Y Combinator on YouTube
What does AI mean for designers?
As with many other tech careers, design is immediately threatened by rapidly improving artificial intelligence. When full-blown prototypes can be generated in seconds, where does that leave us? Dylan Field — co-founder and CEO of Figma — is making the bet that when all the rubble clears, design will be the last field standing.
This past summer, I was fortunate enough to attend YC’s AI SUS in SF. The event brought in many AI industry leaders (Sam Altman, Elon Musk, etc.) to speak on building AI applications and developing with AI.
As you can infer, AI SUS was geared towards SWEs and engineers. When it comes to building, especially at the startup stage, design is often undervalued. In all 20+ speakers only one discussed design — Dylan.
As Dylan recounted how he built Figma, I noticed he utilized many design methods to successfully propel Figma to the forefront of tech.
For example, the very first thing he did was research his users. He cold emailed his “design heroes” asked them to play around with his initial product, point out what was wrong and how to make it better. We do this all the time as designers! If you’re a non-technical designer who wants to build, don’t treat code as the make-or-break. You have skills that are extremely valuable, skills a majority of engineers don’t have experience in.
Figma Buzz was announced during Config 2025
Once Figma got larger and larger, they started carrying a whole suite of products (FigJam, Figma Draw, etc.). Dylan’s (and the product teams’) philosophy behind when to add a feature to Figma Design (the main product) vs branch it off into a separate product is a classic human-centered design decision. Take Figma Buzz for instance:
If you got a brand team and they've created templates how do you make it so you're able to then empower a marketing team to go use those templates and do mass creation of assets? That's a core workflow we see all the time. But we didn't want to make Figma Design more complicated or dumb it down. And so, instead, you make a new surface. — Dylan Field (17:54-18:22)
In my opinion, Dylan’s best startup advice was what he called aiming for “product market pull”. Product market fit is usually the main criteria for determining whether or not you have a valuable idea. However, product market pull focuses less on do users love and recommend your product, and moreso on whether users are obsessed enough to nitpick, critique, and ask for more — exactly what designers look for.