Dylan Field on Scaling as a CEO

A. Scaling as a CEO

• As Figma approached 50-100 people - managing and scaling people really started to matter
• Dylan faced 3 problems: 1) alignment, 2) communication, and 3) managing low performers

B. Alignment and Communication

All hands is your main company-wide alignment mechanism. Invest in it as you scale

• Dylan uses all-hands for alignment. His framework for all hands is it needs to be “must watch TV” - people need to be excited to attend'
• If you can drive attendance, it's a unique time where you have the full attention of the company
• At 70 people, Figma had biweekly all hands on Thursday. Today, they happen less frequently because they require more investment

Tactic: How to use all hands effectively?

• Use all hands to beat the drum on progress (e.g., ARR) as well as excitement about future initiatives
• The best all hands register emotionally with employees. Telling customer stories is a great way to accomplish this goal
  • Example. They had a former prisoner speak who used Figma to get their first job post incarceration
  • It’s motivating to take a step back and to see the impact of your work. This drives intensity/effort
• Strategically emphasize teams or people that need recognition. This is an easy forum to recognize effort from individuals and teams
  • Example. Dylan recently framed an entire all hands around the support function
  • The support team doesn’t typically get much recognition, and this helped the support team feel appreciated

1-1s are your tool to gather context and unblock teams

• Dylan uses 1-1s to gather context and to figure out where he can uniquely help/unblock someone

Establish the norm that you will/can dive into any area of the business

• If Dylan perceives there is an issue, he’ll openly tell leaders he is going to talk to x,y,z to figure it out
• It’s better to be direct and establish the norm than to gather data and / or dive in behind the scenes
• When you identify an issue, don’t wait to share the feedback. Dylan calls his execs immediately

Tactic: How Dylan determines where to dive in?

• Dylan identifies problem areas by regularly monitoring Slack, support issues, and social media chatter
• Additionally, two factors determine where Dylan digs in regularly: 1) trust and 2) personal strength

Trust in Leadership

• If he has high-trust in a leader, he is less likely to audit the function regularly

Personal Strength

• If he can add unique value in an area (Product and Marketing), he regularly dives deep
  • Make sure to have someone else that is accountable for that function who is not you
  • This acts as a natural check and balance against your founder driven input
• For functions where he doesn’t have this experience, he creates a system of checks and balances
  • For example, in Finance his checks and balances were 1) the audit and 2) hiring a CFO

Use a framework like DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed) to ensure accountability

• Figma has tried various accountability systems, but has had the most success with DACI
• DACI stands for Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed
  • Driver: Person responsible for the outcome
  • Approver: Person with decision making authority
  • Contributor: Person who is working on the project
  • Informed: Person who just needs to be aware of the project
• This protects against situations where everyone is waiting for someone else to decide 

Boards require alignment to be successful partners to the company

• In the early days of Figma, Dylan wanted to strengthen the board member and founder relationship
• A key mental shift for Dylan was internalizing the idea that the board (like you) operates in service of the company. Therefore, they are looking for direction and alignment just like any other stakeholder
• Dylan more clearly articulated the plan with board members and complemented it with more structure:
  • Monthly metrics emails documenting performance
  • Made sure to understand “hot pressing” issues for the board and addressed them in meetings
  • Board letters where he covered what’s going well, what’s not going well, and strategic issues 
• Board letters became a regularly scheduled way for Dylan to take a step back and to reflect on Figma

Tactic: How to get the most out of your board meetings?

• The best board meetings aren’t metric reviews. Rather, they are discussions around strategic topics
• Find topics that can’t be summarized in an email and require lengthy discussion - spend time here
• Ahead of the meeting, provide context in advance and lists questions you’d like to discuss as a group
• Additionally, you need create a culture of engagement so the board understands the social norms
  • Dylan DMs board members in the meeting and says “I know you care about this, speak up!”
  • Dylan will walk the board around the office and get the team to show them demos

C. Managing Performance

Founders must overcome psychological barriers to proactively manage performance

• In hindsight, Dylan wished he had managed poor performers more actively as poor performers compound bad decisions
• Dylan knew consensus advice was to deal with poor performers quickly, but it “doing it” is hard
• Recognize this psychological barrier and force yourself to actively manage performance all the time

Compromise hires rarely work. Assume every poor performer you hire has a multiplier

• Everyone has made compromise hires at times. In Dylan’s experience, it is almost never worth it
• Dylan’s mental framework: The more leverage this person will have = the worse it is to compromise
  • Why? A compromise hire has a multiplier effect and their bad influence/work compounds
  • This is especially true for executives - a bad executive usually builds poor performing teams
  • More leeway for IC hires, but still not ideal to compromise on quality and talent

As you scale, you receive less feedback. Create systems to manage your own performance

• As you scale, fewer people are willing to give you feedback. Tactics to enable feedback are below.

Tactic: How to create systems to receive feedback?

360 degree reviews

• Do a 360 degree review with a facilitator to get feedback from executives and individual contributors
• Feedback can be hard to review, but they are helpful in understanding your areas for improvement

Create allotted time for feedback in board meetings

• At the end of each board meeting, Dylan steps out and the board discusses feedback for Dylan
• One board member is assigned to call Dylan and deliver the aggregated feedback
  • Example. At 40-50 people, the board told Dylan he needed to become more commercial
  • Example. As they were scaling the board told Dylan he needs to learn to hire leaders
  • Both of these helped him fix or address a gap and to scale with Figma to 1,500+ people

Actively encourage feedback and create “psychological safety”

• Dylan is demanding and sometimes this causes people to feel fearful about delivering feedback
• Celebrate when team members deliver constructive feedback to encourage the behavior more

Look for leaders with the capability to both lead and manage

• Executives need to be both great leaders and great managers - hard if you only have one of the two
• Management is the mechanical tactics of driving accountability, driving cadence, and setting good goals
• Leadership is driven by great communication. Great leaders motivate and make sure people know what they're doing, their priorities, and how priorities and their work connect to the mission. They are able to set really ambitious goals and create a sense of inevitability about achieving them

D. Balancing Craft and Speed

• Even though only 1/3rd of users are designers, designers are Figma’s primary audience
• Given designers are the primary audience, Dylan feels a unique pressure to make sure quality is high
• Speed comes from paranoia - Dylan is always worried they are not doing enough and pushes cadence

Below is how Dylan balances quality and speed at Figma.

1. Empower, retain, and promote “simplifiers” in your organization

• As you grow, your product becomes complex. Find people that are a simplifying force in your company
• “Simplifiers” reduce instead of add to products and are able to push back credibly on complexity creep
• When you find these people, reward them and doing everything in your power to retain them
• At the current scale, Dylan estimates there are only a handful of people that are true “simplifiers”
• Simplicity in product often means you can accomplish a better customer experience faster and with less resources

2. Modulate between feature breadth, deadline, and quality to optimize craft and speed

• For everyone product release, you can modulate features, deadline, and quality
• Dylan tells his teams that you can only pick two of these things and you need to be clear about which
• For example, they have releases where quality is lower by design - they release these as beta products
  • Over time, they work with customers to improve these beta products to platform level quality

3. Emphasize the importance of craft through customers

• When you notice an issue from a customer or a public post, raise it internally and in public channels
• This shows 1) that it is a priority for you and 2) that you care about quality / craft in the product 

4. Carve out time for Tech Debt and Quality Weeks

• The reason most companies slow down is tech debt - you can’t move fast if tech debt is high
• Early on, they had a competitor called InVision. Dylan believes they did not succeed because of tech debt. They would promise feature after feature to customers and never deliver on the promise
• To solve for this, Figma dedicates a week / quarter to burn out any tech debt that they’ve accumulated. Dylan also wants to experience with 2x weeks where the team only spends time on working on projects that would make them 2x faster overall 
• Figma also sometimes does “quality weeks” where the entire company spends time investing in quality

5. Simplify your org design to maintain quality and move fast

• Dylan has tried to design with organization with simplicity, basic processes, and no duplication
• If your organization is complicated to operate, people make suboptimal decisions for the business
• Dylan has been very intentional about team/org design, even if it means slowing down hiring on the teams
• Simple processes and organizational design encourages higher quality and better decision making. It's also easier to move fast

6. In situations without intense competition, cap headcount growth to maintain quality

• Growing headcount more than 2x y/y, puts strain on all your people and all your processes
• It creates situations where people make short-term optimizations to handle the influx of people
• If you have external factors that allow it, Dylan advocates not growing headcount more than 2x/year
• There have been periods where Figma throttled sales hiring to let the organization and product catchup
• The one function Dylan never throttled was support - Figma over-invested in support for a long time
  • The rationale was that great support drove community and referrals 
  • Up until 80-90 people, everyone’s first month was a tour of duty in support

D. Community

• Early on, this was making sure he was meeting customers and hosting meetups wherever he traveled 
• As Figma scaled, they introduced Config (a user conference) as a way to bring the community together
• Community becomes an asset if you create it - mainly in the form of frequency/depth of user feedback
• Dylan views the Figma community as a great source of ideas and potential products