This talk will describe the process of building one of the flagship new feature areas that Figma launched at its annual conference this year (May 2025). I’ll talk through how I turned a small team, a lot of passions, and a large mandate into a successful product launch.
For the past year I’ve been the lead engineer and de facto product manager for a large new product area at Figma. In just a few months, armed with only a handful of engineers and a huge product mandate, our team had to be efficient, resourceful, and most importantly, needed to have a lot of fun in order to deliver such an expansive feature set. Follow along our journey to unlock entirely new ways of being creative with Figma: our successes, our mistakes, and unexpected experiences all the while navigating a highly performance-sensitive front-end C++ stack.
Key takeaways
- How having a strong technical perspective from the start is key to building an efficient roadmap
- How building partnerships with other engineering teams can stretch your headcount a long way
- How to continually prioritize, adapt, and communicate about product decisions
- How to continually develop buy-in with leadership and give your team space in doing so
- How to build a happy team, and how to delegate, trust, and build leaders within your team
