Some people are natural managers. Others need a bit more time to figure it out.
Before Dylan Field cofounded Figma, he interned at companies like Flipboard and LinkedIn. He’d never been a manager. Now, his company has over 1,600 employees.
On the “First Time Founders” podcast, Field said that he wasn’t a great manager initially — and that he had to learn the hard way.
“Management and leadership are different,” Field said. “You can be a good leader and a bad manager or vice versa.”
Field said that he’d always been a leader, so he came into Figma thinking he was “good to go.” He said he learned that there was a “whole new skillset around management” that he “definitely didn’t know.”
Field listed the skill set: Knowing where your team is, building relationships, holding one-on-one meetings, holding people accountable for their goals, and setting a consistent cadence.
Host Ed Elson asked: Was Field really bad at all of those management principles?
“Oh, for sure,” Field said. “I think I was bad at all of it.”
It didn’t help that Figma had pressure from venture capitalists to get a product to market, he said. Figma was founded in 2012, but didn’t start shipping a beta product to customers until 2015. General availability took another year, and it wasn’t till 2017 that a paid plan was available.
“Don’t do what we did,” Field said. “Please don’t take away that you should take five years to launch a company. You’ll be dead.”
What helped, he said, was hiring his first manager, Sho Kuwamoto, who started as Figma’s director of engineering. “I learned a ton from him,” Field said.
Field is one of many founders-turned-CEOs who have had to learn how to manage a team.
Dustin Moskovitz cofounded two large, publicly traded companies: Facebook and Asana. He led the latter as CEO for over a decade. In October, he described being a manager as “quite exhausting,” stating that he’d intended to be “more of an independent or Head of Engineering.”
In May, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said that all founders should be micromanagers until they had 30 employees — but that he took it too far, micromanaging until he had 50.
“At this point, I also have learned that most of my job is culture carrier, mascot, and just making some of the kind of tough philosophical decisions,” von Ahn said.
On the podcast, Field struck an optimistic tone about the ability of great founders to become great managers.
“The good news is if you’re a first-time manager, it’s all very learnable,” he said. “It’ll feel like muscle memory eventually.”
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