Voice of the Customer Program Manager

Figma CEO Dylan Field on why design matters as AI makes coding easier. October 17, 2026 | 10:36 IST Figma is expanding from collaborative design into professional software development, with AI tools that help non-developers build products. CEO Dylan Field discusses the company's India expansion, enterprise strategy, and plans to connect design, coding & product development. Artificial intelligence is making software easier to build, but Figma CEO Dylan Field believes the ability to stand out will increasingly depend on design. The company is expanding beyond collaborative design into AI-powered coding and app creation, aiming to bring the process from an initial idea to a finished product onto a single platform. India is an important part of that strategy. It is Figma's second-largest market by daily active users, and the company is expanding its team in the country to serve customers better. In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Field discussed how AI is changing software development, why Figma wants to bring design and coding together, and how it plans to deepen its presence in India. "In a world where code is becoming a commodity," Field said, "what matters? It's design, it's craft, it's point of view, it's brand, it's your marketing." Why Figma wants to bring design and coding together Figma began as a collaborative design platform, but its ambition now extends across the product-development process. Field described the goal as building a "full-stack creative canvas" where teams can move from brainstorming and diagramming to creating working products, measuring their performance and using the results to decide what comes next. One of the products supporting this vision is Code Layers, which brings code onto Figma's existing canvas. It connects to a GitHub repository and coding tools, allowing users to create prototypes and contribute to a working codebase. The aim is to help designers, product managers and researchers participate more directly in software development without having to work primarily through a coding environment. Field said non-developers increasingly want to work with code but do not necessarily feel comfortable using an integrated development environment (IDE) or a terminal. "Our designer customers, product manager customers, researchers and other non-developers say that the terminal and the IDE don't feel like home," he said. "They ask, 'Can you build us the thing that feels like home?'" Figma is also developing Make, which provides a dedicated surface for creating, while Code Layers brings code into the existing canvas. Together, the products are intended to give non-developers more scope to experiment with ideas and contribute to professional development work. The broader ambition is to connect the stages of product creation rather than treat design and coding as separate activities. For Figma, the challenge is to make that workflow useful to businesses as well as individual creators. Why design could become more important in the AI era Field believes that making software easier to produce will not necessarily make it easier for businesses to attract users. He pointed to a growing gap between the number of applications being created and the number being used, arguing that the ability to build something quickly does not guarantee that people will want it. As AI makes coding more accessible, businesses will still need to decide what to build and how to distinguish their products from competing offerings. Field sees design as central to that process, encompassing not just appearance but also a product's identity, its appeal and the experience it offers customers. That does not mean engineers are becoming unnecessary. Field said Figma continues to hire engineers, but the nature of their work is changing as people in other roles gain the ability to undertake tasks that previously required coding expertise. He also believes companies developing AI products must anticipate what customers will need in the future rather than build only for current requirements. At Figma, that involves using its own tools internally, testing their limitations and experimenting with approaches that have not been tried before. The argument underpinning Figma's strategy is that if producing software becomes easier, deciding what is worth building and creating a product that people want to use will remain difficult. India: moving beyond user adoption India is already a significant market for Figma by user numbers. Field confirmed that it is the company's second-largest market by daily active users, although he did not disclose revenue figures or provide a specific growth target. The company is expanding its Indian team, with plans to strengthen customer-facing functions and potentially move further into product design and innovation over time. Field said Figma's experience in other markets has typically involved an initial focus on sales, followed by investment in customer advocacy, developer relations and more product-facing work. For now, he said, the priority is to serve customers better, including businesses already using Figma at scale. He did not identify converting users into paying customers as the main challenge facing the company in India. That approach also involves adapting products to local requirements. Field cited multilingual translation and voice interfaces as examples of areas where Indian customers may have different needs from users elsewhere. He also expressed interest in getting more students in India to use Figma, while acknowledging that verifying student eligibility can be difficult. The company's expanding presence therefore involves more than building its user base. It wants to develop closer relationships with customers and ensure its products address their specific requirements. How Figma views the competition Figma faces competition from established software companies and newer AI-focused businesses. Field described Adobe more as a potential partner, saying it operates in areas that Figma does not cover and does not intend to enter. He sees companies such as Lovable and Replit as serving people who want to build applications for the first time. Figma, by contrast, is focused on businesses and professionals with specific outcomes to achieve. That distinction helps explain why Figma is investing in tools that let non-developers contribute to professional workflows rather than simply generate applications. However, Field acknowledged that new competitors are entering the market regularly and bringing forward ideas that could reshape the industry. Figma must also turn its product vision into tools that work reliably for a broad range of customers. Field said Code Layers and Sites have been rolled out in open beta, and ensuring that they serve all use cases and customers around the world will require further work. AI safety remains an open question Beyond competition and product development, Field acknowledged that the pace of AI development has raised questions about safety and oversight. Asked whether sufficient guardrails were in place, he said: "No, and I think we're getting there. I hope we get there faster."

Figma launches AI agent tools and Specs editor at Config India. Figma used its first Config event in India to announce a suite of features designed to give AI agents clearer rules to follow when generating designs, including a new Markdown-based editor called Figma Specs and a deeper integration with the headless CMS it acquired in 2025. The announcements, reported by TechCrunch, came as the company expanded its agent-on-canvas feature to a broader user base and moved its code layers tool from private to public beta. Config India 2026 drew more than 30,000 registrants in-person and virtually, making it Figma's largest international conference to date, according to the company's official blog. Figma also said that India is its biggest market by users outside the United States, and that its platform is used by 40% of India's top 100 companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange. Specs, code layers and the agent question. The centrepiece of the product announcements is Figma Specs, a Markdown editor that lets teams document their design language in a single, shareable file. The document can live as a standalone file or sit directly on the canvas alongside designs. Teams can embed FigJam diagrams, reference canvas elements, pull in design and code libraries, and add guidelines, creating what Figma describes as a centralised system that both human teammates and AI agents can consult when building to a brand's rules. The rationale behind Specs sits alongside a broader point the company made about AI's relationship with software production. Figma's chief design officer Loredana Crisan put it in terms of output versus releases: 'There are 17-times more lines of code being produced today than in the past. But when you're looking at releases, only 1.3-times more releases.' Much of that code, she argued, is written not to ship but to explore: 'It's built to design.' Crisan added that Figma sees itself as 'the place where software teams come to decide what they build and ship.' Because AI generation is inherently non-deterministic, the company said it is providing tools such as Specs to steer agents towards more predictable outcomes. Code layers, which adds coding capabilities directly to canvas designs for more interactive prototypes, was first announced in private beta in June. At the India event, Figma moved it to public beta, allowing users to prompt an agent to convert a design into code or to iterate on a specific section of a prototype. Payload integration and expanding MCP partnerships. Figma acquired the open-source headless CMS Payload in 2025. At Config India, it announced the integration of Payload with Figma Make, its product for generating dynamic websites, giving teams a built-in backend and an editing panel to manage content (creating articles, swapping media, tagging content and publishing updates) without leaving Figma. According to the Figma blog announcing the integration, Payload's downloads have grown sixfold in the past 12 months, and it is now described by Figma as the fastest-growing open-source CMS on NPM. Figma also said it is now supporting over 20 new tools through its Model Context Protocol, with new partners including Open Code, Dia, Grok Bot, and Indian AI startup Sarvam. Sarvam's Indus joins an existing list that includes Claude Code, ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Xcode, and VS Code, among others. Separately, Figma's SEC annual filing noted that the company also acquired Weavy, now branded Figma Weave, in 2025, to help build out image and video capabilities, a deal disclosed in the company's SEC 10-K filing. India as a strategic market. Figma opened its first India office in late 2025, covering sales, partnership, go-to-market, and product support. The company launched a Hindi localisation of its product earlier in 2026, ahead of Config India, and continues to hire locally. As of 30 September 2026, Figma employed approximately 2,200 people globally. The company did not give a specific timeline for further India-focused product updates, but the Config event marks the most concentrated set of announcements it has made for that market to date. Funke Adeyemi spent a decade in corporate banking and fintech before moving to business journalism. She started in trade finance at a major UK bank, moved to a payments company scaling into African markets, and spent her last role leading partnerships at a cross-border remittance platform. She writes about business strategy, fintech, digital banking, and the corporate news that moves markets. She is interested in how companies actually make money rather than how they describe making money in investor presentations. Funke lives in South London. She reads earnings calls the way other people listen to podcasts, and finds them about as reliable. 15/10/2026 12/10/2026 11/10/2026