Figma's Collaborative Product Strategy
Key Points
- Successful product strategy hinges on spotting and aligning with long‑term industry megatrends, as illustrated through the Figma case study.
- Figma’s core insight was that software would transition from a solitary activity to a collaborative one, and they chose design—a highly collaborative discipline—as the launchpad for this shift.
- By delivering a fully cloud‑based, real‑time design tool, Figma outpaced incumbents like Adobe, which were still tied to outdated, single‑user workflows.
- The launch of Figma Slides demonstrates how a disciplined, trend‑driven strategy can evolve into a “capstone” product that extends the original platform while staying true to the original collaborative vision.
Full Transcript
# Figma's Collaborative Product Strategy **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkRlKJVjeDQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkRlKJVjeDQ) **Duration:** 00:11:04 ## Summary - Successful product strategy hinges on spotting and aligning with long‑term industry megatrends, as illustrated through the Figma case study. - Figma’s core insight was that software would transition from a solitary activity to a collaborative one, and they chose design—a highly collaborative discipline—as the launchpad for this shift. - By delivering a fully cloud‑based, real‑time design tool, Figma outpaced incumbents like Adobe, which were still tied to outdated, single‑user workflows. - The launch of Figma Slides demonstrates how a disciplined, trend‑driven strategy can evolve into a “capstone” product that extends the original platform while staying true to the original collaborative vision. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkRlKJVjeDQ&t=0s) **Leveraging Mega Trends: Figma’s Strategy** - The speaker explains how product managers can harness industry‑wide shifts—such as the move toward collaborative software—to create long‑term, successful product strategies, using Figma’s evolution and its recent Slides feature as a concrete example. ## Full Transcript
so today I want to talk about product
strategy about figma and about how
successful companies and successful
product managers can latch onto larger
trends that are in the industry to build
really successful long-term approaches
to solve real problems for people and
we're going to make it specific because
like who really has the time to do this
generally we're going to talk about
figma and we're specifically going to
talk about the motion that figma had
from getting started as a company all
the way through to their most recent
their most recent release which is
slides uh and slides is a wonderful
example of how you can build a
Capstone product on top of an existing
strategy if you've been diligently
working at this for a long time now the
best strategies are strategies that
capture Mega trends that affect all of
us for years in
and so you might wonder what did figma
do right like where's their
strategy well the truth is figma figured
out earlier than most people that
software was going to become
collaborative one of the defining
characteristics of software in the 1990s
software in the 2000s was that it was an
individual activity that you did at your
computer at the beginning you would
literally go and you would get software
on desk and you would put it on your
machine and you would compute on the
machine now we're not really talking
about Computing as like a cloud service
right that's a whole separate
conversation we'll do a separate YouTube
video on that we're talking about
Computing as an activity designed to
produce economic output for a worker
which sounds really dry but at the end
of the day fundamentally most
productivity software for businesses is
built around the idea of can it make you
more efficient at your job that's what
companies like auna pitch all the time
so with
figma what they figured out their core
Insight what they believed was true five
10 years and in the future when they got
started was that software was going to
move from being this individual activity
to being something that we all work on
together and they pick design as the way
to do that because design is one of the
more collaborative job Families how many
times if you work in engineering if you
work in product if you work in marketing
have you been talking with a designer
about the way something is framed or
structured or designed so that it
affects the customer in the right way so
the customer can get their job done more
efficiently whatever it
is it is a collaborative art it is
easier to be collaborative if you can
all be in the tool together see what you
each are doing if you have Canvas OR
space to comment and
talk and frankly Adobe was late to the
game on that adobe was not investing in
that with their sketch product they
viewed productivity in the old 1990s way
as let's just get this on Dis Let's get
this downloaded let's get this worker a
seat that we can monetize and off we
go so if you're figma that's a massive
opportunity right but there's a huge
technical challenge which by the way is
a reason to start a business not to stop
it because at the end of the day if you
are solving a big technical challenge
you're fundamentally making a difficult
promise come true for
customers and that is hard to beat if
you can do it if you can get it right
now figma was really hard because they
basically had to take software that
everyone had assumed you could write on
a computer program that you can use your
whole computer to to employ and and work
against and they had to put it all in a
little light
browser which is a much smaller envelope
for your
application and they did it just took a
long time and so when we talk about sort
of the Saka of silicon bellet companies
which ones have started quickly which
ones have not figma's a slow one figma
took a long time to really get going
four or five years I think
and one of the reasons why is because
they had to solve a whole bunch of
complicated technical problems to get
into the browser and have a smooth
collaborative experience in order to
take vage of that Nega Trend now I want
you to think about something if you are
solving a hard challenge but you're not
solving in the direction of a larger
Trend what's going to happen in four or
five years when You' solved it you're
going to be off
Trend and so it's so important to
understand where is the trend going over
the long term and how can you be infront
of it and in a sense startups are about
seeing the future a little bit more
accurately than everybody else and in
this case for the specific kind of work
figma saw the future more accurately
they saw that people were going to want
to collaborate they'd be hungry for it
if they could deliver the product so
when they finally did four or five years
later people latched on to it I remember
when every design director I knew was
getting figma installed at their
workplace and rolling Adobe back out and
I think that's part of why you know a
few years later Adobe tried to acquire
figma because they saw that they kind of
missed the boat um they missed the boat
on collaborative software and they
needed to spend some of the cash that
they had on hand to change that and get
back in the
game and that's how larger companies
often do it like if they miss the boat
on a particular Trend they'll try and
buy their way out so let's get back to
figma at the end of the day when you
have this core product you've launched
they have figma they launch it it's
collaborative it starts to take off the
natural thing to do is to add more
features to that
product when people tell you to add them
right you talk to your customer your
product manager Now talks to the
customer they add a feature it's a
little Widget the widget goes inigma the
product manager takes their hat off and
says job well done everybody great job
that's a path to feature bloat that's a
path to unhealthy product long term
regardless of the micro results what you
need to do is understand what are the
things that your customers are saying
about adjacent problem spaces that you
can solve using a similar approach so
yes you do need to listen to your
customers but don't listen to them if
what they are telling you to do is going
to make your product more complicated to
use or only available to Super users
listen to it if it's going to enable you
to solve meaningful problems for them
across more and more
workflows so in this case with the
slides released just fast forwarding to
the present and there's other ones we
can talk about that figma has done I'm
just using slides as an example because
it's
recent at the end of the day what they
realized is that designers were already
using
figma and not just for design they were
already using figma for
presentations but it wasn't clean it
wasn't easy to do other people couldn't
get in there and use it as a slide
Creator really easily so they decided to
change that and it was a Leap Frog
motion for them because the the thing
that they are now worried about getting
disrupted by is of course AI so they
needed to find a way to start to compete
in the AI space as well and what better
way to do that than by getting AI which
is deeply informed by text because we
have so many large language models now
and that's like the heart of the
movement I know there's a big image
generation movement and I know that's a
factor in design they went all in on
large language models I think partly
because those are so influential right
now for business
that being
said they go in on
slides and what they realize is that
they have an opportunity to level up the
actual core presentation experience yes
customers are asking for slides by their
behavior they're basically saying I use
this for presentations and figma
noticed but what they probably didn't
say clearly because I've done a lot of
customer interviews and they almost
never say this
is please can I have an AI powered
applet called
slides where I can actually show my
clickable demos as if it was a slide
presentation that's what they built
almost never do your customers ask that
clearly that was up to the imagination
of the product and design teams and the
engineering team at figma to figure out
from what the customers were doing and
presenting those slides and to say how
can we take this and tie it back back to
this larger Trend this larger strategy
where we're working on collaborative
software and how can we continue to
build on that into more workflows this
slide or presentation workflow is a new
one for them people were using their
software for it but it was kind of a
hacky use case so if they wanted to
build it right they had to understand
that workflow and they had to apply
figma's knowledge of how to do
collaborative software to that new
workflow that's really the heart of what
makes slides tick and that's why I think
it's a great example of how you start to
build on Trend over time because now
slides is out and all of a sudden people
are able to interact with this
PowerPoint presentation beyond the
canvas and so just like we are now
thinking about design as a fundamentally
collaborative exercise figma is inviting
us to think about presentations as a
fundamentally collaborative
exercise and yes designers will probably
be the ones that use this most often
initially but the idea of having strong
collaborative activity is something that
figma is really good at and that they
are extending into more workflows and I
think that we as product managers we in
Tech often don't have that degree of
consistency of vision we don't start out
years and years ago building something
for a future we think is possible around
a megat trend consistently solve a hard
technical problem finally get something
done that many people thought was
impossible by the way getting figma into
the browser people thought that wasn't
going to get done and then keep building
on that right like we don't just build
bloatware after that like keep
relentlessly building on the core value
that we have discovered that people like
to collaborate they need to collaborate
and that that accelerates value so I'm
not a figma person I don't work at figma
I don't have figma stock or anything
like that I just think this is a
wonderful case study for people who
study product strategy and I wanted to
kind of take it and open it up I've done
a shorter version of this on my Tik Tok
but I thought this would be a good place
to sort of have a long form discussion I
hope you enjoyed it