Figma Slides

We knew designers were already making thousands of decks in Figma Design, but it was tough for their cross-functional teammates to participate or contribute in such a design-centric environment.

Develop a dedicated editor for crafting presentations and decks, with a mix of simple, intuitive default tools and Figma's world-class design capabilities—a space for the entire team.

I played a hybrid designer-writer role, split between:

• Design: Templates, onboarding, AI features, launch assets.
• Content: UX writing, type/style naming, tooltips, keyboard shortcuts, etc.

The team included:

• Design: Keeyen Yeo / Jakub Swiadek / Natasha Tenggoro
• Product: Mihika Kapoor
• Eng: Laura Pang, Silas Tsui, Noah Finer, Jon Kaufman, and so many more.

Slides needed an AI feature, but only if it was genuinely useful. The obvious bets were image and layout generation—the flashier options, and the ones every other tool was chasing. We went the other way and scoped to text, where LLMs were already reliable and where our timeline gave us a real shot at shipping something good. The tradeoff was explicit: Slides would help you write a presentation, not design one.

That left the harder question of how. Rather than generate finished copy, we bet on a flexible model that let people push tone and length until something fit—the Tone Dial, a joint idea with another designer on the team. I defined its language axes, which I get into below.

Research showed that the non-design audience leaned heavily on templates to get started, which meant we'd need our own. I managed an agency through exploration and a first draft, then polished and produced the final assets. But one question was mine to answer: what should the placeholder content actually say?

The generic answer is "Title" and "Body." I went the other way—every layer should teach the slide it sits on. "A bold, memorable headline," not "Title." Opinionated content is a bet: it has to be right, and it's far more work than filler. It also made each template self-explanatory, and made the whole thing sound like Figma rather than like any other presentation tool.

Slides blended two modes—Slides and Design—and the two audiences arrive differently: designers with deep muscle memory, non-designers with none. So the call was whether to preserve Figma's existing shortcuts wholesale, or reset and pick more intuitive ones for everyone.

I split it by whether the mental model carried over. Switching props panels in Slides is the same act as switching props panels in Design, so those stayed identical and designers kept their reflexes where the parallel was real. Where the action was genuinely new, I chose intuition over consistency—⇧S for a new slide. Everyone was learning something regardless, since the tool itself was new; the point was to spend that cost only where it bought something.

Slides was one of the flagship announcements at Config '24—Dylan closed the keynote by revealing he'd been presenting in it the whole time, and it got the loudest reaction of the show. The enthusiasm was real—millions of decks got made in the first year—but it didn't hold. Slides settled into being a nice-to-use product rather than one you'd upgrade for.

While many saw value in Slides, the switching costs (from Google Slides, Canva, etc.) were high, particularly in sales & enablement. Since then it's been a slow burn, growing within teams who are already in the Figma ecosystem—a stickiness product, but not a monetization driver.

Figma has never broken out a Slides revenue or usage number—not in the S-1, the FY2025 10-K, or any earnings call. Slides' job was never its own line anyway: it was raising what a seat is worth and deepening multi-product attach. I can't isolate what Slides contributed to either, and I'd rather say so than borrow a number the whole portfolio earned.