"The Age of the Designer Alone Is Over" How Figma’s Sho Kuwamoto Sees AI Redefining Creation and Collaboration - 매드타임스

[ 매드타임스 최영호 기자] AI is no longer just a tool to make design faster—it is a force reshaping who creates and who decides. With AI-native features such as Figma Make, Figma is breaking down the traditional boundaries between design, development, and product strategy, advancing a new order where design is everyone’s business. In an interview with MADTimes, Sho Kuwamoto, Vice President of Product at Figma, discusses how AI is transforming the role of designers, redefining product sense, and fundamentally changing the way teams create and collaborate. Among the AI features Figma has recently introduced—such as Figma Make, Sites, Draw, and Dev Mode—which do you believe have the greatest potential to change the way designers think or collaborate? Figma has evolved from a design tool to an AI-powered platform that enables collaboration across the product development process. Figma Make, our AI-native tool to turn prompts or existing designs into working prototypes and apps, is democratizing the design and product development process. It helps users at all skill levels quickly explore and iterate on ideas. As part of Figma’s broader platform, users can also seamlessly start with an existing design, or bring their Figma Make result back to the design canvas to continue riffing with the tools they know best. How is the rapid advancement of AI reshaping the role, skill set, and client relationships of designers? Do you see designers moving toward more strategic or technical responsibilities in the future? Increasingly, roles are shifting and the boundaries between them are less defined — designers now have access to code, while product managers and developers can experiment with design tools. We recently conducted a study that found 91% of product builders have taken on a major new responsibility in the past year. It also showed that design skills are spreading well beyond design roles, with the majority of non-designers reporting they now engage in design tasks. We believe the more people who participate in design, the better. That’s why we like to say “design is everyone’s business.” As AI continues to evolve, I expect roles will continue to blur, and design will rise as the most critical part of turning your ideas into products. Figma often emphasizes how “little things” can have an outsized impact on product experience. Could you share a recent example of a small improvement that delivered significant value to users? We launched a feature called multi-edit, which simplifies how you edit multiple objects across Figma. Now that it exists, multi-edit feels like a natural part of Figma and makes us wonder how we ever got along without it Multi-edit took many years to polish and iterate, yet the feature itself is barely noticeable once you get used to it. It made us realize how inefficient it was to edit multiple objects before. Figma is well known for its culture of “customer obsession.” How does this value translate into your product development process, and can you share an example where user feedback was quickly reflected in the product? Customer obsession is something that we built into Figma’s culture from the very early days. Everyone at the company is encouraged to talk to users and gather feedback to improve our products and features This also helps us know what to prioritize — I recently posted on social media to ask whether users would prefer if we focus on making our auto layout feature easier to understand and use, or if they’d prefer we add more powerful capabilities. It was a helpful way to gather qualitative and quantitative feedback. The customers decide what’s going to be successful or not, which is why I was so grateful to speak with our Korean customers and learn what's needed in this market. Figma has long collaborated closely with its early champions and core user communities. How do you continue to nurture these relationships today, and how do they inform your product strategy? Figma’s Community is foundational to who we are, what we build and how we show up in the world! Our biggest Community investments are: Config is our flagship conference for people who build products. Held annually in San Francisco, thousands of people come to learn and connect. Friends of Figma is our global creator community, consisting of hundreds of chapters worldwide. In Seoul, our Friends of Figma Community has over 1,400 active members. These community-run events bring together like-minded individuals to collaborate, learn, and grow. The Figma Community enables creators to build and publish plugins, widgets, files and other resources. There are over 10,000 widgets and plugins available on Figma Community. Figma also launched the Creator Fund, a grants program to incentivize creators to make free resources. How do you personally define “product sense”? And within Figma, how do teams collectively develop and share this sensibility across the organization? At the core of product development is problem solving — in order to