figmaApr 14, 2025

The Long and Short of It: Issue no.10 | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

“Skill share,” Figma’s April 2025 issue, gathers practical lessons for designers, developers, and product builders ahead of Config 2025. Its central argument is that strong products depend not only on speed or technical execution, but also on craft, communication, storytelling, experimentation, and long-term thinking. The issue encourages readers to keep learning across disciplines and apply these skills collaboratively. ## Craft as a Competitive Advantage - Linear CEO Karri Saarinen shares ten principles for creating products that stand out. - The advice reflects a shift away from “move fast and break things” toward deliberate quality and attention to detail. - Craft is presented as an organizational value that should influence every level of product development. ## Better Designer–Developer Handoff - Successful handoff depends on collaboration rather than simply transferring designs to engineering. - Figma’s guide focuses on three principles: - Encourage curiosity between designers and developers. - Keep communication open throughout the build process. - Establish a shared understanding of what “good” means. - The goal is to reduce friction, clarify expectations, and preserve design intent during implementation. ## Writing and Storytelling for Product Builders - Clear writing helps teams explain technical architecture, new features, product roadmaps, and broader visions. - Storytelling is not limited to writers or marketers; people in every product role benefit from articulating ideas effectively. - Strong communication can make complex concepts easier to understand and build support for new directions. ## Building for the Long Term - In a period of rapidly advancing AI tools, product teams must focus on making things work well—not merely making them work. - Dylan Field and Garry Tan discuss experimentation, play, and exploring an “idea maze” as essential parts of product development. - They also address vibe coding, AI-assisted creation, and the importance of preserving human craft even as AI models become more capable. - Founders are encouraged to remain deeply focused on quality and to develop products with lasting value. ## Broader Exploration - The issue also includes a “Rabbit hole” section featuring additional visual and editorial explorations. - Together, the featured topics present skill development as an ongoing process spanning design, engineering, communication, and strategy. The practical takeaway is to treat craft and collaboration as core product skills. Teams can improve their work by communicating clearly, aligning early, experimenting freely, and maintaining high standards even when new tools make development faster.

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figmaMar 17, 2025

Karri Saarinen: 10 Rules for Crafting Products That Stand Out | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Linear CEO Karri Saarinen argues that exceptional products stand out through deliberate craft, not merely speed or feature delivery. Quality must be embedded in leadership, team structure, collaboration, and product decisions. The goal is not perfection, but a consistently high quality bar that earns users’ attention and trust. ## Quality Starts with Leadership - Leaders must explicitly prioritize craft and create the conditions for teams to pursue it. - Declaring quality important is insufficient; companies need to explain how it supports the business. - Design can make complex products more approachable, as Saarinen observed at Coinbase. ## Build Small, High-Quality Teams - Smaller teams reduce excessive debate and preserve execution quality. - Hire people who already demonstrate strong craft rather than focusing only on measuring output. - High standards should be established through the quality of the team’s work. ## Eliminate Handoffs - Product managers, designers, and engineers should share responsibility instead of working in isolated stages. - Removing “handoff to development” prevents teams from treating quality as someone else’s responsibility. - Understanding implementation constraints helps everyone contribute to the final result. ## Avoid Rigid Product Silos - Too many specialized teams can create inconsistent quality and fragmented cultures. - Rotating responsibilities keeps ideas fresh and prevents teams from becoming narrowly focused. - Users care about the overall product experience, not the organization chart. ## Treat the Specification as the Starting Point - Meeting requirements is only the minimum standard, not the definition of a great product. - Teams should add care and judgment beyond what the specification explicitly demands. - Craft is what turns a technically functional product into a memorable one. ## Quality Is Not Perfection - Products should pass a clear quality bar before reaching customers, even if they are not flawless. - Beta users can help teams iterate from a solid initial release toward greater polish. - Defects are measurable, but excellence is often judged qualitatively through user perception and organic praise. ## Design with Strong Opinions - Products work best when designed for a specific audience and purpose. - Flexible products that serve everyone moderately well often fail to excel at anything. - A clear point of view strengthens the product’s value proposition and helps earn user trust. The practical recommendation is to make quality a company-wide operating principle: hire carefully, keep teams connected, exceed the basic specification, and design decisively for a particular user.

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figmaMay 28, 2024

The Linear Method: Opinionated Software | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Linear argues that software should be intentionally designed around a clear use case rather than offering unlimited flexibility. Its defaults reduce process debates and help teams start working quickly, while the company remains willing to evolve its opinions through customer feedback and experimentation. The approach balances strong product principles with deliberate, manageable compromises. ## Opinionated Software as a Default Way of Working - Linear was created by founders with experience at companies such as Airbnb and Coinbase, who wanted an issue-tracking and project-management tool suited to modern product teams. - Unlike general-purpose software, opinionated software guides users toward one effective workflow. - The goal is to prevent the chaos that can emerge when every team or individual invents a different process as an organization scales. - Linear does not insist that its default is the only possible approach, but it makes the recommended path clear. ## Designing at the Atomic Level - Linear favors familiar concepts such as projects, teams, labels, and due dates instead of introducing specialized jargon. - Users should be able to start without reading a handbook or learning an elaborate methodology. - The company is most opinionated about small, foundational decisions—such as treating labels and due dates as issue properties. - For broader structures, such as how projects should work, Linear responds more heavily to customer feedback because organizations differ in how they operate. - The intended result is less time spent configuring processes and more time spent building products. ## Managing Product Debt Deliberately - Linear distinguishes product debt from technical debt: - Technical debt is generally associated with poor or costly code. - Product debt comes from narrowing scope, postponing polish, or optimizing for short-term delivery. - The team treats product debt as borrowing against the future, with “interest” paid through later customer feedback, redesign work, or additional resources. - Settings are an example: Linear has continued adding features and preferences without redesigning the overall experience. - Because settings are not central to the primary workflow, the team considers the accumulated debt relatively low-interest and acceptable to repay gradually. - These shortcuts are framed less as reducing quality and more as intentionally limiting scope. ## Strong Opinions That Can Change - Linear does not treat its principles as a rigid recipe; it expects the product and its processes to evolve. - The team supports experimentation and iteration instead of preserving every decision indefinitely out of fear of user resistance. - Changes that disrupt established workflows require care, but the company believes software must retain the ability to remove or rethink features. - Strong opinions are therefore held firmly enough to guide decisions, but flexibly enough to change when evidence shows a better direction. Linear’s method is most useful when teams want to reduce workflow complexity without eliminating adaptability. Establish clear defaults for common tasks, be deliberate about where flexibility matters, and treat shortcuts as temporary product debt that should be tracked and repaid when its cost becomes significant.

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figmaMay 8, 2024

Craft and Beauty: The ROI of Marrying Form and Function | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Craft and beauty are presented as business advantages, not merely aesthetic preferences. Leaders from Stripe, Linear, and Figma argue that thoughtful details improve usability, engagement, conversion, and product differentiation. Their examples—including a 20% increase in email conversion and 11.9% higher average revenue for Stripe Checkout users—show that investment in quality can directly support growth. ## Craft Improves Usability and Conversion - Beauty can make products feel easier and more effective, an effect known as the **aesthetic usability effect**. - Clearer language, stronger visual hierarchy, and a smoother journey helped Stripe increase conversion from an email series by **20%**. - Every user touchpoint can either add or subtract value from the overall product experience. - Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite, whose quality and detail were key priorities, helped businesses generate **11.9% more revenue on average**. ## Craft as a Mindset, Beauty as the Result - Linear’s Karri Saarinen distinguishes between: - **Craft:** the mindset and care applied while creating something. - **Beauty:** the visible experience and quality that result. - Quality extends beyond appearance. A well-designed object or product should function smoothly, reliably, and pleasantly. - The central question is whether a team is committed to doing excellent work or merely completing tasks as quickly as possible. ## Performance and Quality Are Foundational - Figma views product quality as a hierarchy of needs. - Fundamental qualities such as web performance and a consistent **60 frames-per-second** experience must come first. - These technical foundations enable users to appreciate higher-level design and interaction details. - Craft also involves making products feel intuitive—so well-designed that users feel everything simply works. ## Craft Requires a Company-Wide Culture - Craft is not the responsibility of a single design team; engineering, product, design, and other functions all contribute. - Figma and Linear emphasize that quality should be an inherent cultural value rather than something enforced only through OKRs. - Stripe uses “friction logging” and multidisciplinary “walking the store” exercises, in which teams experience the product end to end as users do. - This approach helps teams identify and remove problems across the full customer journey. The practical recommendation is to treat craft as an organization-wide operating principle. Companies should invest in performance, clarity, usability, and detail at every touchpoint, because form and function together can create both a better experience and measurable business results.

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