Loredana Crisan - Figma's big bets for the future of AI design

[00:00] 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 of putting the soul in the music, putting yourself into your design, is the message that I'd give everyone right now. Welcome to Dive Club. [00:30] This week's episode is with Lordana Krishan, 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. [01:00] the ways that it's influenced how she thinks about design and taste. 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 [01:13] 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 like teenage years, I rebelled against classical music by starting to prototype and my style prototype at that point, like record and experiment with house techno rock and music production in general. [01:43] 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.

[01:55] 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 [02:09] 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 learn how to hear [02:21] 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. [02:37] 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 gear that was in a different room that you had to like make sure to get sound through. And then very interesting, I was in San Francisco at that time.

And [02:56] 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 A. and really focus on my music career as a music producer, you know, forever or [03:18] 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 [03:30] 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. Now, I've repeated this story many times throughout my career. And like I generally when somebody asked me for a career advice around [03:51] 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. [04:17] 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 what design is, how roles are blurring, et cetera. Just make something. Real quick message and 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 [04:47] it way easier to get started because you can now copy and paste from Figma directly into Papers Canvas.

All of the layers and their properties, including images and SVGs, are imported in an instant. It's a pretty big deal and you can try it out today. Just head to club slash paper to get started. Framer 3.0 just launched and it is exactly how I want to build pro websites. [05:17] directly in a canvas that is tailor-made for shipping production sites. For example, I have like five different CMSs for Dive, which isn't exactly my favorite thing to deal with. But now I can have the Framer agent do 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. [05:47] with agents all inside of Framer. And if you head to 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 [06:17] the config 2027 release. We're talking about your sound design panel that you get added to the file. [06:23] So I would love that so much. 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... [06:43] The first is that [06:45] Well, okay, if we look at your background as somebody, I mean, 20 years of raps playing piano is crazy.

I took probably 10 or 11 years of piano, and it's an unimaginable amount of practice and scales and drills and everything. Yeah. [07:00] With AI, it's almost like we're compressing the speed at which we can get those reps by... [07:06] an order of magnitude or more. And so one sentiment might be, well, taste is actually not defensible because [07:14] Everybody's getting these reps so quickly that your experience matters less. [07:20] Good. [07:21] Performance expertise requires time. [07:25] Nobody, even somebody with like incredible... [07:28] 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 like, this person has it and they are miraculously 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 [07:58] 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?

[08:14] 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 things. [08:30] designed to throwing a party. And if you think about like the best party that you've ever showed up for, [08:36] that person, whoever threw it, [08:38] 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 considered there are many people and like they have like different restrictions. All of that stuff is care. [08:55] 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. [09:06] Okay, I'm going to keep pushing on this a little bit because I love the party metaphor. Where I think potentially it might start eroding in the long run is... [09:15] there's no equivalent to copying and pasting a party, right?

It's always going to require a level of manual effort. But this world that we're 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 [09:34] replicate it. And it's harder to [09:38] 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 the value of taste in the long run? I actually think that what happens when everyone has the power to build [09:54] 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 make something that feels authentic to people. You can buy those pretty funny or, you know, soulful congratulatory cards, birthday cards, whatever cards, and they have the [10:19] 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 [10:26] 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 rate. And we already had trouble consuming what was already there. And so what we're going to try to do is look for even more authenticity. I don't know 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. [10:56] 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 taste. It's just your point of view, your human intuition, what you want for that experience needs to come through. And then the tools that we build [11:26] 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, I, you can't make that with your hands. Therefore it is not, [11:37] And yet it allowed people to... [11:41] 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. There is a beautiful quote by Vioric, [11:53] on on this because you're right. The world of music was like, absolutely not. These are not real. It's 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. [12:14] but your responsibility is to bring the heart to it.

Okay, let's talk a little bit about how you guys brought the heart into what you shipped with Config. I believe that technology changes things [12:24] the world [12:25] 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, you know, [12:55] already here is interesting, but the one that they imagine is even more so.

The question for us with Figma at this moment was like, 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 [13:25] much expressive on the other. And so this is why it probably feels like they're, they spam 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. [13:42] 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 [14:01] helps your product stand out in a world that is increasingly uniformitized by just like what the models can produce. [14:09] 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 [14:20] views [14:21] AI as almost the giving up of control in many ways. [14:24] 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...

[14:45] 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? Basically, I think the premise for some of our releases is an example that the shader effects that you could prompt yourself and the tools. The premise is that [15:15] 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, right? And so it was really important to me to get... [15:33] away, 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 dictating a painting over the phone. It's very, very hard. I have an organic shape that I have in my head and I could easily manipulate it myself to get to what I want.

It's almost impossible to describe. If there is a color that I want to put [16:03] there are moments where you just want to take control yourself. So what we're doing with ShaderFX, 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 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. [16:33] that creates that shader. You can tweak all of its values. And it's an interesting way of working, because increasingly as designers, I believe, we're 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. [16:54] 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 has 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. [17:17] and your team in one space. You said an interesting phrase, creating systems, not screens. I'm wondering if we can double click on that. And I'm actually curious, given that shift, [17:29] How does that change what signals you would look for in new designers that you want to hire? [17:35] 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. [18:05] 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 [18:24] you know add the inputs that would generate the output but [18:28] The underneath of it, all of the special sauce, is in the workflow. [18:33] 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 thinking about it from the standpoint of like somebody was leading the design of.

[18:51] 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 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. [19:16] Yes, you have to zoom to the level of we actually talk about the Skoll 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. [19:46] not afraid to truly understand what's out there. [19:51] But I wouldn't say, you know, I'm AI-pilled and like 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.

If back to painting, you know, like if you're a five-year-old and I give you some watercolors, you're going to 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. [20:21] 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 understand how we use them.

Outside of tools, I think it's this system thinking and this idea, can I distill what's important here? Is there a way to extract this so that it becomes replicable? And that is in the interest of making [20:51] the same question or give it the same task or implement it in very different ways each time you ask. And you can't wield a tool that does something very different each time you ask it to you. Generally, you'd want the hammer to behave the same and the same every time you use it because you want to understand and learn how to wield it yourself.

And all of these things that we're doing are in the service of precision and we need designers that understand that. I would assume there's probably a good amount of [21:19] research that you are obviously doing at all times, but probably leading up to some of these strategic bets, you're trying to understand the shape and activities within different teams. And, [21:30] 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 types of paintbrushes even that you're noticing in these teams that you're latching on to?

[21:49] that kind of [21:50] give you the ability to imagine where things are headed and what exactly you all should be building for. [21:57] Yeah, there's so much. I would say that everyone is experimenting. We get so many questions about, like, Figma, what is the workflow that we should anchor on? How should this evolve? And you have various organizations that are at various levels of adopting the new technologies and really settling on new workflows. A lot of what we're hearing is, on the one hand, excitement about what's possible now. And then that [22:23] is almost always paired with a but.

[22:27] XYZ and like the XYZ ends up being like what everyone can build. It's really hard to decide [22:34] 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 [23:04] to speed up and 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 [23:18] to transform, to use AI 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 it's part of my tool set. I want to expand and be able 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

[23:48] things a certain way. 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, [24:18] as an example and understand how your users use your system and what they maybe want differently from you. That's one area that people are excited to explore.

If I was going to [24:30] 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 a certain direction, often alone?

[25:00] make something that feels considered and like moves us forward, not just create more. 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 [25:15] 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... [25:25] previously where it felt like I could just hop in. [25:27] to anybody's [25:28] file.

So I'm interested to see 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 call out all day. [25:40] 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, you know, like the computer started with MS-DOS as well. And like, you know, we did not stop there and we didn't stop there for a good reason, because as people were visual, we want to touch, we want to maneuver. [26:10] 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] Can we talk about the review bottleneck piece? I'm sure a lot of people listening are experiencing that right now.

[26:22] How are you all thinking about solving that right now? [26:25] even just in the way that you all like work internally, like all, [26:29] How do you approach this problem that I think a lot of us are facing? This probably happens in every company right now, but you go in and build something in code and you have a great idea. 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 they're linear.

[26:49] It takes 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 seeing the system and you bring them together and then ship something that's absolutely incredible. [27:07] And so visualizing them on the canvas where everyone is, is really step one. [27:13] And so what we're able to do with code layers on the canvas is bring your prototype [27:19] onto the canvas. And then from there, you actually could simply tell your agent to visualize all of the states of the app.

[27:26] 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, [27:56] It's 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. - Yeah, I've seen a lot of people building [28:10] 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 [28:33] It feels like inevitable.

Of course, it has to be that way. [28:37] That's exactly what we're doing. And that's why we think an infinite canvas 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 discontinuous innovation. Right. As an example, [28:51] We're building, we're often building Figma and Figma, but we're also building all sorts of apps that are, you know, 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, you know, finance is an example.

[29:21] different type of interactivity on like you know the keyboard buttons of that calculator or whatever it is that you are building and then somebody else comes in and says well actually we tweak it in a 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 the type of thinking and the type of collaboration that you could get to is the one that feels [29:51] What if companies apply 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 or maybe you're even looking for your next design hire, head to club slash talent to join today. [30:21] 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 a medium that is available to designers. And everything's getting really blurry. [30:51] 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 [31:01] 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 an identity crisis and a renaissance at the same time. So well said. We'll release a study that we did where we asked about the importance of design. 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. [31:31] 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 for them right now is like not only to check the code, I think it's important to check the code, but also like participate in what we're building and why. The roles are blurring. Expertise still very, very much matters. Of course, I would [32:01] 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. It's quite interesting because you get into the, who should stamp my PRs question. Oh, that's funny. What kind of PRs do you ship? Give me an example. Eval tools. I specialize in Eval tools these days. [32:29] 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 then bugs, simple things on our properties.

So if I see something misaligned or there's an instance where a hover state actually was instantiated with the new badge, but the new badge was hidden because there was nothing new there. [32:59] to actually fix that. But then I ran into who should stay on my PR. And so I've decided to ask the VP engineer responsible for that area to do it because it's all left there. And yeah, it was a pretty special connection. 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?

Does everybody have it on their machine? [33:29] code, is everybody shipping to production or are designers... [33:33] 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 seeing? [33:43] Both are important, and we are doing both. Prototyping playgrounds can speed you up. [33:48] because you don't have some of the code base 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 stage you are. It's just kind of like... [34:16] 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 production is a tool, a medium that you need to have the nuance to know how to use.

[34:30] Okay, let's talk about evals. I'm not thinking about that near enough, apparently. So why is that a big deal for designers? [34:35] 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 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 [35:05] 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 the evals is on the one hand, the. [35:22] 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 be augmented 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 not a correct answer to design, but there are many [35:52] of our agents should build and design. And honestly, if we care about the experience, that's where we should spend our time. It feels like a lot of the new areas that we as designers are feeling like, [36:05] I'll say pressure, honestly, to grow in and explore are all pretty technical. And I'm just wondering, is that just the shift? Is that just where this is heading?

We're all going to become a little bit... [36:15] engineering, where even brand is like, I'm creating these semi-technical workflows. Is that just where this is going? I think a lot of it is going in that direction, but also there will still be plenty of moments for craft and 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 [36:45] crave it out 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's under your control, not like a technical thing that you're just banging your head against the wall and fighting. It's really important for good work to be in the flow. So what does it look like when the product that you're using, whether it's technical, it's about evals and all of the other stuff, but it's actually a joy to use. I built a [37:12] a little eval game. We eval on the canvas, of course, where you could try to beat an auto judge at finding design issues.

There are so many ways to do all of these things. Like, [37:24] fun let's zoom all the way out for a second [37:27] So, [37:28] You've been at Figma, I think, around 10 months. [37:30] which is probably, my assumption, a really short time, but also 10 months in eternity nowadays. And you're brought in externally. You have this long background at Meta. [37:41] 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? Honestly, we have incredible talent at Figma. And I think as a leader... [38:04] a lot of what I want to spend my day on is figuring out how to pull all of that up and like, you know, remove the barriers from them, like truly building what's in their heads. So some of the things that AI is creating as challenges become entirely logistical. Like this, why we're talking about, you know, the review cycles and like how do you all climb that pipeline, etc.

That's one thing. The second thing is like you want to make these tools available. You want to [38:34] Maybe from a Figma perspective, the thing that I consistently say is find the intersections. I really, really believe in the magic that happens at the intersection of things that used to be disconnected, whether it's design and code, sound and visual, PM and design. You've seen me hover across all of those. And then within Figma itself, Big Jam and Slides, Slides and Design, code layers and the canvas, there is so much more that you could do when these things are interoperable.

[39:04] And that requires looking at teams and projects in different ways. [39:09] 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 are just 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 works? [39:26] operates that have stood out to you so far. [39:29] the joy of building, [39:30] and how much we nerd out at Figma over the details, the interactions.

The joy of building a tool is very, very apparent at Figma, but not just across design. All of the disciplines have it, literally down to our HR and sales departments. All of us are makers. And that just creates a culture of most heartwarming nerds coming to work together. That's the thing that stands out. Everyone is... [40:00] making something, it's constantly creating, constantly thinking about how the tools should evolve. Where at Meta, there was a lot of [40:07] thought about the people on a global scale and what content is important and elements of culture.

They're truly key to developing the next set of products. So the apertures are a bit different. [40:20] you talked about how designers are having to think a little bit more holistically, like product strategy is kind of a, [40:26] something that everybody holds on to and maybe we could pull on that [40:30] strand a little bit because you guys are in an interesting place where you have a heck of a foundation [40:36] 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 the broader platform strategy?

Put us into the room on some of the core product strategy debates that were leading up to config. What were some of the things that you guys were really wrestling with? [41:03] 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. It's 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. [41:33] result of us introducing the code layers on canvas and like yes the answer is like 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 [41:47] It used to be that you'd go to one place to design what you wanted to do, and that resulted in an artifact. And then that artifact would become a brief role 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, [42:08] It's you you don't have the. [42:10] quick loop back to try a different idea. Right. And so what we're looking at is like, how do you bring it all together? But that obviously creates a lot of strategic questions about, you know, [42:22] what each product is about, like 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 agents on canvas and how should they be represented?

And should they feel like people on your team? Or should they be more in the background, working and not taking too much attention? Those are the sole questions that come up then where there's no right answer. And there's [42:52] 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 represents like the right balance between bringing AI into the foreground as it builds with you and allowing you to really stay focused on the task conditions around you too.

[43:15] 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 change. [43:29] 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 helping move the actual design and decision-making forward given these compressed timelines? On the one hand, we used to say design is so important because it makes things tangible, [43:59] long time and you have the risk of talking over each other because what you imagine in your head is very different than another person's imagination.

So a picture is worth a thousand words exactly for that reason. And a prototype or a PR in staging around a direction is worth even more words. And so a lot of time, I think what I love for designers to do is try to make [44:29] explore directions to consider all of the possibilities as much as possible. This is 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 can have the most productive conversations about what matters and move the solution forward.

So those are the, you know, understand the system really well, understand the [44:59] 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 just their point of view. What do they think is the right thing to do? Where is their conviction? And thankfully, we have that in Spades and Figma that, as I said, in Sign2 is just absolutely crushing. It points back to the value of systems thinking again for me, [45:29] touching everything else.

And so being able to 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, as a whole skill just in that for designers. And I can relax. [45:41] Absolutely. And if you think about it, we live in an increasingly complex world and software has gotten incredibly complex itself. We're building global products that people experience in many different incarnations. Some of them read left to right, some of them read right to left. That's not even the most complex thing that we need to think about when we build software.

[46:11] 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. That's why design is increasingly important here too. 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, right? So let's imagine that somebody [46:41] portfolios and applications that are just full of eight out of 10s, nine out of 10s.

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. I'm now paying attention and this is probably somebody that I'd want to bring onto the team. [47:03] 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. [47:33] united that oftentimes i look for passion more than i look for 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 your 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 the shared language with the rest of the team that is already like very much you know bought [48:03] From that perspective, I think the passion ends up carrying things.

You certainly look for signals that they're experimenting, that they're expansive in their thinking. You look for signals that they're comfortable exploring technology in the state that we're in right now. [48:33] 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 on a different area as well. [48:44] Everything that you're saying keeps coming back to what makes you unique as a human, both in terms of how you're using the tools, what you're capable of imagining, why you're caring about something.

I appreciate that as a through line through this whole conversation. And isn't that beautiful, though? Isn't that? [49:01] why we're here? 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, [49:15] 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 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.

[49:28] I think I'll be a version of like, put yourself in. [49:32] 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 it's [49:42] It's beautiful. Well, I think that's a fantastic place to end this conversation. And Lodana, I really appreciate you coming on today and sharing a little bit about behind the scenes of what y'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.

It really goes a long way and it's inspiring for me. I hope it's inspiring for others. So I appreciate you. Thank you for having me and thank you for running this podcast. It's such an inspiration for all of us.