Dylan Field: belief

Transcript context

…I'm curious how your leadership style has evolved over the years. Figma has been around for 13 years, as we've been talking about. If you were to compare, say, Dylan 10 years ago to the Dylan of today, what would you say is most different? There's a lot of zero to one on management that I need to learn. I came in never having managed a team and it turns out you can just call yourself a CEO, but I might've had some leadership skills. I think I had a lot to learn on the management side. Until Sho started as first director of engineering, then he moved into product later, he's just a very multi-talented guy, but he taught me a ton about management. This has been our theme. A lot of the people I've hired as leaders I've learned so much from. But outside of that zero to one, where I just had a lot to understand about how to manage folks, I think on the leadership side, it's the same lessons over and over again. I keep learning them and then forgetting and worrying them again, and I think I get a little better every time. But one of them is just, how do you unpack context? How do you get the context you've got in your head and really unpack it for a group? Another is, how to make sure that you're showing up in a way that folks know that we're all working towards the same goal? Like I said, I can definitely get into intense mode where I'm asking a lot of questions, but it's always from a place of trying to understand or trying to figure out something together, and making sure I show up the right way there is important. Yeah, I would say just clarity is the thing that I circle back to the most right now. Clarity around where are we all going as a company, but also clarity for any individual team. If there's a lack of clarity, how do I help clear the way, but also how do I teach others just to be as direct as possible to unpack that, to create the clarity themselves too? Those are just some of the things that I count the most. There are so many threads I'd love to follow here. Maybe just this last one on clarity is such an important skill for leaders, for product builders. Is there anything specific there that you try to do to improve your clarity?…

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