The Product Review: Figma
How did a collaborative design tool unseat Photoshop and grow beyond designers?
Intro: From too-niche to too-big-to-fail
Figma. I did not see it coming when it launched in 2015: the Cambrian explosion in design and collaboration tools. Millions of users and thousands of paying customers. Expanding beyond the design function to wall-to-wall. Figma (or its peers e.g. Canva) are used at most tech companies and beginning to replace monopolies like Adobe Photoshop/Creative Suite. It passes the “Most of my peers use it regularly” gut check, which is when a product is already a success, on its way to glory — and too late for an employee or investor hoping to join a company pre-hypergrowth!
In April, it closed a $50 million round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz [at a $2B valuation], even as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the US in full force. Figma impressed investors with its revenue growth and major customer wins, including teams at…GitHub, Square, Zoom… Business Insider, October 2020
With customers like that, as well as teams at Fortune 500 companies and local small businesses alike, Figma is currently moving through the Early Majority initially described by Everett Rogers in 1962 in the diffusion of innovations theory “that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread” and later popularized by Geoffrey Moore in the 1991 book Crossing the Chasm:
Source: Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Ideas (1962)
Source: Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm (1991) and Technology Adoption Model
Fun fact: Professor Rogers coined the term ‘early adopter’ — 58 years ago! When I tried to find what other events were happening in US technology then, you wouldn’t be surprised to know that space technology dominated that list - not apps or SaaS companies. The adoption curve Rogers was sharing originally related to agriculture and home economics. It was just one year prior in 1961 when JFK famously set the goal to put an American on the moon before the end of the decade and three years prior in 1958 when Eisenhower helped create DARPA that would become a critical creator of information technology primitives. It is an important reminder to search history and social science for lessons to apply to technology and humanity.
But I digress.
What is it about the product that has enabled it to sprint up the hill of that curve?
1. Unified functions require unified tools: the designer role consolidated and Figma fit right in
It’s easy to forget the complex confluence of multiyear trends that converge to make a company’s rise successful. One of those trends for Figma is how the design function has changed in the last ten years alongside the rise of tech’s ubiquity.
There used to be functional differences between User Experience Designers (UX) and User Interface Designers (UI); in the last 10 years that has blurred and now there’s mostly just Product Designers or Designers. It will probably become ‘unbundled’ again eventually. Those two separate functions used to use different tools and produce different deliverables: UX designers would do low-fidelity wireframes (enabled by tools like Balsamiq and Mockingbird) and UI designers would do ‘pixel-perfect’ mockups that could actually be handed off to engineers for implementation (enabled by tools like Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign). There were different goals at each product development stage and thus the best-in-class tools were different. The former required something quick and easy to use at the cost of perfection. The latter required something robust and feature-rich at the cost of usability especially for non-designers who have no idea how to use layers, for example.
But Figma has benefited from (and accelerated) the unification of the design role.
As the role became unified, why would a single designer want to use one tool for the first phase and then have to start over from scratch in a second tool for the next phase? Moreover, as tech expanded and competition heated up, the cycles sped up and many teams would blend the prototyping and production phases, requiring unification.
Notice how in a single tool I can move between something low fidelity (i.e. wireframing) and high fidelity (e.g. prototyping or production-ready designs that can be handed off to an engineering team). Figma even has it in its onboarding.
2. On the shoulders of Sketch and the iPhone: New tools and technologies created new unmet needs
First there was Microsoft Paint. Then Adobe Photoshop. Then Sketch started to open the window to a more usable, more accessible, and lower cost design tool. Then mobile took off and now we needed quick and easy ways to prototype designs across desktop web, mobile web, iPhone, and Android without crushingly repetitive work. The evolution of tools and the rise of multi-device design opened a door for Figma.
Sketch grew in popularity, down-market competitors like Balsamiq and Mockingbird let engineers and PMs feel like we could design things, InVision came on the scene, and Adobe’s control of design tools started to unravel, over many years. Moreover, cloud meant that a native desktop app like Photoshop wasn’t adaptable to the new world - unless it had a web app, but that was not a simple feat given the amount of complexity built into Photoshop, an incredibly complicated technical architecture that underpinned it, and a business model was optimized for licenses sold - not usage or virality. Thus Adobe pivoted from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud in 2013 but this transformation had already begun. Adobe’s ability to pivot to SaaS has helped it retain some of its customer base while expanding revenue and margins in recent years. But Adobe’s success did not preclude the rise of new market entrants like Figma. The preceding tools broke Adobe’s full control and mobile and cloud required new tools that could make it easier to design for multi-device multi-app products, even while Adobe skyrocketed in value over time. The market is massive to enable an incumbent to grow exponentially in the last 4 years and produce several unicorns.
3. Beyond the design function: some features make Figma the hub for cross-team collaboration
With the aforementioned transition came undone the idea that only designers could design; the easier the tools became to use and the less likely a small change would mess up the whole file, more people could engage, making the tools more sticky in the organization, increasing the number of licenses a company could charge a customer for, and growing the design function’s centrality in an organization as more functions could collaborate around the artifacts for which design was the functional owner — surprisingly increasing power rather than diminishing it by making something previously restricted to guilds available to the masses.
Features like commenting and @ mentioning are about more than just enabling collaboration; they also make the product more viral and enable customer expansion. The ability to charge for 100X as many seats because instead of just 10 designers it is used by 1000 employees across product, marketing, legal, and more is a game-changer for the financials of companies like Figma and the total addressable market. This is a prime example of the marriage of product strategy and business.
This strategy similarly applies to companies like Webflow that let anyone have the power that previously was reserved for just engineers, and should be kept in mind by other companies competing for collaboration mindshare from a files, messaging, or note-taking perspective. This will all dramatically shift how SaaS is used and paid for.
4. Make it work like we expect it to work: simplicity is a welcome oasis in the desert of complexity
It sounds easy. But it’s incredibly hard to make some products work as humans intuitively expect them to work. Think about when Workday makes it hard to file an expense because the upload function for your receipts doesn’t work as expected. Think about when you paste text into Gmail or Google Docs and the formatting isn’t as you expected it to be — even when you use special shortcuts to match the existing styles. Think about in the 1990s and 2000s when applications wouldn’t save your settings even when you changed them and hit ‘Back’ but hadn’t hit ‘Save’ below-the-fold.
Figma gets basics right: CMD+ or CMD- to zoom in and out. Click into a text field to edit the content without any confusing user interaction. CMD+B bolds the text as expected instead of triggering some odd design function. You can easily undo a design error like you can undo a typo in Google Docs rather than losing it to some broken versioning history in an outdated design application. Getting the basics right is dramatically underestimated. The cumulative effect is that customers get more done, trust the app, and become fervent evangelists. It also codifies a principle of simplicity in the company’s culture that pays multiple dividends for years.
5. Productize (and kill) your customer’s stress: technology can make a mess into a delight
Prototyping used to be a nightmare. A designer would make designs in a static program. Then we’d either have to build the real thing before knowing how it felt to use it — or do some crazy HTML hack (or use a prototyping tool) to demo things. There used to be lots of (physical) wires involved and Apple AirPlay when we wanted to show the iPhone experience. It was bad. Really bad. It was crazy that in building products we didn’t know the product…until it was built.
Figma lets you effortlessly prototype. In fact, the designs just ‘become’ the prototype with the click of a button. I actually got to this screen almost accidentally, it’s that easy. I know so many Figma customers who use Figma in design reviews. Everyone from the VP Design to the individual contributor designer showing work can riff together on the work, edit it in real time, get to an answer, and ship the product. Design reviews that used be about presenting static image files and translating written feedback into visual action items turned into collaborative working sessions. It’s a step-change in productivity and decision-making. It also puts Figma at the center of critical technology team decisions, which solidifies its brand and market position.
The lesson is that world-class design and technology can take incredibly complex problems that most people lack the grit to solve — and it can solve them! When it does - from PageRank at Google so we can access the world’s information, or the reduction in audio/video packet loss on Zoom so we can have high quality flawless video calls - it works and it reminds people why technology is like magic. Figma does this repeatedly.
Questions
What does Figma look like in 10 years? How does no-code impact design tools?
Now that Figma is on its way from design tool for designers to collaboration tool for knowledge workers, should it create new tools for other functions?
Will there be consolidation in the market, be it Figma and its competitors, or from seemingly unrelated collaboration apps like Slack and Figma?
What does Figma’s community and creator marketplace look like in time, and will there be another billion dollar company built on top of its core product in the manner that Zynga was built on Facebook or Paypal on eBay?
Mobile and cloud opened doors for new tools; will the 2020s see a megatrend of similar significance, and how will the former trends continue to unfold?
Thanks for reading! More on Twitter @jasonyogeshshah.
Sources
Recent Business Insider Coverage
Figma Folks to Follow: CEO Dylan Field (@Zoink), VP Product Yukhi Yamashita (@yuhkiyam), Director of Product Ken Norton (@kennethn), Director of Product Sho Kuwamoto (@skuwamoto) who has a great thread on Figma product development