With a design system, make it so they can create edits, they can create new effects that are extremely interesting, and eventually get to a working application, not just something in Figma design that's a stopping point, but go all the way. Putting that out there gave us the insights we needed that led to Figma make, that led to us in the work that we're about to start shipping in Figma design and yeah it's been a big learning experience overall to figure out how to work effectively with AI systems but one that I'm really proud of the team for navigating. I think it also raises an interesting question about what the models actually include and when there is so much out there that is kind of like the OS style. I feel like I'm hearing lots of fears that as much as we all prize design and craft that a lot of the generations of AI tend to be generic. Do you worry about that for the future of software design?
I think that's our opportunity. When you're generating things and you're getting this average result, that's not what people want. I think that we're in a world where with AI, good enough is not enough. Good enough is now mediocre. So, if you really want to stand out, you have to be great. How can Figma help make you great? And what we're trying to do is allow you whether it's in make or in Figma design iterate, explore and really push the bounds of what's possible both with AI and also through the human touch and explore that entire option space of what's possible with design faster because that's to me the design process is you're looking and you're kind of seeing around corners and you're seeing here are all the paths I could go down. Well, can you identify the paths that are most promising faster? And can everybody from your team do that too? Can you make it so that more people can contribute ideas at the start and then as a designer you can guide the process and you can keep pushing further to make it so that what the end result is is very differentiated.
Do you feel like designers are still worried about losing their jobs though right now? It's interesting. I was at an event last night here in Hollywood and it was more Hollywood people but people on the production side and just there's so much fear in the room about the tools and what they're doing and enabling and I have to I mean I'm not a designer and I'm not in the world like you and Ellis but I have to imagine there's a lot of fear and consternation among a lot of Figma users that like my job's going to go away because of this stuff.
Yeah. I mean, I can't speak to the Hollywood side, but we actually did a survey around this recently and put out a report on it and it was I'm looking at the numbers right now. It was 17% of our respondents that said developments in tech tools and AI are a threat to my role. So, that was the actual number that we got from the survey. Now, you could argue is 17% high, is it low? But I certainly don't think it's like everyone's going, 'Oh my gosh, what's going to happen here?' And I think it's because designers kind of intuitively know this is an opportunity for us with AI. You know, Figma's point of view is it's going to lower the floor, make it so more people can get into the process, but also raise the ceiling and make it so that you're able to do even more with AI. And I think the more we can remove the drudgery of repetitive tasks, things that maybe are easy to conceptualize or describe but right now they're tedious to execute. That's something that AI can help with. For example, one feature we shipped super early on was rename layers. Very basic feature. It just you press a button and it looks at all your layers and it gives them a name. And you might go, 'Okay, well, what's the big deal?' Well, designers can take hours to rename the layers right now in a complex file. And if you're someone who likes to have the clean desk and be very structured, you might really care about your layers having all the perfect names. And so this is something that saved countless hours of time for designers already. Okay, now think forward into what else you could do that for and how else you can remove TDM and get people to the point where they're able to actually explore ideas further, explore more ideas. That's the promise to me.
Have you made anything good lately?
Huh? I've made some like internal tools for myself. I experiment a lot. You know, I try to do a bunch of very random experiments that are kind of like a little bit more artsy. Some of the things that I've seen others make that are far more impressive than what I've created myself. You know, I saw some really cool typography tools recently that just blew my mind as part of our Make Hackathon. I saw some people that made some pretty cool interactive experiences, games, and even things like complex synthesizers, poetry explorations. And not all these are products per se, but just the creativity of our community is kind of like always amazing to see. And sometimes they also went outside the field of software. You know there's some users that were exploring ways to understand biology better and DNA RNA sequences. So yeah, it's pretty exciting to me to see what you can do when you start to hook up these data workflows and make it so that you can really visually explore data in that way too.
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MCP is fascinating to me. For people who don't know, I think it's what? Model, context, protocol. Is that right? And you guys have this pretty hilarious video for your server that you put out this week that people should check out.
Dude, oh my god,
Awesome. It's good because it also explains it in a way that I think is more digestible because MCP is like a very heady thing to understand. Even if you're into tech, like you have to be in it to get it. At its highest level, I think of it as like how apps use LLMs to talk to each other and to share data between each other. And it's in the pre-netscape era. There's not even like a browser to see all these servers, right? But like you have one bunch of other companies that are embracing AI have them. And I'm curious because you know when we were prepping for this obviously a big concern with Figma's like what is competition and AI and all these companies that are popping up going to do to Figma and like prompting and all this stuff. And I'm curious actually to back into that question like the way you all are embracing MCP and working with other companies and really opening Figma up. What does that say about where you see Figma fitting in the value stack so to speak of like the AI world? Because there's this huge conversation obviously about like are you just an app? Are you a foundational model provider? Are you trying to do both? Where did the apps sit? And it seems like you have a POV on that and you're articulating it already with the MCP strategy. So I'd love for you to dive into that with us. Yeah, I mean without going too much into all the strategy and future road map I think that first of all the physics of the AI space are there's sort of a gravitational pull towards being more open and I think it's important to recognize that and to follow it. I also think that the goal is to get you from idea to product. And yes, we want to give you all the best tools that you could possibly have in the Figma platform, but if for whatever reason you want to go elsewhere, how do we make it so that you can bring your context from Figma to other applications? And also in the future, how do you come back? And how do we have a great loop? And again, I think that there's so much partnership we can do with the ecosystem here. And I think it's there's actually quite a lot of win-wins even with tools that people think are our competitors. And so it's been nice to have just very open and friendly conversations with many of the tools in the space in order to make it so that we're able to figure out what can that foundation be so that your users can have a better experience and also they can go iterate and get to the point where they are in a high craft place beyond what you might be able to do in another tool in Figma afterwards. And so, you know, lots to come, but MCP is a really core part of our strategy and what we're doing in the future.
So, theoretically, like Lovable, I think, is a good example of a company that I think people from the outside or Figma investors would go the rise of Lovable maybe suggests Figma has some competition to worry about. Are you suggesting that like maybe you would partner with Lovable and you could bring Figma assets into something like Lovable? Maybe we don't have to say lovable as a specific example, but the rise of these no code vibe coding tools like them like you actually see a way to partner with them. Is that what you're saying?
Exactly. Yeah. I think like we need to have a remote MCP that with the right conditions of course but if you've got a partner who is excited to work with you then you're able to open that up to them and that they are able to use it to create better experiences for their users and also I think that can be beneficial to us again it's like context is created in a lot of places and how do you take that context and then use it to help them in Figma. And I think that in Figma make you know it's I guess the bigger question is how much do we believe in Figma make and our belief in Figma make is very high. We think that what you can do on the Figma platform in a connected way and what we can offer users that are very is very differentiated in where we're headed. We're very excited about that and we're just very high conviction and so I think that also is a contributor to that whole strategy of being more open is that conviction.
I know a lot of companies get disrupted at the moment when they start expanding to different verticals and this and that. When you think about slides and buzz and make and all this other stuff, do you think of it as kind of serving the whole team in a way or serving some fundamental use case as you see it?
Yeah. So basically from the start what we've done when we introduce new products is we look at Figma design and go okay what is a use case that we are seeing in Figma design over and over again at scale but it's underserved and with that use case we could either dive into it and make Figma design much more complex or we could create a new surface and Sometimes with for example Fig Jam that ends up being not just a way to create a simpler experience for people to engage in whiteboarding, brainstorming, diagramming like we saw that spike as a need during COVID along with this need of I want to be in the same place with my teammates and open up conversation and make it so that we're all able to contribute to that conversation more and by making Fig Jam its own space, we're able to not only prevent complexity from occurring to Figma Design, but also it became a space where we were able to explore new concepts like how do you just make it really fun. And it was actually kind of an interesting story because about a month ahead of Fig Jam launching we had this very strategic conversation kind of serious ironically and the conversation with my board and with the team was like okay which way do we want to differentiate for Fig Jam and my push and what we ultimately ended up doing was let's have the differentiator be fun and the board was like all right let's go. The team was a little surprised like this is our strategy. Okay, let's see how this goes. We did a design sprint like one day and out of that day I think 20 ideas came up many of which made it into the product as fundamental features of Fig Jam and many of which have spread other places as well like cursor chat came out that day. And so then as we go and expand the platform even further does something like slides or buzz these are examples of okay people are already doing Figma design we want to make it so that if you're in a product process if you're in a product team how do we give you one connected experience across all of Figma and how do you go further through the workflows that you're already doing and these are opportunities for us to really support those workflows those personas with these products.
Consider this a formal feature request to add a hamburger sticker in Fig Jam. Please send that one to the team.
I think you can find it already, but note it. I'll see if we can make it more prominent.
I mean, at the very least, you can generate one. So, you've been talking about building for the kind of latent demands for product builders. I know when I was at config, I don't know what percent of the people were like illustrators, graphic designers, brand designers. I feel like those needs are kind of diverging, right? You know, the vector people versus the product and code people. No, you're shaking your head.
