A framework by Dylan Field
Dylan Field ships on a startup clock and refuses the startup excuse. An MVP clears when users put up with it. His bar clears when one part of the release is good enough to talk about and the rest shows where the thing is going. Same speed. Higher floor.
The bar he ships against
I think it's not enough to have the MVP. You got to have something that's a little bit awesome at least.
Figma took almost five years to make its first dollar. Field calls that the mistake, and he does not fix it by lowering the bar.
The framework
Field learned the launch trade-off from Evan Wallace, who built Figma's rendering engine with him. He still repeats it as a rule of three.
For any new launch you got quality, features, deadline. Choose two.
Most teams drop quality, because quality has no launch date attached to it. Field drops features. Software keeps shipping after launch, so scope is the thing you can add later. A reputation for shoddy work is not.
That leaves a small release with a real bar on it.
I think you have to know when you're introducing a new thing what it's going to take, and then to make that minimally awesome product.
Awesome here does not mean finished. It means one part of the release is good enough that a user tells someone else about it. Everything else can be table stakes.
The obvious failure mode is the one Field names himself, before anyone else can.
The lesson is not okay, how do I make the awesome thing? I'm going to sweat every detail and I'm never going to ship.
He has the receipts for that one. Figma started in August 2012 and made its first money in the summer of 2017. Field's word for the whole run is too long.
Practice
Pick the one thing a user would repeat to a colleague. Hold the bar there and let the rest of the release be plain.
A month out from launch, FigJam worked and bored everyone who used it. Field took that to his team and the board. They came back with one word: fun.
Figma got about twenty ideas out of that day. Cursor chat came out of it and turned into one of the things people know FigJam for.
Field scopes work down until a real user can react inside a quarter. A year-long epic hides the quality question until the answer costs too much.
He measures how fast a new user reaches the moment the product exists for. In Figma that is a blank canvas becoming a thing you made with someone else.
Figma ran a team called blockers that struck adoption problems down one by one. Retention and activation moved on the graph after each fix.
Figma's rule is that a major release survives real daily use inside the company first. A week on it finds the gap between a demo and a tool.
Field's advice on his own delay is blunt: go faster. Get to market and take money. Let the next release carry the scope you cut.
Conditions
The bar assumes you already know the problem is real. Field had that signal long before Figma charged anyone. Designers kept pulling features out of the team. He reads that pull as the cue to double down, not to keep testing.
The first row on the left is where the fight is. Garry Tan's launch-jankiest rule says the opposite: put out the roughest thing that delivers value and let reaction decide. For a problem nobody has named yet, he is right. Figma launched into a market that already had Sketch and Illustrator, where a rough build would have proved nothing.
The two bars answer different questions. Eric Ries sizes an MVP by the experiment it runs, so polish that changes no answer is waste. Field is sizing a release that has to win a user off a tool they already like.
Primary sources
Two long conversations. He names the bar on stage at Figma's Config. A 2025 interview covers what holding it costs.
Dylan Field · Lenny's Podcast
Defining Product Quality and Deadlines
"you have to know when you're introducing a new thing what it's going to take, and then to make that minimally awesome product"
Dylan Field · Lenny's Podcast
The Importance of Speed and Avoiding Over-Optimization
"it's not enough to have the MVP. You got to have something that's a little bit awesome at least"
Dylan Field · Lenny's Podcast
The Strategy of 'Making Fun' a Differentiator
"The team was like, what, we're gonna make fun our differentiator? In retrospect it was absolutely the right move."
Dylan Field · Lenny's Podcast
Prioritizing 'Time to Value' and Removing Blockers
"we literally at some point had a team that was called blockers and they just went and one by one struck them down"
Where experts disagree
Dylan Field
argues the MVP bar is not enough on its own. Software keeps shipping after launch, so he cuts features rather than quality and insists one part of a first release be good enough that a user repeats it to someone else, because that part is what carries the vision the release cannot yet deliver.
Garry Tan
says put out the jankiest version that still delivers value and let real reaction decide, on the grounds that fear of launching kills more startups than competition does. Polish before contact with users is time spent on assumptions.
The condition is whether buyers already have something that works. Tan probe answers whether the problem exists, and in a young category a rough build gets a clean read. Figma launched against Sketch and Illustrator, where the open question was not whether designers had the problem but whether they would switch, and a rough build there measures your polish instead of their demand. Field bar is also not permission to keep building: he names the trap himself, that chasing the awesome thing means sweating every detail and never shipping.
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