI, have agents, have the direct manipulation and direct control and your team in one space.
- [17:20]
B
You said an interesting phrase, creating systems, not screens. I'm wondering if we can double click on that. And I'm actually curious, like, given that shift, how does that change what signals you would look for in new designers that you want to hire?
- [17:36]
A
Okay, so the first part, systems, not screens. I'll give you an example with Weave. Weave is a design product that we acquired last year. And what it allows you to do is on an infinite canvas, use a note based interface to string together inputs from you prompts to the model, Any visual model, whether it's like video or image, and several variables to create something that really feels as unique as you are. You could take a texture from one image and the object from another and database of specifics that you'd want to implement those to and you create a system at that point and what the output for that is, is actually a mini app. We're actually bringing these into Figma as well at config. And so these mini apps will allow you or anyone to just add the inputs that would generate the output. But underneath of it, all of the special sauce is in the workflow. And so that is a system. No matter what the input is, the output will consider and match from a brand perspective, from an intention perspective, what you've designed in like, in the guts of the, of the workflow and even
- [18:45]
B
thinking about it from the standpoint of like somebody was leading the design of prompting tools and plugins that give you custom parameters kind of thing. Yeah, like you're thinking about the components maybe that you're making available to the model. But like that's a really loose grip on what the final output it is. And so can we just go a little bit deeper in terms of what does it look like to thrive as a designer when that's the thing that you are responsible for? It's not this finite list of screens and flows.
- [19:17]
A
Yes. You have to zoom to the level of. We actually talk about the Soul MD concept at Figma a lot. And that is just like, can you understand the intent, the idea behind what's being created such that you could enable not just more people on your team, but agents to actually build with that intent as well. And the reality, you asked me what types of designers we're looking for. On the one hand, we want the people that really are exploring the tools right now and they're not afraid to truly understand what's out there. But I wouldn't say I'm AI pilled and I will look for nothing but how AI can do this for me. But actually the people that are able to find those intersections, because in reality any tool is nuanced once if back to painting, you know, like if you're a 5 year old and I give you some watercolors, you're gonna get 10 colors and like three paintbrushes and that is all you need, that's all you could do. But if you're a painter, your set of tools will be very, very different. And nobody could tell you that this big brush is so good, like you could use it for anything you want. In reality you have to have range. So we look at people that have range, but they're willing to expand it because right now a lot more tools are coming into our arsenal and we need to be curious and like, understand how we use them outside of tools. I think it's this system thinking and this idea, like, can I distill what's important here? Is there a way to extract this so that it becomes replicable? And like that is in the interest of making AI a precision tool. Right now, it's very much not. So if you ask AI the same question or give it the same task, we'll implement it in very different ways, like each time you ask. And you can't wield a tool that does something very different each time you ask it to. Generally you'd want the hammer to behave the same and the same, but everything time you use it because you want to understand and like, learn how to wield it yourself. And all of these things that we're doing are in the, in the service of precision. And we need designers that understand that.
- [21:17]
B
I would assume there's probably a good amount of research that you all are obviously doing at all times, but probably leading up to some of these strategic bets. You're. You're trying to understand the shape and activities within different teams. And maybe to borrow your paintbrush analogy, when you're looking at these teams and talking to different orgs and trying to understand how things are changing and how people are working, what are the behaviors or, you know, what are the, the types of paintbrushes even that you're noticing in these teams that you're latching onto that kind of give you the ability to imagine, you know, where things are headed and what exactly you all should be building for.
- [21:57]
A
Yeah, there's so much, I would say, that everyone is, is experimenting. We get so many questions about, like, figma, what is the workflow that we should anchor on? Like, how should this evolve? And you have various organizations that are at various levels of adopting the new technologies and like, really settling on, on new workflows. A lot of what we're hearing is on the one hand, excitement about what's possible now and then. That is almost always paired with the but xyz and like the XYZ ends up being like, what everyone can build. It's really hard to decide or even review all of the things that are coming in. Review is a bottleneck across design, across development right now. And it's quite interesting because as humans, we actually love making and we don't love reviewing quite as much. But we're now in a place where we have to become expert reviewers and probably figure out how to automate those reviews as well. But this is where I use Figma a lot as a programmatic canvas, as an example, like where I visualize different things in order to bring people in and that collaboration to speed up reviews. We could go into some of those workflows in a bit. So that's one of the things that we're hearing. The second thing that we're hearing is from designers. Sometimes they'll say, I feel like I have the mandate to transform to like, you know, use AI for, for everything. And sometimes I don't feel like my leadership fully understands that AI is not always the solution for everything that they want. Even though I love AI and like, you know, it's like it's part of my toolset, I want to expand and like, be able to. To use everything that I want. So everyone's very excited when we tell them that AI is coming into figma because it removes that, you know, idea that I could. I have to be in this tool and like, do certain things A. So that's another part of that nuance of how you use these systems together is starting to appear. Synthesis and data is really, really interesting. The ability to unify what's being said in Slack with your asana tasks, with your design workflows, with what you ship to prod. That level of thinking really opens up the aperture for designers in particular. Like, bring in hey, Marvin as an example and understand how your user just use your system and what they're, you know, maybe want differently from you. That's one area that people are excited to explore. If I was going to peel back a little bit, the things that are really, really important is can you enable more synthesis, better data sources, just like a lot more context to flow into your system. The second thing is how much power do you have to mold things in the way that you want to and like, with speed, but also precision. And then what do we do with all of this? Like, how do we build together when everyone's kind of like on their own with, you know, building in, in a certain direction, often alone? Like, how do we pull all of this material to make something that feels considered and like, moves us forward, not. Not just create more.
- [25:05]
B
That's kind of where I'm excited to see your continued take is. It does feel like, okay, I've been given superpowers with AI, specifically in like the code piece, but I can kind of make. I feel like I can make anything, you know, but everything happens locally in a silo on my machine and it's A very big departure as a designer from previously where I felt like I could just hop in to anybody's file. So I'm interested to see, like, in what ways these recent releases lay the foundation for enhanced collaboration and the feeling like, okay, I'm working together with people and not just co op all day.
- [25:40]
A
And we really believe that, you know, code is a medium and you should be able to, like, be in code and explore. And, like, data is really important as well, and your team should be there. So we want to make all of the coding workflows really visual. We want to give you all of the design tools that you need in the moment, and we want to bring your team on the canvas as well. If you think about it, the computer started with Ms. DOS as well. We did not stop there, and we didn't stop there for a good reason, because as people, we're visual, we want to touch, we want to manipulate, and these systems are not as easy to bring into alignment, but it's possible and we're very much on our way.
- [26:17]
B
Can we talk about the review bottleneck piece? I'm sure a lot of people listening are experiencing that right now. How are you all thinking about solving that, right? Even just in the way that you all, like, work internally, how do you approach this problem that I think a lot of us are facing?
- [26:33]
A
This probably happens in every company right now, but you go in and build something in code and you have a great idea, and the way to get it out is often record this Loom video. There are a lot of Loom videos, and I would love to watch all of them, but then they're. They take some time. So the question becomes, what's a better way to actually not lose any of these ideas? Because the ideas are awesome, and ideas are really awesome when somebody builds on them and you start, like, seeing the system and you bring them together and then ship something that's like, absolutely incredible. And so visualizing them on the canvas where everyone is, is really step one. And so what we're able to do with code layers on the canvas is bring your prototype type onto the canvas and then from there you actually could simply tell your agent to visualize all of the states of the app. You could ask it to visualize the flow of the app. If you wanted to also see the diagram of it, you could run a skill that maybe looks at it through the point of view of a new user. There are so many tools that you could bring into that review process that take you out of. I just must consume the seven Minute loom and decide what feedback I might give for the next step. But have a surface where you pull it apart, you visualize it with other people, you give comments on the specific screen that like, actually needs a buildup on the idea. And you make the review process not only a lot more fun because now it's joined, but you make the next steps very, very clear and you clear the backlog in that way.
- [28:08]
B
Yeah, I've seen a lot of people building like custom tools to go from prototype to even just taking out the screens and bringing it back to the canvas. I don't know, I'm sure maybe you've accounted that in your own research too, where it's like, man, it felt like, surely, surely there's a better way to do that. Like, we felt like we had this choice between interactivity and the bird's eye view of something, and getting both of those for free kind of thing feels like inevitable. Of course it has to be that way.
- [28:37]
A
That's exactly what we're doing. And that's why we think an infinite canvas is the, is the answer as a thinking space, because you don't just want to look at one mode, you don't want to be in a linear flow and you want the opportunity for distance, continuous innovation. Right. As an example, we are building, we're often building Figma and Figma, but we're also building all sorts of apps that are not products that we want to release in the world, but where we put ourselves in the shoes of somebody developing a mobile app for finance, as an example. And so when you start looking at it, looking at code in the same way that you might look at a design screen, then your instinct is to, what if we could do it a different way? So you duplicate that code layer on the canvas and all of the sudden you put in like a different type of interactivity on the keyboard buttons of that calculator or whatever it is that you are building. And then somebody else comes in and says, well, actually if we tweak it in a different direction, it might feel even more playful. And now you have that same process. The medium has changed underneath and that's absolutely perfect. That's not a problem at all. But the type of thinking and the type of collaboration that you could get to is the one that feels familiar to us. And other.
- [29:49]
B
There's one question that I can't stop asking myself. What if companies applied to talk to you rather than the other way around? And that question is the foundation for the all new Dive Talent network? And it's working. Like right now I'm helping many of the most exciting startups that I know to hire the designers and builders who listen to this show. So if you're curious what might be out there and maybe you want to get on my list, master, maybe you're even looking for your next design hire. Head to dive club talent to join today. I remember being at Config, I guess it would have been two or probably three years ago where you released dev mode and in some ways it felt like, yeah, there are bridges between code and design, but it was also like the deepening of the trenches between roles a lot of times. And now everything that you're saying is like code is just, just a medium that is available to designers and everything's getting really blurry. And I guess I'm kind of wondering, like, do you have any thoughts on this sentiment that, you know, we're all just going to become builders and the lines drawn between designers and engineers in the long run just kind of fade away and everybody's working with code and who is what role anymore? Do you have any thoughts there?
- [31:02]
A
I do. I think it's happening. And what's really interesting is that everyone is elevating up the stack in some way. Design is having a, an identity crisis and a renaissance at the same.
- [31:13]
B
So well said.
- [31:14]
A
We'll release a study that we did where we asked about the importance of design and this is something that we've been doing for a while. And what's really interesting is that developers are the most likely ones to say that design is more important and that they are doing more design. So we are sometimes myopic from our identity as designers as we're like doing more coding about like how much more design is happening. Like developers are already like, you know, you work with a great developer, they have a design mind and like what's really important, important for them right now is like not only to check the code, I think it's important to check the code, but also participate in what we're building and why the roles are blurring. Expertise still very, very much matters. Of course, I would say that a designer should feel empowered to take their idea all the way to front end production and make sure that the interaction that they had in mind is not translated through a document back into the product if they're able to do that themselves. We ship PRs all the time. I ship PRs really quite interesting because you get into the who should stamp my prs question.
- [32:21]
B
Oh, that's funny. What kind of prs do you ship. Give me an example.
- [32:26]
A
Eval tools. I specialize in eval tools these days and that's where I work with a team that is in our eval loop. We could talk about evals more. I think it's really, really important for designers to embrace evals because that is how you create the system. That's your definition of good. And that bugs like, you know, simple things on our properties. So like if I see something misaligned or you know, there, there was an instance where a hover state actually was instantiated with the kind of new badge, but the new badge was hidden because there was nothing new there. So like it was just misaligned and it took very little time to actually fix that. But then I ran into who should stamp my PR and so I decided to ask the VP engineer responsible for, for that area to do it because it's only there. And yeah, it was, it was a
- [33:13]
B
pretty like one of the variables that is in my head when I think about the future and where this is all going and how fast it's changing is like what percentage of people in an org are actively in the code base? You know, does everybody have it on their machine? Are we all collaborating code? Is everybody shipping to production? Or are designers just working in the medium because it's more realistic and we have, you know, playground repos like crazy and everything's this like 80, 20, 90, 10. Like what are you all saying?
- [33:43]
A
Seeing both are important and we are doing both. Prototyping playgrounds can speed you up because you don't have some of the code based dependencies and you might just not run into as many issues just running the code and making sure that you could. And if your intent is not necessarily to ship, that you're still exploring, speed is really, really important at that point. When you want precision, you want to be in the code base. There's no point in trying to refine an interaction in your prototyping playground and then just go translate it over. So you need to know in what you are. It's just kind of like we tend to be reductionist and say you should only work this way. But in reality, anything from a sketch on your desk all the way to like production is a tool, a medium that you have need to have the nuance to know how to use.
- [34:30]
B
Okay, let's talk about evals. I'm not thinking about that near enough, apparently. So why is that a big deal for designers?
- [34:36]
A
Increasingly we're working with non deterministic systems, right? So a lot of what the experience Is is produced by an LLM. Previously it could be produced by an LL algorithm. I worked at Meta and can tell you we've had a lot of conversations about like the buttons that would exist on a feed story. Those buttons are important, but when you think about what people really experience when they open one of those products, it's the content. And so all of the conversations that we had about buttons as designers were far, far less important than the conversations that we should have had about the algorithm itself. Right. And when it comes to these non deterministic systems, how do you ensure that like they, they meet your quality bar? There's this thing called evals is on the one hand the least sexy thing in the world because you are now in a place where you're trying to specify what good looks like and have systems that could either recognize that themselves or you know, be augmented with, with humans that could do that. And it's fascinating to try to do this on an unverifiable domain like design, because design is not, you know, there's nothing a correct answer to design, but there are many incorrect answers. And so we certainly dive deep in there as we consider how all of our agents should build and design. And honestly, if we care about the experience, that's where we should spend our time.
- [36:00]
B
It feels like a lot of the new areas that we as designers are feeling, I'll say, pressure honestly to like grow in and explore are all pretty technical. And I'm just wondering, is that just the shift, like, is that just where this is heading? We're all going to become a little bit bit engineering where even brand is like I'm creating these semi technical workflows and you know, is that just where this is going?
- [36:24]
A
I think a lot of it is going in that direction, but also there will still be plenty of moments for craft and like for sweating the details in the way that you might want to. I welcome designers entering some of these technical areas because we have a bar for usability that I just can't wait to bring to all of the technical systems that maybe did not crave it quite as much. And this is one of the things that we're doing with code as an example. We want it to feel like a medium that that's under your control, not like a technical thing that you're just banging your head against the wall and like fighting. It's really important for good work to be in the flow. So what, what does it look like when the product that you're using, whether it's like technical, it's about evals and, you know, all of the other stuff, but it's actually a droid to use. I built a. A little eval game. We eval on the canvas, of course, where you could try to beat an auto judge at like, finding design issues. There are so many ways to like all of these things. Like, fun.
- [37:25]
B
Let's zoom all the way out for a second. So you've been at Figma, I think around 10 months, which is probably my assumption, like a really short time. But also 10 months is an eternity nowadays. And you're brought in externally, you have this long background at Meta, and my assumption is you're having conversations with existing leadership around what you want to instill in the team why me? Kind of thing. So maybe we could talk at that level for a little bit. Like, what are some of the core ideas around how design orgs can and should operate that you're hoping to see more of at figma?
- [37:59]
A
Honestly, we have incredible talent at figma and I think as a leader there, a lot of what I want to spend my day on is figuring out how to pull all of that up and remove the barriers from them, truly building what's in their heads. So some of the things that AI is creating as challenges become entirely logistical this way. We're talking about the review cycles and how do you unclub that pipeline, et cetera. That's one thing. The second thing is you want to make these tools available, you want to inspire everyone, you want to make sure that collaboration happens. And then maybe from a Figma perspective. Perspective. The thing that I consistently say is find the intersections. I really, really believe in, you know, the magic that happens at the intersection of things that used to be disconnected, whether it's design and code, sound and visual, you know, PM and design. You've seen me like hover across all of those. And then within figma itself, figjam and slides, slides and design, you know, code layers and the canvas. There is so much more that you could do when these things are interoperable. And that requires, like, looking at teams, projects in different ways.
- [39:10]
B
So you have almost a decade at Meta now, almost a year at Figma. I would imagine there's certain things that you're noticing that just like a little bit different, right? Different shape of an org, different type of people. So what are some of the unique ways that the design Org operates that have stood out to you so far?
- [39:29]
A
The joy of building and how much we nerd out that fixed stigma over, like, the details, the interactions, like, you know, the joy of building a tool is. Is very, very apparent at figma, but not just across design. Like, all of the disciplines have it literally, you know, down to our, like, HR and sales departments. Like, all of us are makers. And that just, like, creates a culture of most heartwarming nerds, you know, like, coming to work together. That's the thing that stands out. Everyone is making something. It's constantly creating, constantly thinking about how the tools should evolve. Where at Meta, there was a lot of thought about, you know, the people on a global scale and, like, you know, what content is important and, like, you know, elements of culture that are truly key to developing the next set of products. So the apertures are a bit different.
- [40:20]
B
You talked about how designers are having to think a little bit more holistically. Like, product strategy is kind of something that everybody holds onto, and maybe we could pull on that strand a little bit, because you guys are in an interesting place where you have a heck of a foundation, and yet you're adding so many different types of features, some of them coming from acquisitions. I think there's probably multiple different ways that you could have sliced up the. What lives where and what's the relationship between all these tools and how interconnected are they and how does that fit into, like, the broader platform strategies put us into the room on some of the core product structures strategy debates that were leading up to config. What were some of the things that you guys were really wrestling with?
- [41:04]
A
A number of things, like some very small that you'd expect us to talk about and some that are broader around, like, how the products exactly as you said, are coming together and like, what is the right way to build. As an example, with code layers on canvas, that is a big decision. It changes what the design canvas can do. With animation on canvas, you always have to think about how these things compose with each other. If you have an animation, would you be able to build it straight on the canvas as a result of us introducing the code layers on canvas? And yes, the answer is you need to be able to do all of these things. We're just removing the distance between all of these actions that were already happening, but in a very sequenced way before. Right. And so it used to be that you'd go to one place to decide what you wanted to do, and that resulted in an artifact, and then that artifact would become a brief for a design that happened in a tool, and the design would become an artifact that, again, would get translated. And each of these steps had a translation cost. And more importantly, you don't have the quick loop back to try a different idea. And so what we're looking at is how do you bring it all together? But that obviously creates a lot of strategic questions about what each product is, about how they should interoperate. We talk about that quite a bit and there's a lot more that you'll see from us in that direction. And then we have the small big decisions around, you know, like agents on canvas and like, how should they be represented? And like, you know, should they feel like people on your team or should they be, you know, more in the background, like working and not taking too much attention? Those are the sole questions that come up then where, you know, there's no right answer. And like, there's a lot of let's build something, see, see what it feels like. Let's pull back, let's build again. Like it takes a little bit of time to get to something that we feel even internally. Thankfully, we're both building Figma and figma, so we're always in the tool and we feel that it's, it represents like, right balance between bringing AI into the foreground as it builds with you and allowing you to really stay focused on the, on the task and the humans around you too.
- [43:15]
B
So let's imagine that I'm a design lead on one of these features that has a horizontal element to it because everything is kind of touching everything when you're putting a bunch of functionality inside of the canvas and there's this constant iteration, exploring and just making and building things. And what are the behaviors that you would hope to see as the design leader in terms of how I'm not only bringing people along for the ride, but like helping move the actual design and decision making forward given these compressed timelines.
- [43:52]
A
On the one hand, we used to say design is so important because it makes things tangible. Right. You could talk about something for a long time and like you have the risk of talking over each other because what you imagine in your head is very different than another person's like imagination. So picture is worth a thousand words exactly for that reason. And a prototype or like, you know, a PR in staging around a direction is, is worth even more words. And so a lot of time. I think the, what I love for designers to do is like, try to make things concrete, be very clear with like the, the trade off space that their job is to explore directions, to consider all of the possibilities as much as possible. This is actually, actually where AI is a great tool to actually understand what variation could be in place that you might not have considered. So elevate all of the tension points. That's one of the important things. So that we could have the most productive conversations about what matters and move the solution forward. So those are the. Understand the system really well, understand the trade offs, expose the trade offs, show ways in which we could work through those as an example and bring everyone on the same page. And with that, I think at least the direction part of it is taking care of. The second thing that I expect is, you know, just their point of view. Like what do they they think is the right thing to do or is their conviction. And thankfully we, we have that in in spades in Figma. That, as I said, Scienti is just like absolutely crushing points.
- [45:25]
B
Back to the value of systems thinking again for me, where again, because like everything's kind of touching everything else and so being able to see, see that full picture and then how that reflects in the set of micro decisions that you're making on a Tuesday, that's a whole skill just in that for designers.
- [45:41]
A
Absolutely. And if you think about it like, we live in an increasingly complex world and software has gotten incredibly complex itself. We're building global products that people experience in like many different incarnations. Some of them read left to right, some of them read right to left. That's not even like the most complex thing that we need to think about when we build software. So when you build building the tool that needs to express software for like the entire population, you really need to figure out how to read between the lines, like, figure out what dots connect and simplify things that allow you to take things forward. Because complexity is kind of the enemy of action. This is why design, like, is increasingly important here too.
- [46:24]
B
Before I let you go, I want to tap into your perspective as somebody who is pretty frequently hiring and thinking about the different types and shapes of designers. And so we've talked about how design gives you a lot out of the box bucks, right? So like, let's imagine that somebody who's listening is in a stack of portfolios and applications that are just full of 8 out of tens, 9 out of tens, you know, so what is something that you could see in either somebody's portfolio or how they're presenting themselves that would get you to the point where it's like, wow, that is a heck of a signal. Like they, I'm now paying attention and this is probably somebody that I'd want to onto the team.
- [47:03]
A
It's interesting because you can have like incredible design thinkers that maybe did not work on A domain that immediately applies to what you've done. And so oftentimes you actually have to pull yourself back from, oh, have they worked on a design tool specifically? Because we need somebody who understands like just the design tool space. In particular, I think that you're actually looking more for a way of thinking, again, like at the, at the system level, you look for their craft. And like, for me, craft and passion are so united that oftentimes I look for passion more than I look for anything else. Because that gives you a number of things. It gives you the drive to like, overcome something that maybe doesn't go, go your way. It gives you the taste back to, you know, where we started. Like, it gives you that way of seeing that that's unique to you, that people come to appreciate. It gives you the shared lens which with the rest of the team that is already like very much, you know, bought into, into the church of craft. From that perspective, I think the, the passion, like ends up carrying things. You certainly look for signals that they're experimenting, that they're expansive in their, their thinking. You look for signals that they're comfortable exploring technology. In the state that we're in right now, sound designers are quite interested in diving deep into the model space. We actually hire AI model designers whose job is a little bit different. It's less about figuring out the pixels and more about figuring out how to mold that medium. So it depends a little bit. Like there's some specializations that are coming about right now in design, where everyone is still a product designer, but might be focused on a different area as well.
- [48:44]
B
Everything that you're saying keeps coming back to what makes you unique as a human, both in terms of how you're using to the tools, what you're capable of imagining, why you're caring about something. I appreciate that as like a through line through this whole conversation.
- [48:59]
A
And isn't that beautiful though? Isn't that why we're here?
- [49:02]
B
I have a annoyingly hard question for you before we leave and we can ride off into the sunset on this, but if you had 24 hours where you could create a billboard that everybody in the design community would see, what would you put on that billboard and why? And I think given your position as somebody who's shaping the future of this industry as much as any anybody. I don't reach for this question often, but I'm going to reach for it with you and you can take your time to think about it.
- [49:29]
A
I think I'll be a version of like, put yourself in what you're making. The idea of, like, putting the soul in the. In the music, putting yourself into your design is the message that I'd give everyone right now. That's what the world needs.
- [49:43]
B
It's beautiful. Well, I think that's a fantastic place to end this conversation. And Madonna, I really appreciate you coming on today and sharing little bit about behind the scenes of what you all are working on, how you're thinking, what you're seeing in the industry, and also just reinforcing this human message at the heart of everything you're saying really goes a long way. And it's inspiring for me. I hope it's inspiring for others. So appreciate you.
- [50:04]
A
Thank you for having me, and thank you for running. This podcast is such an inspiration for all of us.