Forward Deployed Engineer

App to help diners with visual impairment at hawker centres among ideas at inaugural challenge. (From left) Tay Yu Qing and Genevieve Yip, product designers from the Skills and Workforce Development Agency; Ho Yin Mei, a principal design lead from the Ministry of Social and Family Development; and Jeffrey Ang, a principal architect from the Urban Redevelopment Authority. Published Oct 21, 2026, 06:45 PM Updated Oct 21, 2026, 10:31 PM SINGAPORE - Finding an empty table in a packed hawker centre is hard enough, let alone for persons with visual impairments. An app that is being developed seeks to help them with this aspect of dining out through audio guidance over a paired Bluetooth earpiece or pair of smart glasses, though this is just one step of a complex journey for them. Named LetsGo, the app prototype will tell the user "occupied table" or "empty table" when the user points their phone camera at their surroundings. It is among several prototypes showcased on Oct 21 under the inaugural Inclusive Design Challenge (IDC) organised by GovTech Singapore in collaboration with Microsoft and software company Figma. Held as part of GovTech Singapore's annual Inclusive Design Week (IDW), the challenge aims to put users at the heart of the design process. "For Singapore, our ambition for digital inclusion must reach higher," said Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo in launching IDC on Oct 21. "Having achieved the basics of broadband and device access, we have focused on building skills, including for seniors and disadvantaged communities. But we must not stop there. We must instead do better to identify groups who still have difficulty getting the most out of digital."

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."