The Practitioner Advocate Role (The Tom Factor)
Hire a passionate user from your community into marketing and sales — no quota, no CRM.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 92%
Figma's highest-leverage GTM hire was not a marketer or a salesperson but a Designer Advocate — a passionate user from the community, previously a product designer, whose full-time job was talking to users, creating content, joining sales calls, and carrying feedback back to the product team. Butler calls the role 'the magic dust' and Figma scaled it into a full team spanning products and regions.
Origin
Claire Butler's first hire at Figma, roughly six months after launch, was a designer advocate rather than a marketer. She credits the same mechanism used by Datadog, which hired engineers to write its blog posts. The 'Tom Factor' name emerged from the sales team's observation about Tom Lowry, Figma's second Designer Advocate.
Core principles
- 01A marketer will never have a designer's credibility with designers; the same is true of a salesperson.
- 02The advocate must be a genuine, pre-existing passionate user — you cannot post the job and source for it.
- 03Keep them off the sales team, off a quota, and out of the CRM; their value is that they are not selling.
- 04Because they talk to hundreds of customers and know the tool deeply, they become the best synthesizer of product feedback in the company.
How to run it
- 1
Find them in your user base, don't recruit them
Look for the person who already loves the product with unusual passion and is technically expert in the craft. They tend to find you rather than the reverse.
Pro tip The ideal profile is someone who was themselves an internal champion — they brought your tool into their previous company.
Watch out You cannot manufacture this profile from a job posting; passion for the craft cannot be interviewed into existence.
- 2
Make marketing their first partner
Pair the advocate with the marketer as a permanent gut-check on everything: pitch, copy, positioning, tone.
Pro tip Their most valuable output is often 'that's too thirsty' or 'you're using a fluff word again'.
- 3
Insert them into the sales process without making them sales
When you hire your first salesperson, hire (or start) an advocate the same day. The advocate joins customer calls to explain the product designer-to-designer — unblocking, best practices, real workflows — never pitching.
Pro tip Track whether deals with advocate involvement close at a higher rate; at Figma this effect was named 'the Tom Factor'.
Watch out Never give them a quota, a CRM, or a sales-team reporting line, or you destroy the credibility that makes them work.
- 4
Close the loop back to product
Route their synthesized customer feedback into the product team; they hold more context than any PM because they combine practitioner expertise with hundreds of customer conversations.
- 5
Scale the role with the company
Add advocates per product line and per region as you expand — developer advocates for a developer product, a local advocate as part of every new-market landing team.
Pro tip Figma treats the advocate as a landing-team requirement when entering a new region, e.g. two Japan designer advocates.
In the wild
Tom Lowry started as Figma's Designer Advocate on the same day as its first salesperson. He had been the internal champion who brought Figma into his previous company. Sales reps began informally asking him to join calls to explain the product to other designers.
→ Deals were significantly more likely to close when he joined the call; the effect was named 'the Tom Factor' and the role became a scaled team he now leads.
Roughly six months after launch, given headcount for a marketing hire, Butler hired a designer advocate from Figma's user base instead — someone who already loved the product and could talk to users, write content and carry feedback back full-time.
→ The advocate became the mechanism that let Figma's non-marketing credibility strategy scale beyond the engineers and designers who had no time for it.
Common mistakes
Hiring a marketer to speak to a technical audience
The audience will detect the lack of practitioner credibility no matter how good the copy is. The credibility is in the person, not the message.
Putting the advocate on the sales team
A quota or CRM turns the advocate into a salesperson in the customer's eyes, which destroys the exact trust that makes them close deals.
Is it for you?
Best for
Technical B2B products approaching or scaling their first sales motion with a craft-driven practitioner user base
Not ideal for
Products with no expert practitioner community, or teams that need pure pipeline generation rather than credibility
From the transcript
“the first person I hired was actually a designer advocate so was not a marketer it was someone who was a designer”
“they ended up calling it The Tom Factor”
“I would never have the credibility with designers that a designer has same is true with sales”
“he was never a salesperson never had CR a quota doesn't live on the sales team”
From the episode
An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion
Claire Butler (first GTM hire)