AMA: Noah Levin (Figma)

over 3 years ago from Noah Levin, Design Director, Figma

  • Justine Shu, over 3 years ago

    Hey Noah! Thanks for being here :) Two questions:

    1. What are you most excited about Figma's latest product announcement, and why?

    2. What does success look like for you and your team? Has that changed since you started? If so -- how?

    0 points
    • Noah LevinNoah Levin, over 3 years ago

      Thanks for having me!

      1. Ohh that's a tough one. I'm pretty excited about a lot of things. From the editor side, hyperlinks will be super fun and enable a lot more use cases in side of Figma for teams. I've been waiting on that one for a while, and I'm excited for us to release it soon (we're just brushing up some final interaction details first). Outside of the editor, I'm most excited about our work with Community. Today when you want to find valuable resources on the web, you have to sift through a lot of noise, and even then you mostly find static images. We're not too far from a future where you'll have access to design source files of all kinds to help speed up your work, and to learn best practices from each other.

      2. Success for me and for the product design team at Figma includes a number of things, like 1) is the team happy and do they feel they are in a healthy environment to do their best work? this includes things like career development and training, cross-functional relationships, team culture, hiring/resourcing, etc,. 2) are responsibilities for everyone clear? do THEY know what success looks like? 3) are we able to stay on top of all the requests and feature development work that needs to happen? Are their cross-functional partners (eng, PM, marketing, etc,.) satisfied with how collaboration is going? are we able to get ahead of the roadmap and be strategic to help define and shape what it is we're working on, or are we mostly stuck in the weeds? That's just a few parts of it, as most of you know design has a ton of different requirements, especially at a fast-moving startup!

      7 points