The Champion Amplification Flywheel
Grow your internal champions' careers, and their credibility becomes your credibility.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 88%
The final step of Figma's motion: once someone has championed you inside their organization, the relationship never ends — and you owe them something beyond the tool. Figma uses its platform to give champions speaking slots, social amplification and thought-leadership status, which serves them (career growth) and Figma (new practitioner credibility from an independent voice), closing the loop back to step one.
Origin
Claire Butler's description of how Figma maintains internal champions at scale, expressed through Config (its conference), Schema (its design-systems conference), and its social amplification of practitioners.
Core principles
- 01Champions do not go away — and sometimes they get publicly angry at you.
- 02You have direct control over things champions want but cannot easily get: a stage, an audience, a platform.
- 03A champion amplified into a thought leader generates credibility for you that you could never buy.
- 04Content that comes from practitioners is the only content practitioners want.
How to run it
- 1
Keep the line open, including when they're angry
Monitor and respond immediately when a champion at a major account complains publicly. Reach out, understand what they want and what's wrong.
Watch out Silence from a champion who has publicly criticised you is how you lose an entire account.
- 2
Source your event content from them, not from thought leadership
Run an open call for proposals and let users tell you what they want to talk about. The result is technical, practitioner-level content aimed at ICs rather than executive-level fluff.
Pro tip Have your advocates help each speaker shape their talk — it improves quality and deepens the relationship.
Watch out Generic thought-leadership programming loses exactly the IC audience this motion depends on.
- 3
Amplify them deliberately
Put them on your stage, promote them on social, and actively help them become thought leaders in their own right.
Pro tip Champions who got promoted for bringing your tool in are the strongest case studies you will ever have.
- 4
Let their credibility feed back into acquisition
Their technical talks and posts show other practitioners how to do the craft in your product — which is credibility building (step one) performed by someone who isn't you.
Pro tip This is what closes the flywheel: champion amplification is your top-of-funnel.
In the wild
Butler had never run a conference. Instead of curating speakers top-down, Figma applied its listening habit: an open call for proposals, letting users propose what they wanted to talk about, with Figma's advocates helping them shape the talks.
→ Config became a deeply technical, practitioner-focused event — described by an attendee as feeling like a rock concert, not a conference — and a major engine of Figma's community credibility.
Figma runs a dedicated conference, Schema, where advanced design-systems practitioners show exactly how they work — helping them build their own profiles while generating the technical content Figma's audience wants.
→ Champions become independent thought leaders whose credibility flows back to Figma, generating new designer interest without Figma marketing at anyone.
Common mistakes
Treating a closed deal as a finished relationship
The champion who brought you in remains your lifeline inside that organization. Neglect them and you lose both the account and a public advocate.
Giving champions nothing but the product
Champions took a personal risk on you. If the only thing they get back is the tool they already have, the relationship has no upside for them and will decay.
Is it for you?
Best for
Community, advocacy and GTM leaders at a product that already has internal champions and a platform (events, social) to give away
Not ideal for
Pre-traction companies with no champions yet, or products whose users have no professional identity tied to the craft
From the transcript
“you have to keep that relationship going with those Champions forever like they don't go”
“we're going to amplify you on social we're going to promote you and make you a thought leader”
“let's put out this call for proposals and see what they want to talk about”
From the episode
An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion
Claire Butler (first GTM hire)