The Best Advice to Bring to Work in 2025 | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)
The article gathers practical workplace advice from leaders at Ableton, Snapchat, Coda, and other companies. Their principles emphasize finding inspiration beyond familiar sources, automating low-value work, shortening users’ path to meaningful results, designing meetings around clear purposes, and maintaining momentum through difficult work. Together, they argue that effective work depends less on rigid formulas than on experience-based judgment. ## Look Beyond Design for Inspiration - Pablo Sánchez of Ableton recommends drawing ideas from emotions, memories, science, nature, and other fields—not just existing design conventions. - Designing for yourself first can produce work with genuine personal energy that resonates with users. - Ableton’s Note app borrowed from Brutalist architecture rather than traditional music software, creating a stripped-down experience focused on immediacy. ## Automate Work That Gets in the Way - Product managers should focus primarily on understanding customers, delivering value, and enabling sound decisions—not perfecting internal artifacts. - When documentation, reviews, or OKRs consume as much time as product development, teams should delegate or automate them. - Peter Yang uses AI to synthesize brainstorms, summarize customer feedback, and improve product requirement documents. ## Accelerate Users’ Time to “Magic” - Products should help new users reach their first meaningful “aha moment” quickly instead of overwhelming them with tutorials. - The goal is to move people from following instructions to confidently creating and sharing something of their own. - Snapchat’s Lens Studio team mapped the user journey and reduced the path from download to first submitted project from 19 steps to four milestones. ## Cultivate Different Types of Meetings - Coda’s Shishir Mehrotra distinguishes three meeting categories: - **Cadence meetings:** Regular staff meetings, standups, and syncs that track progress against goals. - **Catalyst meetings:** Decision-making forums, product reviews, and design critiques that resolve questions and drive change. - **Context meetings:** All-hands meetings, off-sites, and orientations that share information, establish context, and build connections. - Teams need a healthy balance, since too many catalyst meetings can cause burnout. ## Keep Moving Through Difficult Work - Dan Mall compares difficult progress to the tedious parts of training that are usually omitted from an exciting montage. - His advice is to build momentum to counteract the discouragement and monotony that can accompany worthwhile goals. The broader recommendation is to focus attention on meaningful outcomes: use unconventional sources of inspiration, remove unnecessary effort, guide users quickly toward value, give meetings a clear purpose, and keep building momentum when progress feels slow.