Dylan Field
Co-founder and chief executive of Figma, the collaborative design platform he started in 2012 and took public in 2025.
Dylan Field did not write this page. What is this?
It collects the places they publish and what they have said there, each linked to the source. They have no account here. Is this you? Claim it, correct it, or ask us to remove it from ppll.
Where they publish
No channels checked yet. We list a place only once someone has opened it and confirmed it is theirs, so this stays empty rather than guessing.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 22 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Software is now won or lost on design: good enough is no longer fine, it is mediocre.
if you want to win in the game of software, you need to differentiate through design. Like that's again how you win or lose. Craft matters. And so we're no longer in this era of good enough is fine. It's like good enough is not enough.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
In a world where software can be created easily, designers matter more, not less, and they are going to be the leaders of the future.
I think in this world where software can be created more easily, design matters so much and designers matter so much. I think designers are going to be the leaders of the future and I think that more designers need to speak step into that leadership role
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
Craft is a competitive strategy rather than a nicety: a company wins by having the best craft and the best design, so that is what it should hire for.
we're looking for high judgment individuals, people that are going to roll up their sleeves and do a lot, whether they're IC's or managers, and people that are going to get the details and perfect their craft, because we know that's how we're going to win is by having the best craft, the best design.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
Show 19 more
Taste is not innate; it is a loop of noticing whether you like something, asking why, and learning the canon that led to it.
It's just this loop of okay, I'm having an experience of any sense. Maybe I'm looking at art, maybe I'm hearing music, maybe I'm literally eating food and tasting something, you know, but like do I like it? Do I not like it? Why?
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
A lot of people can match a framework for taste; almost nobody can create one, and creating one is the rare skill.
I think that for those who can create and then articulate a framework around what is taste for us that is really a important skill and uh then I think people can a lot of people can basically match a framework not many people can create the framework.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
Taste necessarily implies judgment — that some things are good and some are bad — and you have to be willing to say so.
And there is something about judgment in there too. you know, uh, implied in taste is that some things are good and some things are bad. So, I think you have to be willing to lean into that yourself in terms of uh, being high judgment.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
The best product designers can switch their own taste off and match somebody else's, which is a separate skill from having taste at all.
I think the best, you know, designers on the product side can turn it on and off. They can go, I have my own taste. I know what I like. And then, okay, you're going for this. And that might be different than what I like, but I can match it brand as well.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
After a decade of Swiss minimalism, design is about to swing back to something far more expressive.
I think we're going to swing back to being way more expressive and draw as part of that story.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
AI cannot get a product to the quality bar on its own, because it still works in the realm of averages.
And AI won't get you there alone. AI is uh still in the realm of kind of law of averages and uh better prompting can help of course
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
In a product review a prototype beats a static mock, and a static mock beats a lot of words.
at least my product reviews and uh product conversations, I feel like prototypes beat static mocks and static mocks beat lots of words.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
AI prototyping ends the era of product managers asking designers to draw an idea, which frees designers for deeper work and lets anyone join the first conversation.
PMs are no longer saying to the designer, hey, can you draw this thing out for me? That frees up designer time to go explore more deeply the stuff they need to go into and it allows anyone to kind of add to that first conversation of where should we go and look further and wider and broader at the option space.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
Ideas die on the vine when their visual expression looks wrong, so a prototype built from the real design system gets judged on its merits instead.
it's, I think, critical that ideas don't die on the vine because you've got, um, a visual expression that doesn't match what everyone else expects. Sometimes people will just filter them out because they don't look right.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
Teams building AI products coast on vibes for too long: trusting the vibes gets you somewhere, but it is not rigorous.
it's easy to um go on vibes for too long. Uh some folks, you know, just kind of like trust the vibes and you know that'll get you somewhere, but it's not rigorous.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
AI's productivity gains at Figma have been mild to moderate, and none of them have reduced the number of engineers the company wants to hire.
Have we seen productivity increases? Yeah, mild to moderate, but like that is not something that has made our new headcount we want for engineering go down.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
The one safe bet about AI is that models will improve, so what a company has to build is an organisation that gets better as models get better.
the only thing that we know is that models will improve. Will it be incremental? Will it be exponential? I mean somewhere in between. Who knows? But uh what you have to believe is that you get better as models get better. Your organization gets better as models get better.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
AI does not remove a job so much as change what it consists of, and knowing exactly where a model's capabilities stop is now part of being a good engineer.
take prompting and as an engineer, there's a range of prompting abilities. uh the way you discretize and split up your task matters. And if you assume that uh a model can do more than it can do, then you're going to have a bad time.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
A company can treat AI as a way to grow and do more or as a cost-cutting exercise, and the growth reading is the better one.
you can either see AI as an opportunity for your company to grow and do more or you can look at it as like cost cutting efficiency but I think the growth part is way more exciting.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
The thing to optimise at launch is time to value — how fast a new user reaches the moment that shows what the product can do.
shortening the time to seeing and having that incredible moment and seeing, you know, the true value of the product, for example, in Figma design, can we get you to have a collaborative multiplayer moment?
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
Striking down the boring blockers one by one moves retention and activation as visibly as any new feature does.
we literally at some point had a team that would that was called blockers and they just went and one by one struck them down and each time we saw uh improvement in retention, improvement in activation the metrics for as we addressed each one you could literally see the change in the graph.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
A minimum viable product is not enough: the first release still has to contain something a little bit awesome that shows people where it is going.
I think it's not enough to have the MVP. You got to have something that's a little bit awesome at least.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
Figma took five years to charge anyone and that was a mistake: ship something people can see the vision in, and get to market faster than we did.
The lesson is you just got to get something that you can that you can have that people can see the vision of where you're going. Um, but don't don't do what we did. Get to market faster. I wish we had.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
Fun can be a product's differentiator, even when the team thinks that is an absurd thing to compete on.
The team was like what we're gonna make fun our differentiator and in retrospect it was absolutely the right move.
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field Said 16 Oct 2025
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.