Dylan Field

In an AI-driven software landscape, product strategy must focus on craft and unique design as the primary competitive differentiators.

"I was looking online on social media and I think people are already zeroing in the right conversation, which is, okay, in a world of more software being created by AI, what does that mean and the impa..."

AI shifts the product development process from execution-heavy (drawing mocks) to exploration-heavy (strategic direction).

"PMs are no longer saying to the designer, 'Hey, can you draw this thing out for me?' That frees up designer time to go explore more deeply the stuff they need to go into and it allows anyone to add to..."

Rigorous evaluation frameworks (evals) are necessary to move beyond 'vibe-based' AI development.

"We have done a lot of work to figure out how we do evals, and we're also continuing to evolve our process... it's easy to go on vibes for too long. Some folks just trust the vibes and that will get yo..."

Effective leadership requires explicitly sharing the internal context in your head to ensure the group is aligned on the same goal.

"One of them is just, how do you unpack context? How do you get the context you've got in your head and really unpack it for a group? Another is, how to make sure that you're showing up in a way that f..."

Clarity is achieved by leaning into 'murky' areas and asking difficult questions until trade-offs are fully understood.

"I think it's your job as a leader to always try to investigate those areas, push on them, and if something's not adding up, really ask the hard questions and not shy away from them... I just try to ke..."

Systematic slowness is often a symptom of technical debt that requires pausing feature work to fix underlying infrastructure.

"You always have to keep in mind tech debt and there might be, when you're moving slow, systematic reasons for that. How do you make sure that you're not grinding to a halt because things are built the..."

Shortening 'time to value' by quickly exposing users to the product's 'special sauce' is critical for activation.

"I think it is important to get someone into a product and very quickly have them experience some special sauce, something that's amazing about the product... shortening the time to scene and having th..."

Removing adoption blockers is just as important for retention as adding new features.

"Specific things that he's encouraged us to focus on are not just innovative features but a consistent emphasis on fixing the blocking issues that might prevent a user from adopting... removing the blo..."

Use 'fork in the road' moments to ensure the team is fully aligned with the company's pace and mission during major transitions.

"One thing we did was a program we called Detach... it was just a way for us to say, 'Hey, look, maybe you joined and you thought you were joining Adobe, and surprise, you're at this hard charging star..."

Regular hackathons with broad prompts can foster a 'maker' culture and lead to significant product innovations.

"Make a Week is an example of that where like a week long company hackathon and the only prompt is, make Figma better in some way... many of our products and our most important features have come out o..."

Maximize team performance by mapping individual interests and passions to specific projects.

"There are I think a lot of people who when you put them on the thing that they are super interested and fired up about will outperform your wildest imagination of what's possible. Put in the wrong eff..."

When influencing leadership, use concrete artifacts and be prepared to answer deep follow-up questions based on first principles.

"I think the more concrete an artifact is or the more you can debate something, the better. I ask for examples a lot, I try to ask follow up questions about things and make sure I fully understand it...."

PMs facilitate collaboration by synthesizing strategy into clear frameworks that align engineering and design on a shared destination.

"The best PMs, I think again, create those frameworks that bring everyone else along and those frameworks also have a point of view and a strategy associated with them. So you're able to take the strat..."

The future of product development involves the merging of roles into a unified 'Product Builder' identity.

"The trend that we've been seeing for the past five years is the trend that is going to accelerate in the next five years, and that's a shift in emerging of roles... We're all product builders and some..."

Build a community by identifying central nodes in a network and engaging them through genuine curiosity and a desire for feedback.

"I constructed this list of, 'Here are the most central designers in the graph', but also then I looked at their work. And the ones that I was really inspired by as a total fanboy, and someone who want..."

Expand product lines by identifying and 'tracing' the user's end-to-end workflow.

"I think for us we had a framing of, we're going to go trace a workflow. If you've got an idea, go express it through Slides or hop in FigJam and brainstorm with your team. Okay, what's next? Go design..."

Don't be constrained by current market size (TAM) if you have a strong intuition that the industry is shifting.

"You have to go from strength to strength, and you can't always just be obsessed with what's the next biggest TAM... we looked to the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the start of Figma, and it was like 2..."

Effective problem definition in design requires balancing utilitarian solutions with creative expression to avoid 'soulless' products.

"I like art applied to problem solving because I think that design is often... There is some component of creativity to it and unique expression that you're trying to provide and create and put out int..."

High-intensity, long-form user studies with early adopters can provide a comprehensive roadmap of necessary improvements.

"I ran him through the user study, I knew we'd need a bottle of wine to finish and it took hours. The type of sentence in Figma was so slow... Payam wrote a very long doc for us about all the things th..."

To truly understand user feedback, you must look across all channels and ask probing questions to distinguish between stated requests and root needs.

"I definitely look everywhere trying to constantly ingest information about Figma, and it's not just Twitter/X, whatever that's called now, but anywhere on the internet, support channels, et cetera. An..."

Prioritize shipping speed to accelerate the feedback loop, which is the most valuable asset in early product development.

"Get it out as fast as you possibly can. Everything they tell you about making sure that you get a product out really quickly is totally true. The faster you get it out, the more feedback you get. That..."

Avoid over-polishing before launch; get to market quickly enough for users to see the vision, even if it's not perfect.

"We started the company August 2012... summer of 2017 we made our first money. Don't do that. Get to market faster. I wish we had... get something that you can have that people can see the vision of, o..."

Challenge timeline estimates by digging into the underlying assumptions and identifying unnecessary padding.

"If timelines are maybe not well reasoned through from first principles and perhaps there's padding that has been well intentionally added by different folks, you have to understand fully, okay, what a..."

The guest discusses intuition as a 'hypothesis generator' and a core superpower for making product decisions, which is a distinct skill from general strategy.

"I think intuition is like a hypothesis generator and you're constantly generating these hypotheses and others are generating hypotheses as well."

Dylan Field provides a deep framework for what taste is (a point of view), how to develop it (building a repertoire and reflecting on 'why'), and why it is the ultimate differentiator in an era of AI-

"Taste is your point of view on things and how do you develop your point of view... build your repertoire. Understand what is the greater context, what is the canon that led to this thing, and where do..."