Follow-the-Workflow Expansion
Find your next product by tracing the user's end-to-end journey and carving out the steps that overload your core tool.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
A method for deciding what product to build next: map the full workflow your users already move through, watch which adjacent jobs they keep hacking into your core product, and spin those out as dedicated surfaces before they add complexity to the core. Use it when a single-product company is deciding whether and where to expand into a second, third, or Nth product.
Origin
Dylan Field explained how Figma went from one product to many (FigJam, Slides, Buzz, Sites, Dev Mode, Make) not by chasing markets but by tracing the creative workflow from idea to shipped product and noticing which jobs users were already forcing into Figma Design.
Core principles
- 01Map the whole journey from idea to shipped product, then place each product on it.
- 02Watch for jobs users are cramming into your core product that add complexity for everyone.
- 03Pull a job out into its own surface when keeping it in the core would burden other use cases.
- 04Going from one product to two is the hard leap; two to N is much easier.
How to run it
- 1
Trace the end-to-end workflow
Lay out the full sequence your users move through (for Figma: idea > brainstorm > design > develop > ship) and locate where your existing product(s) sit on it.
Pro tip Frame expansion as completing a journey the user already wants to finish, e.g. 'I've designed a website, now I want to ship it.'
- 2
Spot the overloaded core
Identify jobs users are already doing inside your core product that it wasn't built for (slides made in Figma Design, whiteboarding, brand-consistent bulk asset creation).
- 3
Test whether to extract
Ask whether packing the job into the core would add complexity for the job itself AND for existing users. If yes for both, it should become its own surface.
Watch out Don't extract prematurely; some requests are better served inside the core. The test is mutual complexity, not raw demand.
- 4
Extract and connect
Build the dedicated surface, then invest in interoperability (round-tripping, MCP) so the new product feeds back into the workflow rather than becoming a dead end.
Pro tip Make the round trip work both ways; an extracted product's output should flow back into the core.
In the wild
Figma noticed people making slides, whiteboards, and off-brand marketing assets inside Figma Design. Packing all of that into the core would have made it complex for those jobs and for existing designers, so each was pulled out: whiteboarding became FigJam, slides became Figma Slides, brand-safe bulk creation became Buzz.
→ A multi-product platform covering the whole idea-to-ship workflow instead of one bloated design tool.
Users kept saying 'I've designed a website, now what? I want to ship it.' Figma built Sites as a publishing surface to close that step of the workflow.
→ A new product that let users complete a journey they were already starting.
Common mistakes
Cramming every request into the core product
Trying to satisfy adjacent use cases inside one product adds complexity for both the new job and existing users; the workflow lens tells you when to extract instead.
Treating the second product like the tenth
The one-to-two jump is uniquely hard because it splits company focus; underestimating it stalls the whole expansion.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and product leaders at a successful single-product company deciding whether and where to launch a second product line.
Not ideal for
Pre-product-market-fit teams who haven't yet made their core product great; expand only from strength.
From the transcript
“Just like we noticed there's slides made in Figma design, pulled it out and made Figma slides, whiteboarding, pulled that”
“People want to complete that journey. I've designed a website. Now what? I want to ship it.”
“for a second (31:00) product it's very hard to go from one to two going from two to n is much easier but going one…”
From the episode
Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups
Dylan Field