Community keeps you honest
Reflections on Figma's Config and a long-term commitment to your customers.
This week I attended Figma’s Config conference. It was refreshing to see old friends and meet new folks! While ‘community’ has become a buzzword that is often indecipherable in its meaning, I’ve found myself reflecting on the topic. Dylan, Figma’s co-founder, has created an incredibly admirable and lasting community around the product. One that founders and product people can learn from.
One fun fact is that Coda was Figma’s first team-based customer back in 2016. Interestingly, we churned a couple times before the product stuck with our team. I’ll never forget the early ‘community’ efforts that Dylan underwent to secure the love of our company. To put it simply, he cared a lot about our success as customers. He would make the hour drive from San Francisco to Palo Alto to personally demo some of the latest bug fixes and features to our team. And as Figma grew, he instilled this in the rest of the company, setting up functions like the Designer Advocate team, creating systems for global meetups, and continuing to personally spend tons of time with their customers.
Photo: Evan Wallace, Dylan’s co-founder demoing to Codans back in those days
One of my favorite parts of Config was seeing Yuhki (Figma CPO) and Shishir (Coda Co-Founder) talking about rituals. It’s a shared passion and frequent topic of this newsletter. You can see a video of the talk here along with a very clever behind-the-scenes look at how they created and timed the presentation. My favorite ritual they talked about was the Warriors dinners on the road ritual which I hadn’t heard about before. Oh, and Shishir’s also writing more these days, so signup to see more of his writing here.
Another interesting moment from Config came in a fireside chat between Figma co-founder Dylan Field and serial entrepreneur Bret Taylor on the topic of community. Bret said something that really resonated with me. He was emphasizing the importance of the Trailblazer community to Salesforce’s success and said very simply, ‘Look, community keeps you honest.’ For context, the Trailblazer community started as a technical training program and evolved into a holistic and aspirational ecosystem that helped support Salesforce’s business. He went on to explain how Salesforce tied their success to people in the Trailblazer community getting promoted and having their own career success. And in order to do so, they needed the product to work and do what they promised it would. In that way, customers held them accountable to their vision in a way that no one else could.
Photo: Dylan Field in fireside chat with Bret Taylor
In my experience, both at YouTube and Coda, this feels very true. At YouTube, it was a community of creators relying on the platform to quit their jobs and do what they loved. At Coda, it’s a community of makers relying on the tool to reshape their team’s work. In both cases, we were/are accountable to an ever-changing set of desires, frustrations, and needs. Passionate customers keep us honest to deliver on promises in a way that is both challenging and incredibly motivating.
So as I walked around the halls of Config this week, seeing long lines for paid merchandise and micro-celebrities that grew up within the Figma community, all I could think about was — these are the long-term lagging indicators of staying honest to your community.
How might your company or product create a lasting community like these?