Dylan Field live at Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:02)
Today, I'm excited to bring you a very special episode which was recorded live at Figma Config with Figma's CEO and co-founder Dylan Field in front of a live audience at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is the first ever live recording of this podcast, and it was so much fun. If you watch this on YouTube, you can see the epic stage that they built specifically for us to recreate my podcast studio. I could not be more thankful to the Config team for making this happen.
In my conversation with Dylan, we dig into how he builds and refines his product taste and intuition. How intuition is a hypothesis generator, the future of product management, how Dylan attempts to operationalize keeping Figma simple and to continue simplifying the experience, a bunch of stories from the early days of Figma that I've never heard before. Also he shares his favorite AI tool called WebSim, which is wild. And if you wait till the very end, you can see a very young child actor Dylan Field in a clip that I found online that was hilarious. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Dylan Field.
Dylan, thank you so much for joining me and welcome to the podcast.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:16)
Thank you, Enny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:18)
Hi all.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:22)
Is this your first live podcast?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:24)
This is my first ever live podcast. Also, a big thank you to the Config team who set up this crazy studio. I had no idea this was going to happen. I feel like I'm in my studio here with a thousand people watching us.
It's very impressive.

**Dylan Field** (1:36)
I very much dig the background and also the mics that may or may not be wired.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:40)
That's right. Don't say that. Don't tell people.

**Dylan Field** (1:42)
Oh, sorry.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:43)
There's no wires coming out of them.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:45)
There's no one behind the curtain either.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:47)
Okay, so Dylan, I want to start by just checking in on how you're doing. So Config is about to wrap up.
You've been at it for two days now.
I know how much Lyft goes into doing these sorts of things. I imagine you've been thinking about this for a long time now. I'm just curious how you're doing. Any surprises? Any highlights? Any lowlights?

**Dylan Field** (2:06)
The highlight is the community and just the incredible, incredible people here at Config.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:12)
Yeah.
Y'all are awesome. I don't know why I keep talking in the mic like this. It's instinctual.

**Dylan Field** (2:21)
But seriously, it's just the most amazing community to be part of, and I feel so lucky. And then in terms of how I'm doing this exact moment, like exhausted, but riding on caffeine and whatever this really cool probiotic drink is.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:36)
Any surprises from the past couple days? Anything that's like, oh wow, that went a lot better than I thought, maybe less well?

**Dylan Field** (2:43)
I mean, like, you know, demo, definitely things I would have improved.
But also like the Emil and Mihika were phenomenal. And it was just like so awesome to see them do their demos and present materials. And then, yeah, I was just really pleased with the conversation. I think that's getting started at Config around AI. And I think that, you know, I was looking online, on social media, and I think people are already kind of like zeroing in the right conversation, which is okay in a world of, you know, more software being created by AI.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:21)
What does that mean?

**Dylan Field** (3:22)
And you know, the impact on craft and the impact on quality and the need to have more unique design and how design is a differentiator. And I think some people are saying I agree with that. Some people are saying that I disagree with that. And that's exactly the bounds of what the conversation I kind of imagined would emerge from yesterday.
You know, it was funny, the make design feature, you know, anything I said on the keynote, I was like, this is going to give you the most obvious thing in the most obvious form possible. And then people online are like, it's just going to give you some obvious thing.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:05)
I agree.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:10)
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