Writing

Are We All Just Figma Operators Now?

As thousands of designers settled into a cavernous event space on the outskirts of London—laptop bags slung over shoulders, Stanley cups of cold brew in hand, waiting to hear about the latest feature roadmap from Figma—it struck me how familiar this all felt. Not just the scale and spectacle, but the underlying dynamic.

The Need for Speed: How Startups Can Improve Product Velocity

For most startup founders, product velocity—the speed and consistency with which your team ships meaningful updates—is an obsession. And rightly so. In the early stages of a company, momentum is everything. The ability to move quickly can be the difference between winning early users or losing them to a better, faster-moving competitor.

But speed alone isn’t enough. High product velocity isn’t about frantic execution or cutting corners. It’s about consistently delivering value in a fast, focused, and sustainable way. And after working with dozens of early-stage startups, I’ve found it typically comes down to seven key principles.

When Everything is on Fire, Founders Sometimes Struggle to See the Wood for the Trees

In 1949, a crew of elite smoke-jumpers parachuted into Montana’s Mann Gulch to fight what looked like a routine wildfire. But within hours, the fire turned deadly. As the flames roared up the slope, their leader, Wagner Dodge, made a radical move: he lit a fire of his own. By burning the grass ahead of him, he created a patch of scorched earth the wildfire couldn’t cross. He lay in the ashes as the main fire swept over.