Companies are a sequencing of loops. While it’s possible to stumble into an initial core loop that works, the companies that are successful in the long term are the ones that can repeatedly find the next loop. However, this evolution is poorly understood relative to its existential impact on a company’s trajectory. Figma is a prime example of sequencing loops. They’re now widely viewed as successful, but the key factors in their success and what bets they must make to get to the next level are less widely understood.
bet you didn’t know I could make gifs
The core insight of Figma is that design is larger than just designers. Design is all of the conversations between designers and PMs about what to build. It is the mocks and prototypes and the feedback on them. It is the handoff of specs and assets to engineers and how easy it is for them to implement them. Building for this entire process doesn’t take away the importance of designers—it gives them a seat at the table for the core decisions a company makes.
Building for everyone in the design process and not just designers is also the foundation of Figma’s core loop, which drives their growth and compounding scale. That network effect is made possible by Figma’s key early choices like:
Figma’s compounding growth is not only due to product market fit, but is also driven by the alignment between their product and distribution. There are limits to Figma’s success if it remains only valued and spread within companies. In order to break through that asymptote, Figma must build a global network effect across the ecosystem. Figma’s value to new users should compound as Figma’s adoption grows, even for solo users outside of organizations. Figma has begun making its bets on how it will become a platform—namely centered around communities and plugins. While it’s still early, these bets can be unpacked and understood.
Many companies are now at this inflection point. They have found success with their core product and are trying to push themselves to the next level of value to customers and scale. Our understanding of building platforms and sequencing towards them is still nascent. From how to shift the allocation of resources between a company’s core business and its potential future expansions to how to structure a platform to catalyze its growth and more. Until the playbook is well understood, it is more art than science. There are many decisions to make, including which layers should be centralized, whether the ecosystem should be driven by open source contributors or profit-seeking enterprises, how broad in scope to allow the ecosystem to grow and where to not let it grow, and more.
Whether they can catalyze compounding productivity in design is a core question for the coming years. Engineering is one field that has exhibited significant compounding progress over time. Whether Figma’s bets in building out global network effects will be able to push this level of progress in design will be an important question to watch.
When Figma first launched, its value proposition was primarily around making design collaborative. If design could happen in the browser, then designers could work together on the same projects. In fact, they could even work on a design at the same time.
In 2014 as I helped diligence Figma (disclaimer: I worked on Greylock’s investment in Figma, but I don’t have a personal stake in Figma. sadly.), I used to sit with designers at startups and watch them work. The top right corner of their screens were always a nonstop cycle of Dropbox notifications. Because design teams saved all their files in a shared folder like Dropbox, every time a coworker made a revision they would get a notification. And often there were complex naming conventions to make sure that people were using the right versions.
Figma solved this problem. Designs in Figma are not just stored in the cloud; they are edited in the cloud, too. This means that Figma users are always working on the same design. With Dropbox, this isn’t true. The files may be stored in the cloud, but the editing happens locally—imagine the difference between sharing Word files in Dropbox vs. editing in Google Docs.
Any time a user edits a design, they are in effect checking out a temporary copy. This is why two users editing a file simultaneously creates issues. When designs are edited with Figma, there are no conflicts. And since revisions are a first party feature of each design in Figma, there’s no need to have complex files with names like “profile_design_v23_final_draft2”. Similarly, designers can comment directly in each other’s files, instead of sending emails with feedback.
the one with less loops is better. I know, it’s the first time I’ve ever said that
I used to be confused by the Figma’s team consistent framing of Figma as browser-first. What was the distinction between this and cloud-first? Over time I’ve come to see how important this distinction has been. When many creative tools companies talk about the cloud, they seem to view it as an amorphous place that they store files. But the fundamental user experience of creating in their products is done via a standalone app on the desktop. Figma is browser-first, which was made possible (and more importantly performant) by their understanding and usage of new technologies like WebGL, Operational Transforms, and CRDTs.
From a user’s perspective, there are no files and no syncing that needs to be done with others editing a design. The actual experience of designing in Figma is native to the internet. Even today, competitors often talk about cloud, but are torn over how much of the experience to port over to the internet. Hint: “all of it” is the correct answer that they all eventually will converge on.
Designers loved Figma and this drew initial distribution. And with features like team libraries, designers have incentive to pull in other designers on their team into Figma. But a tool designers love, while a prerequisite for success, does not fully capture the root of Figma’s traction so far. While Figma has been building the ideal tool for designers, they’ve actually built something more important: a way for non-designers to be involved in the design process.