Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify and Zora are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile. It's because Wallace data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster. If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny. As an outsider, it feels like Figma is just always firing in all cylinders, shipping the best product. People love it. I use it, I should've mentioned this, but I use it probably every day for my newsletter for illustrations and banners and all this stuff. Yeah, I don't know what I do without it. And it always feels like Figma is just killing it. I know that's never the reality. I'm curious, is there a story of something that just, maybe, didn't work out the way you hoped? Whether it's a feature, a launch, or something like that that just shows people that it's, not everything always works out. We run experiments all the time that don't come back with winning results, and we certainly have built a lot of more complex features that took a while to take off. So a good example of this is in the design system space, we have something called branching and merging. And branching and merging is this workflow of maybe you're building a really complex design system, and then you don't want anyone ever randomly touching your components that are used by thousands of other projects, so you create this workflow of, someone, maybe, effectively suggesting a change, you're reviewing it and then pushing it in. And so, in theory, makes a lot of sense and things that our customers asked us for, but once we built it, in the initial stages, just didn't really see that much adoption and didn't feel great because it's a really big investment for us. It's a lot of work that we put into it and there's just many different reasons. Some of it was performance, some of it was, this is a foreign workflow and it just takes time, and us helping customers implement some of those workflows, we realized some gaps because we don't really use it that much ourselves. And so, I think as we're getting bigger, one of the things that I'm realizing is that we're starting to build a lot of features that are not, necessarily, for organizations like ours. And when we do that, we really need to be creative about how we understand how effective those are because we've had such a strong culture of internal testing and dogs looting, and those are the things that really helped make sure the quality of our product was good enough. But now we're working with really new types of customers and needing to push ourselves and build that muscle, as well.…

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