How Figma made design multiplayer

What’s up! This is Sheldon from The Zero to One - helping you grow your product by breaking down the growth tactics, strategic playbooks, and GTM motions behind your favorite startups and giving you the actionable insights to replicate them. Check out all my previous deep dives here.

I’ve been looking forward to doing this one for a while now and have actually been a bit nervous - Figma has truly changed the way most companies work and I want these deep dives to show that off.

Some housekeeping before we get into it:

• I will be sending a newsletter next Thursday. Consider it a late Christmas gift (unless it sucks, then tell me it sucks - I want to make sure I’m giving you top-quality content)

• I have been much less than consistent these last few weeks. That is being fixed. I have been busy setting up an exciting project with my good friend, and awesome entrepreneur Sina. But more on this soon 😉

• Also, please let me know what you think of the new design, I’m trying to make this a good holistic experience for you!

Enough of my rambling. Welcome to episode 1 of the Figma series: Designing a $20B multiplayer experience.

Default Singleplayer to Default Multiplayer

Many of you reading this grew up in the generation of multiplayer, online applications.

Something so intuitive and normalized to us that we often don’t even notice it.

The best example is Word vs Docs. (Something Dylan, Founder of Figma references himself)

Word was (and still is) designed as a local application first, where the default behavior is single-player.

Meaning I work on my own. Then send my work to someone. Who then reviews. Then sends it back to me. Then I implement. Challenge some things. Then send back…

And this keeps going on.

Now I know you can work together in a Word doc, and many do. But it’s not the out-of-box behavior.

Plus, it’s still intended for all parties to have Word installed locally.

Docs on the other hand makes co-working the default behavior.

First, it’s browser-based, meaning the only limitation to accessing and editing a file someone shared with you is having an internet connection.

No need to download large applications.

Second, the only thing I need to share a doc with someone else?

A link.

No Sharepoint or One Drive set up required with different permissions and payment plans. Just a link.

Before Figma, design was very much single-player.

But what it means to be a designer today has changed.

Not luckily for Figma. But because of Figma.

Figma was the seismic shift that ruptured design and made it collaborative.

Figma took a default single-player sport and made it a team one.

🔬 Why this worked:

3 insights from the tactic.

👯‍♀️ 1. Brought the whole team in

Pre-Figma, design was a bit of a mysterious function that went away and came back a few days later with a finished product.

Feedback was clunky. The process was slow. And most non-designers couldn’t intuitively access it.

Figma wanted to give this intuitive access to people who previously didn’t have it.

And so Figma focused on more than just designers. Rather focusing on the best product. Which meant it became an experience for the whole team, or even, the whole organization.

Without sacrificing the depth required for a highly technical tool, they made design approachable and intuitive to even the most non-technical members.

PMs, Engineers, Marketers, etc. could now easily understand the design process. Leading to better outcomes for everyone.

• PMs could make sure the product was moving in the right direction.

• Engineers had a better understanding of what was required (and could guide on what was technically feasible).

• Marketers now had direct access to materials needed for quick testing.

But also, anyone could now start a design and hand it over to a designer. Who could then work their magic. This time, with a more accurate direction and clearer alignment.

Talking about alignment, what multi-player also did was allow for instant feedback.

This might sound like it can bring a too many cooks in the kitchen challenge.

And it could.

Designers certainly thought so at the beginning of Figma.

But that’s actually a team dynamic issue, not a product issue.

Figma was just an easy target.

High-functioning teams had massive benefits from this instant, multi-player feedback.

Products and designs could be shipped faster. Better. And with fewer issues.

To show this, let’s go back to the PMs.

Say you’re launching a new product. It’s killer (I believe in you).

Your designers deliver awesome work, but you want to tweak some messaging.

Previously, you waited for them to deliver the work. Sent back your feedback. They implemented (maybe after some other work as you might not be top priority anymore). You get it back. And you realize that we need to tweak it again.

So the cycle repeats.

But with Figma, you just tweak it yourself. And you can test as many variations as you want.

Instantly.

And although they received pushback at the beginning about design being a team sport. There’s also something inherently fun about working together, and you get better results.

Designers just needed to see it for themselves.

🫂 2. Improved designers work with each other

Don’t take the previous passage as Figma not focusing on designers. That’s not the case at all.

Figma focused on designers AND. Not instead of.

Figma didn’t just make working as a team easier. But it also made working with other designers a MUCH smoother process.

Remember that PM example of iterated feedback?

(again with the PMs Sheldon? - bear with me)

Now imagine it with a junior designer reporting to their manager instead. Everyday. For all their work.

Figma solved this.

You could just leave comments in the file, in real-time. Or make a small adjustment and explain it in a comment.

Figma removed the tedious back-and-forth of feedback cycles required to help both junior designers and managers grow in their careers.

Faster learning. And also an easier management aspect to a senior designer’s job.

But also consider sharing designs amongst peers.

Although the design tool market has typically always been dominated by a single company (Adobe then Sketch). Not every designer used Sketch, for example.

Now you might be pointing out, and rightly so, that not every designer uses Figma today (although it’s not far from it).

But there’s a key difference. Even if you don’t typically use Figma, I can still just share a link with you, and you can access and potentially even edit it.

But with something like Sketch or the Adobe suite, you would need to have downloaded the expensive software locally.

Figma did the same as Docs did. No downloads. Just vibes. I mean links.

🌍️ 3. Helped standardize design across the org

Since Figma’s launch, there has also been a shift from design as a centralized function in organizations to distributed design teams, within business units or product teams.

Figma enabled this shift and accelerated it.

A big reason design was previously centralized is that it needs to be uniform.

You can’t have marketing looking wildly different from the product.

Or even closer, you can’t have two different product teams, having different look parts of the same product.

In the pre-Figma era it was hard to be uniform across distributed design teams.

Spreading changes in design styles and assets was a lengthy process that was prone to mistakes.

Figma made this process instant.

It was now stored in a central, online, single source of truth. That could be updated, in a design tool, and across a company at the click of a button.

In fact, this became one of Figma’s biggest pay-gated features: design systems (think button styles, color schemes, all the things that are often repeated).

And not only did this become a feature that helped Figma monetised, but it became a key growth lever in their PLG motion. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Tune in next week Thursday to get a deep dive into how Figma kicked off their PLG motion by getting ICs to love the product.

For The Zero to One, it’s been your host, Sheldon.

My picks to take your business to the moon 📽️

• How this startup doubled its valuation to $75M in 3 months (link)

• Free guide to using ChatGPT at work (link)

• How to boost paywall conversion (link)

Tools of the week 🔨

• Vly.ai: The easiest way to build custom full-stack software without code.

• Aditto: Let AI manage your marketing.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

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