Dylan Field
speaker
223 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 20 May
Dylan Field’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I think long term, probably the highest agency people will deliver the best results in the age of AI. Yes, currently agents don't have agency, despite the words being very similar.
It's super simple. And by the way, I think that we're far away from what you're saying, although it's very generous. But I would say it's just any time that we can help a user achieve their goals. Anytime I get user feedback, whether it's constructive, it's like, I didn't like this thing. I'm like, oh, man, we got to improve the thing.
Or it's, man, I was able to do X because of Figma, any part of the product. That is the eternal fuel for me. And I just love interacting with customers.
I think it's probably hardwired. I have notebooks from when I was a little kid about how would you go make the best bathroom? Because that was something I was really interested in as like a six, five-year-old, six-year-old or whatever. By the way, there's still a lot of improvements we can make to bathrooms. Lay it on me. What would you do?
I'm less germaphobic now than I used to be, but as a kid, he was a little bit of a germaphobe. I remember going to SFO for the first time and like, it just be this magical experience that you could like put your hands in the faucet and it would automatically, the water would come out.
Five-year-old Dylan was automatic sinks everywhere. It was a big deal. One clever importance is the ability to open a door with your foot. I mean, everyone's coming into the bathroom, going out of the bathroom, their hands may or may not be dirty coming in or coming out, and opening it with your foot is like a really good move. That should probably exist everywhere. Totos are great.
I'll stop there.
Yeah, it's my responsibility to make sure that everything's going well over Figma. There are some areas I'm gonna bring zero level of expertise to. Our compliance function. Do I have any unique insight on compliance? No, just that it should be done and done well. When it comes to design or the way that our products are built, my level of insight might go up a bit.
I try to be self-aware of what I'm bringing to a conversation, but ultimately, yeah, I have to have ownership of everything. And some things you know you've got the right leaders and you check on them very infrequently. In other areas, whether you have very high confidence in your leaders or not, the stakes are so high that you have to be always involved.
And my point of view is design is like that for everyone across the board. If you're building software, you need to be deeply, intimately working with your design team or anyone doing design on your product, because otherwise you might lose the business. This is the way you'll win or lose. And certainly I'd treat it that way for Figma.
I mean, look, it all comes back to people when you're talking about that. And I think when you maybe don't hire correctly or don't set the standard the right way and you have to reset a bit, that's always tough. But something you can work through. And I feel like as long as you hire people who have that self-awareness, they'll help you work through it. That's the positive part.
It gives me like, make design bigger than design. How do you take it so that design is not thought of just as pixel pushing, but also is something that people are really considering and doing at all parts of the process of building a company? And how do you make it so that they have the tools to that and they're able to be intentional about that?
I mean, I think that if you've got a point of view in the world and you're able to articulate it, how can we empower you with the tools so that you can create something? And then also, how do we empower you with the tools for you to make it great? That to me is super exciting.
And if you look at the number of people that use Figma and they're labeling themselves as designers today, I mean, it's like one third of the people that come into Figma label themselves as a designer. The other two thirds do not. But my belief is that those two thirds will get into the design process in various ways.
I think that we're always curious by design systems. And the more that you've got people in the organization who are deeply thinking about user problems through the lens of design, you also have problem of consistency at scale. That's where design systems come in. How do you make sure that your product is speaking the same language as multiple people with multiple perspectives are working on it?
And I think that the interplay between design systems and creativity is something that we're always fascinated by at Figma. And how do you both help people standardize while also giving them the room to innovate and be creative? And those two things are somewhat in tension sometimes, but are both objectives that Figma should hold.
I would hope within three years, and if we can do it within one year, then we should do another podcast on that.
What we're seeing right now is the earliest tools and it'll evolve a lot the way that you build with them. And I also think that as you build with them in the context of design, people realize that it's not enough just to get out what's in your head at full fidelity, but you'll want to improve what's in your head too.
And you'll start to appreciate the work of professional designers as well, even more. And you'll be on your own journey to becoming one.
That's the beauty of software products versus physical products. A physical product, it's so hard to be in an iterative loop for. Industrial design, it's all about, okay, you do all the iteration up front, and then you ship something, and this thing you ship is going to be around forever. You make your table, someone buys a table, you don't get to update the table.
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