YouSaid · the spoken record

Claire Butler

lines on the record: 101
first: 2023-09-07
most recent: 2023-09-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I guess Twitter, like I'm not active per se, but that's probably, I don't look at LinkedIn, so definitely be the place. I'm just Claire T. Butler there. And then helpful to me, you can tell me your feedback on FitGem and Dev mode. That would be really helpful to me. And then I guess the other thing is parenting tips with work. Like I'm a little nervous about that, right? Like I love my job, love my career. And I'm going to be a mom soon and need to figure out how to make that work. So I want to hear what other people have done that.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think I kind of mentioned this a little bit, but I use it for home renovation, big jam especially. So I renovated a house with my partner, and we're doing another one right now. And I couldn't do renovations without it. I copy and paste, let me start with Pinterest, like get ideas, but then I pull them all mood board on FigJam, and then I circle things, and it helps me communicate with my partner. I'll send it to him and get comments from him on stuff, links. And so, yes, we also like, we'll draw rooms and model things up and have it on the iPad. So, yep, interior design and home renovations on Fig Jam.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was younger, I really was, I've always been motivated, but like, oh, I have to get this thing right now, right? Whether it was my career or I was an athlete growing up. So I really wanted to like perform and do well on things. And I just put a ton of pressure on myself. But I recently got, or not recently five years got this motto of like consistent pressure over time as being more of my motto in like taking some of the pressure off of having to do things immediately or get to a certain place too fast. Kind of maybe it's more to like atomic habits or things like that, but I've just much more in this mode of like you're not going to get everything done as a startup career like whatever. It's not going to happen immediately. You just have to like keep working at it and not giving up and having that grid to keep going and keep pushing over time is way more important than any like immediate accomplishments.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm also a big fan of, and it's true. It's very true. I'm in there all the time. I think I'm the most active VigGym user. I had to go to Indiego validate that in the metrics, but I'm in Fig Gym all the time.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so you might cut this because it's a little promotional, but thig jam. In the last couple of months, especially, I spent a lot of time having to create strategies and files and explanations. And I spent in meetings, and I spent all of my day in FigGam, like literally all of my day. And, you know, I work with Figma. I use the product. And I was using Figma for a long time. But Fig Jam, for me and my role literally use it every single day and now I cannot imagine living without it. It replaces so many different tools for me.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I just watched 100 foot wave on HBO, and I watched it because I'm going to Portugal next week. And that's a place where they have the biggest waves in the world. And it was just really interesting to learn all about this Nazar in Portugal and all the waves and the surfing culture that's grown there. So that was just a fun one that I watched recently.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teaching also growing new managers. And so radical candor and dare to lead. To be honest, are the ones I recommend the most because I do a lot of coaching new managers and helping them learn how to manage. And those are the first two I start with because they're so good.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I recommend management books a lot to people. The other piece of this that we didn't touch on at all is scaling a team and like all the things that go into management”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most important thing there is that you have an executive. The metrics don't immediately show you if something's working or not, it goes back to signal over metrics. And I think that that's so important. And having leaders who believe in that too, who are able to trust their own intuitions and their own guts is so important. And it's so interesting too, because I was just like thinking when I was just now that I was talking earlier about how trusting yourself and trusting intuitions is like the hardest part, the most stressful part in the early days. But even here, like it's the thing you need the most to be successful. And so I don't know how that connects back, but it just feels like that's just so important in this type of model and with just being at a startup is that you're able to believe in it and have the confidence and then trust yourself.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that is a key problem and it's still a key problem with a lot of design organizations is that, yeah, they're siloed. And that it's an organizational shift to get people to be collaborative.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite stories there is that when we launched Desider News, which was a popular forum back in the day at the first response was, if this is the feature of design, I'm changing careers because designers do not want to be collaborative. There was like this process where people were like, oh no, I want to do my work on my own and then present when I'm ready. It was like a massive shift in getting them to think in a different way to do this. So even to me, it was intuitive, but of course you'd be collaborative, but designers did not want to be all of them right away.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To bring people to us, we had a distribution channel already in place that we could kind of work through. So that helped a ton. And then I think the last one was that that core IC audience has a lot of connection points within the organization. Like designers are so collaborative. Like you were saying you work with as a PM, you were working with designers. They work with everybody, right? Like if you're building something, you need comments. You need feedback. And so it was really natural for them to be like a super spreader because their role was such that they were collaborating with a lot of people.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about it. So being technical is important. And then, yeah, caring about your tools, that's another one that I think a lot about as a marketer. I don't know how much I care about my tools. Some of them I do, but a lot of them I don't. You know what I mean? Like if you're like, oh, Claire, you have to move from paper, Dropbox paper to Google Docs. They'd be like, fine, right? Maybe that's their personality, but designers specifically, and I think engineers are the same way just as examples have deep passions for their tools probably because they're in it eight hours a day. And so they're using them all the time. And so it certainly helps if you will already care, care digitally about what their tools are. Another thing that helps is that you have a community that exists within the kind of target audience already. Like we had that with designers. Like, yes, we grew it a lot and have grown with it a lot. But like I said, like that Twitter community that existed without us, that was there before we were there. And so it made it a lot easier for us to get started because we didn't have to make something.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I fell out of this on myself actually because Figma's also has new products, right? So, like, I think to myself, like, oh, can we replicate this? Like FitJam, like FitJam is one of those examples. And dev mode, all of a sudden we're working with developers. So I thought about this a lot. And, you know, I don't know if there's like, oh, you have to have this or you have to have that. But I think there are certainly things that make it easier. And they're both true on like the market side of like the type of the audience and also on the team side. Within the market, I already mentioned it, but I think it really helps if people are technical. And you have this technical audience of people who really care about the craft and they get a lot of value out of the tool by themselves because that just allows them to really learn something and really build confidence in something before they have to spread it or start collaborating. And it gives you something to talk about with them that's not collaboration because like I said, no one wants to talk about collaboration. It's like nobody wants to talk about it. And so you have other things you can talk about, even though collaboration is so important. No one.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he has a few new things too, right? Like you have to layer out new things. How do you not walk away from this thing that got you to where you are as well?”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the key thing is that you have to keep doing it. So, one of the things that I feel like my role now at Figma that I think a lot about is like how I can keep advocating for this stuff when we are starting to implement more top-down motion and having to really prove ROI or thinking about how do you scale the sales team and all these things. And so a lot of what I'm doing too is thinking like, okay, like how do we keep this going and keep this model successful as the company's still growing? Because it's not necessarily as intuitive as you are starting to add in more of these some of the more traditional methods and motions, right? And so that's kind of something that I think about quite a bit. Things like that conference that I talked about, schema, that's a big one config. That's a big one. Scaling our DA team and really like promote like having them grow with the company across regions and across products is really big. And so it's how do you keep.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At one of our events, we're going to amplify you on social, we're going to promote you and make you a thought leader. And it works really well for everyone because these people also have the deep technical expertise to show other people, like here's how I've solved my design systems, here's how I do this. And some people want to learn from them. And we have the platform to be able to amplify them. And so I think a lot about like, yeah, how can we help these people grow in their own careers and get something out of this to beyond just the love of the tool?”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. So just the last thing there is, you have to keep that relationship going with those champions forever because they don't go away. And sometimes they get mad at you too, right? So like I remember like there's one, I think it was at one of our companies, one of our bigger companies, and he was upset about something and he tweeted it and then we immediately had to go talk to him and understand what he wanted and what was wrong. And so they don't go away. But then also I think a lot about how through the process of maintaining a relationship with those people we're actually able to help them and what they get out of it beyond just the tool, right? So like especially over time, especially as we have a larger platform, I think a lot of about like how can we help them grow, whether that's growing their careers like they, because they brought on Figma, they get a promotion or whatever that looks like. But we have more direct control over things like, oh, you're going to speak.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People do it in Figma. Both at the beginning level, but then at the very advanced level to really lean into that. And that also went into marketing, right? So that was, we have design systems.com. It's like a Figma property. We had a whole conference around it in the fall called Schema, where we just bring in these advanced design practitioners and they just show you how they're working. And that's so important too, because design systems are one of the main reasons you upgrade from Pro.org or Enterprise, right? It's like you're at this phase where you're getting more organized, you're more advanced, you're a bigger company. And so that's one of our big gaining features for upgrade. And so that became just the key thing really leaned in on. And that's bottoms up specific because these people are not, the people making the design systems are not like the VP still, right? Like the next phase of bottoms up are the ICs and then the design systems people. And now those internal champions are largely the design systems people.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Design systems meetups. And we were all like, what are design systems? Or that I was like, what does design systems? And then I went and read a patterned way of thinking and atomic, Brad Frost, atomic structures, design systems, and started learning about it. But anyway, so in the early days, we just literally brought, there's a community of design systems, people, right? And we brought all of them together, met with their product team, met with Dylan, started just having these really informal meetups around design systems to learn from these people and start just learning, like hearing from them. And then we started building out more features from it. And then we just started really leaning into the technical aspects of how companies use and scale design systems. Because while design systems are so important, it's also very hard to get an organization to do because it's like an efficiency thing that they also have to invest in. The business immediately connected to a launch that day, right? And so every company is in a different phase of maturity of where their design system is. But we really leaned into the content, into the features, into eventually showing how.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every single time, and it's consistent like you have hundreds of designers in an organization, they're all making buttons. They're going to be slightly different. And then engineering's like, wait, what patting do I use? And so it's very inefficient. So most, a lot of organizations use these design systems and they become very advanced over time. But Figma did not have design systems in the early days, right? Or if we did, we may have had them at the file level, but they couldn't share them with other people. And so that was a huge blocker for us for a really long time was like these big companies were like, oh yeah, this is cool, but like you gotta work. I need a design system. Like, how else am I supposed to work with engineering? Because this is so big in engineering too, because when you're able to, you know, identify all of these different buttons and these components in advance, you can tie them to code and then it's easier for them because they don't have to inspect it every time, right? So it's like way better for everybody. So it was our biggest blocker, but then we decided like, no, we're going to focus on this. And in the early days, that was just like meetups. Dylan was like, we need to do.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about design systems. So let's say you're a designer and you're designing an app you need a button, right? Rather than going in and making a new button every single time, you need a library of the button, right, with the color, the spacing, the padding, all that stuff already predefined. Maybe it's tied to code. Maybe it's not. But you just want to pull that in and then maybe there's someone on the design system and there's brand designer or someone who's like, oh, we changed this from this font to that font that you know that and it just updates everywhere or a padding change and updates everywhere. And that's like the most simplistic version is a button, but this stuff gets way more complex, right? This turns into like, here is our welcome screen. Here is our header bar, like all of the different components that then become like whole pages. And it's a huge efficiency thing, right? If you have a very robust design system, you're just pulling in all of those components instead of having to design those from scratch.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even since we hear highly enough about it, like marketing, we think of it when as we're scaling this role, we're like marketing product and sales, like that's where these people come in. And I think when you have a technical IC audience, I don't see how else you could build any credibility or get anywhere with people if you don't have someone who deeply understands it integrated in marketing and in sales.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hundreds of customers. And so he has the best way of synthesizing product feedback and then bringing it back to the product team because he has all of that context, right? And so I think that that role is just so special and it's something that we've actually chosen to scale because it's just so valuable in the same way it's valuable for marketing. It's valuable for sales.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I understand exactly what you're talking about and what your problems are. Here's how this works, or here's where you're blocked, or here's an idea or best practice how to use this. for them and for the sales team that they ended up calling it the TOM factor, like winning the joint stuff because it wasn't necessarily like a structured process at the beginning. They just be like, hey, Tom, can you come help talk to this company with us or like help show them how this works? But then they called it the Tom factor because he was so powerful and their deals were so much like more likely to close if he joined the calls. But it wasn't his full-time job either. Like he also is connected to the product because he has like the special person who was a designer, was a four user of the product, and then talks to”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advocates are just so special and such a big part of Figma. And like I said, it took us so long to start charging or bringing a sales team. And when we first hired our first salesperson in our first sales rep, it was the same day that our”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, for sure. We all do that, right? Especially because so much of pro, like so many people have individual pro accounts, right? Because it's not necessarily a business or maybe it's a small business or you're an individual. And that's very different from an organization where someone else is paying for it.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's often instead of annoying because you have to like keep moving things in and out of like drasts. Just to not have to bother with it.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because the product is still growing, right? Like we just launched variables in dev mode back in at Config this year. And that influenced pricing and packaging and still is, right? And so at FigJam 2. And so I would say the core foundations aren't something we revisited a lot, but we're continually adding new features and we have to think about what tiers should they go in, what does that look like. So those things influence that all the time.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Charge for so true, you know, so many people, especially if you're a designer and you're working with a products manager, you can comment, right? And so much of this is to, yes, you can spread it and you can use Sigma for free for a really long time because you can just comment on the tool. And it also gets us through many more places with the organization and helps us be more useful to more people because, yeah, editors or viewers are”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has to be pretty natural because you don't have any people involved, right? And so it's like they have to just like do that on their own. And then when you go from pro to org or enterprise, it's more about the organization and like the scale. And that's where that design systems conversation comes in that we could talk about. But that was the thing that we really indexed on for Oregon Enterprise of like why you would want to upgrade from proto.org. So it's what it's like, it is like this multi-step process, but it's also nice because, you know, you can like increase your investment in the process, in the product as you're building your own confidence in the tool.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other interesting thing is, too, and I think I said this, but like so much of ours is like, so we have a couple tiers, we have a free tier, and then we have a pro tier, and then we have our org tier. And the free tier, you can just free tier includes this like free starter team. And so you can just do that, go to the thigma.com and go do that. Pro is all enter credit card. And then org as you talk to sales, Oregon Enterprise, you talk to sales. And so I think the other key thing here is like we get a lot of upsells to org from pro, right? And so it's not like it's also a thought of like, what do you put in org versus pro, right? So that's like the other decision because pro is also relatively inexpensive. So that grows a lot too really quickly and it's still very important to us. But still, most of our like marketing qualified leads, their sales leads, likely come from pro or from free, right? And so it's like the decisions that we think about are like, okay, what do you want to sell on? And it has to go from free to pro.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it was intuitive and it was more about the change management process of how to do that when people at this point were using the tool and using that starter tier and like setting people or what that looked like and for a long time you could also kind of get around that and just collaborate with people in drafts and just share a link too and we wanted to like shut that down so it was like a bigger decision on just change management but I think we intuitively knew it and it was much more about yeah to change management how to make that happen”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was that you could have unlimited files, but only collaborate with two or three people? And that was the starter team and they wanted to add more people to collaborate with. And then, you know, you hit the paywall. We realized that, wait a minute, that's hurting us. And so we switched it. And now it's like you can have three files, but unlimited collaborators. And that was huge for us. And that's a place where you can see it in the metrics very clearly, right? Where it was like, oh, this is really easy for people now to share before they just start paying. This is huge, right? And so then you get people to start using it for free with their teams. And the team's getting confidence in it before then they all have to start uploading it to like their procurement team or whoever it is to start paying for it. So not introducing payment too fast, right? And giving people that time to build that advocacy and to try it out with their teams, with people.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, cool. So the first one's making it the product easy to try and share. So we talked about this a little bit, but if you go to figma.com today, it's very easy to sign up for a free account, right? I have a free account myself on my personal side for designing my house, which is the thing I used to do before. But you just go and you can try the tool. And I think that's so important for us to allow someone to use it over time for a long time until they have confidence enough to be able to want to spread it within their organizations. But then it's also pretty easy to create a free team and share stuff with your organization, right? In the early days, we just, you could just share a link and that was it, right? And you could use the tool and everything was free. Once we implemented pricing, which was about two years after we launched, we had this thing called a starter team. And this is actually something that was switched. So initially, the way that it worked was our starter team.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sorry, that's our acronym for them, designer advocates, because they are so core to how we sell and how this works. The third is finding the operational thing that allows you to scale. For us, that's design systems, the thing that was the biggest blocker to somebody using Figma and turning it into your biggest reason to adopt. And then the last one was much more was still about maintaining and growing that connection with those internal champions over time. So those were the four things. And again, it looks different. Similar concepts with different ideas. Let me look at that in the early days versus like what we do today with it with scale.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, so again, I've got four things here, and I'll list them out and then we can go through them. The first is make it easy to try the tool and to share it without a lot of gates, right? So that you can do this. The second is those DAs. I want to talk about how those DAs work in our sales process. Oh, designers.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that too. We also just have fun. That's another big part of it as well. Yeah, I remember literally saying like, how can I make this more fun?”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technical content through that process and through config, and we're also able to with these people that we work with help them grow their own profiles, right? And that also helps them stay more connected to us, helps them become thought leaders in their own right. And so I think we're able to just draw so many different people who are the practitioners in the ICs because we're not just putting thought leadership out there. We're talking directly to how to use the tool and the things that individual contributors are still dealing with.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Config is such a good example. I remember I can happily talk about config. The way that we do config, I think I'd never run a conference before. Maybe that's probably part of it. And I brought somebody on who had, but she and I were both sitting together and being like, okay, like, so we're doing a conference. Like, how do we get the content for this conference? Like, what do we do? And we didn't know. And so we just decided, oh, like so much of what we do is like listen to our users. Let's put out this call for proposals and see what they want to talk about. And so that's how we got and get a lot of our content for the conference. And a lot of it comes back to what I was talking about earlier, which is very technical deep content that targets individual contributors for the practitioners of a tool. And through that process, we build these relationships with these speakers, our advocates help them shape their talks. And then I think that we do produce really strong.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. It's still how we get so much feedback, right? Is talking to people directly and Chris will come on and people have bugs and just respond to them. Like he's our CTO. Like people are just actively on there listening to people fixing bugs, responding.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have codified our values. It isn't explicitly listed out, which is interesting. But I think of it as our value, especially with our users, right? We think about our value a lot as fun with it. Community, love your craft. And all those definitely come through play. Maybe this should be one because I think it's so core to how we make decisions in our framework of when we have a decision, you know, which way we're going to go.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that that's when the tide started to turn of people giving us a chance to like prove that everything would be great, even when it's like the highest stakes and the hardest thing of still listening to people, maintaining that connection and not hiding behind the brand.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Onslaught on social, and you have to figure out what to do. And I remember the way that we announced it was we just retweeted Dylan. That was like all that we had said. Raji on our team, I remember I was talking to him about it and he was like, we've got to talk to our users. Like we just have to talk to them directly. We have to show where the same company. We just have to like not hide behind the brand. And he was totally right. And so I remember we decided that day that the next day we just had to have an open public forum where we could talk directly with our users and let them ask us any questions. And so we held a Twitter space the next day with Dylan and Shoe and Raji and Tom. And we just had it open and people could ask us anything they wanted and we were able to be just like really honest and transparent with them about everything that we could. And I think that that is just a really good example of how even when it's really, really, really, really hard, you still have to just be transparent.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And people were pissed, right? Things were not going well. Again, back on Twitter, we built the double edged sort of Twitter is like we build a strong communication channel through users and they communicate right back to you if they're not happy, right? So it's in them dating us. And I remember we did a public postmortem and we always do that. If something happens or something goes wrong, we're like, yeah, that was bad. Here's what happened and here's the technical reason and here's how we fixed it. And then we like tweeted that and promoted it and took just full accountability for it. And we always choose to make those choices when they're hard. And that was just one example. But I think the hardest example, and back to your question of like the most stressful days at Figma, the true most stressful day at Figma for me was the day that we announced the acquisition. That was like probably one of the harder moments of my career where my run social. That's like my job is running social and all of a sudden you have this.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And like in the marketing even, we'll pull examples like, oh, yeah, that's the one that the person who said that. So that one's big. And then let's transparency side, you know, I think where this gets hard at scale is, yeah, all of a sudden you have a lot of people who care about your products. And I think it's really easy as a brand because you are a brand at this point as you're getting bigger to be like, oh, I can hide behind my handle or the Figma handle or do I really have to say something about this, right? And so just two examples of things like that where you just, you know, we've chosen to be transparent when it wouldn't have to be or like, you know, you might not are downtime. Downtime is always a big deal. And I remember there was a specific instance, I think it was last year, maybe two years ago where there was like this issue with these servers and like an AWS cluster went down and we couldn't, we didn't know what was going on. And so we had downtime like multiple times in a week.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's another way that we do like the building with, and I think that even giving the engineers, we give them the ability to pick them, right? Like, so they're like, oh, yep, this tweet, I want to fix this bug.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's two examples. The one is building with users because I think this is a good one that I like to get into because you're like, how do you scale that? You don't have, you get so many bug requests. You go to our feature request page on our forum and it's just like so many. But also as you're building product, you're always like, oh, well, I could go do all of these fixes and bug updates. But I also have to go build new stuff, right? to grow. And that's always a tension with any company as you're looking at a roadmap. One of the ways that we saw done that and still continue to like focus on things that people care about that's so related to the craft and quality is through we do quality weeks with engineering. And then we decided a couple years ago we had this idea where we were like, oh, what if we package all of those quality updates?”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who oftentimes they find us more than we find them right? You couldn't just like post this job online and go source for it. It's like this will kind of emerge from the community. And then they love it so much and they know the product so well, their technical experts. But yes, they were, for the designer ones, they were all previously product designers.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that function has really grown with Figma. So now that's a whole team at Figma. It's a large team and it's scaled with us with every product that we launch. So now I have developer advocates, AGM advocates, and regionally. So we go into a new region and they're part of the landing team. Like we're in Japan. We need to find the Japan. Now we have two of them. It's the Japan Designer Advocate, right? Because it's just so core to how we do things and we've scaled that. So I think on the credibility side, I think that those advocates in scaling those advocates are like the magic dust that I always call them the magic dust that like make sure that we are able to build those relationships and stay authentic throughout everything we do.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source