Community-Led Growth: Equip the Champion
The salesperson is the designer inside the company — your job is to make them a superhero.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 90%
Yamashita reframes Figma's famous product-led growth as community-led growth. The person actually selling Figma inside an account is not the sales rep — it is an internal designer who loves the product. So the entire growth machine is built around identifying that champion and equipping them: with data, with stories, with connections to the rest of their org, and critically with a philosophy — a controversial point of view about a new way of working that they can champion, not just a tool they can request.
Origin
Figma's own founding: Dylan Field mapped the social graph of the most influential designers on Twitter and targeted them deliberately (later open-sourcing the code). Yamashita notes the pattern parallels Notion's community-driven growth. Lenny connects it to Airbnb's early growth team mantra 'love drives growth, not the other way around.'
Core principles
- 01You are not selling a tool; you are selling a new way of working that people will champion.
- 02The champion needs an irrational, emotional love for the product — that is the prerequisite, not the outcome.
- 03The love must be authentic internally first before it can be authentic externally.
- 04A controversial idea creates narrative tension — and tension is the signal you are part of a revolution.
- 05Sales' job is to equip and connect the champion, not to replace them.
How to run it
- 1
Solve the problem so well the response is emotional
The base requirement is an almost irrational, emotional love for the product — people singing about it at the top of their lungs. No amount of equipping substitutes for this.
Watch out Cultivate this internally first — your own people have to authentically love the thing to stand behind it.
- 2
Attach a philosophy people can champion
Give users not just a tool but a controversial belief about how work should change. Figma's was radical transparency in design: everyone can see what you're doing, multiple designers in one file at once.
Pro tip The controversy is the point. An early response to Figma was 'if this is the future of design, I'm quitting, I'm changing careers.' That narrative tension is the signal you're changing something real.
Watch out This requires a genuinely big mission. It's a tall order and cannot be manufactured out of a feature.
- 3
Target the influential nodes deliberately
Identify the specific people whose adoption unlocks the community, and be very intentional about winning them over.
Pro tip Dylan Field built a social graph of the most influential designers on Twitter and used it as the go-to-market strategy.
- 4
Make sharing work the default unit of community
Let users share out what they built — effectively open-sourcing 'here's how we do it at XYZ company.' The insider view into how other companies work is what drives the organic conversation.
- 5
Build the human connective tissue
Run a formal program that convenes champions across geographies so they meet regularly and evangelize together. Figma calls theirs 'Friends of Figma,' organized around a Discord channel.
- 6
Arm the champion for the internal sale
Have sales and product jointly equip the internal champion — connect them to the rest of their company, give them the data and stories to make the case, and share where the product is heading and what other customers are doing.
Pro tip Ask literally: how do we set this person up for success in their own org?
Watch out If sales tries to be the salesperson instead of the champion, you lose the credibility that came from a peer advocating.
In the wild
In Figma's early days, Dylan Field built a social graph of the most influential designers on Twitter and was very intentional about which designers Figma needed to win over — later open-sourcing the code that produced it. In parallel, he consistently put the product in front of designers, took their feedback, and came back with it implemented.
→ Those designers became evangelists who shaped the product and then advocated for Figma inside their own companies — the origin of Figma's community engine, with no expectation that any single designer would immediately roll it out org-wide.
One of the earliest reactions to Figma's multiplayer, everyone-can-see-your-work model was a designer saying that if this was the future of design, they were changing careers. Rather than treating that as a rejection, Figma read it as narrative tension — proof the product carried a controversial philosophy about how design should work.
→ Champions ended up campaigning not just for a tool but for a new way of working, which is what Yamashita identifies as the thing people can genuinely get behind.
Common mistakes
Calling it product-led growth and stopping at the product
The product creates the love, but growth happens through a human — the champion inside the account. Optimizing self-serve funnels while ignoring how to equip that person leaves the actual growth mechanism unsupported.
Shipping a tool with no philosophy
People will not evangelize a feature set. Without a controversial point of view about a new way of working, there is nothing for a champion to campaign for and the emotional response never forms.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and product leaders of horizontal B2B tools with a passionate end-user community, trying to convert bottom-up love into org-wide deployments.
Not ideal for
Top-down enterprise products with no individual end-user champion, or commodity utilities where an emotional response is not plausible.
From the transcript
“we talk about product-like growth but in some ways you know I I like to think about it more as kind of like community-led growth”
“the space of like figma is not the sales team but in fact it's the internal you know designer”
“I think a lot of it was about the level of intention around building community and the more there are organic conversations happening about stigma…”
“a program called friends of figma where we have people who are passing about figma in all different geographies kind of like come together in…”
“it's not just that they're tempting for a tool they're also championing for like a new way of working”
From the episode
An inside look at how Figma builds product
Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)