Lessons from the Config 2025 Conference

Our designers and UX specialists attended Figma’s Config 2025 conference and brought back insights and ideas for how to improve the design process, collaborate more effectively, and create great products. A theme that runs through each point is a need for clear communication and common ground from which everyone can work together to create something everyone agrees is high quality.

Each of our team members chose a lesson from the conference, and we compiled them into a guide to share some of the best lessons we learned from the conference.

Joe Werner: Use a common tool to converse and document in a way that makes sense to everyone.

During design, collaboration between subject matter experts, developers, and designers often relies on feedback collected and shared a number of ways. It can be a large undertaking just to consolidate the many comments and reactions to make sure everyone’s input is addressed.

Adopting the right tool for feedback streamlines the process and can make non-designers feel more comfortable sharing their opinions. Rather than creating multiple spreadsheets, emails, meetings, and documents to collect feedback, tools like Figma’s comments and annotations can create a shared space for everyone to communicate. An important part of the plan is training to ensure everyone feels comfortable with the tool and knows how to share their feedback.

Sonya Paclob: It doesn’t have to be perfect—just what the user needs right now.

When creating interfaces, components, and tools, the most important thing is that they function how the user expects. It’s easy to set perfection as the goal, but not focusing on the user’s need may lose their trust.

Megan Metzger, product designer at Forerunner, drew parallels between design and responding to people in crises in her Config 2025 talk, Designing for Climate Disasters. “The parallels to design for crisis response are striking. As creators of digital tools, we’re building the interfaces that people reach out for when navigating their own murky waters…. We have to build tools that help people do hard things that matter.”

By holistically reviewing what does and doesn’t work, using data and past experiences, you can identify the trends and needs of future users to improve their experience.

Ka-Ying Li: Presenting an idea well is more of a science than an art.

While poorly received presentations may feel like they come down to a lack of charisma, it may also be that the client is confused, overwhelmed, or distracted. Science has found people revert back to using the most primitive part of their brain when encountering new or complex ideas. Rather than absorbing the material and assessing it, our brains make quick decisions and try to keep us safe. It’s hard to both remember and process information at the same time in this state.

In his Config 2025 presentation Pitch Perfect: How to Present Ideas to Cut Through the Noise, Wojtek Dziedzic, Senior Product Designer at Nord Security, focused on how to take our understanding of the brain and create better presentations. “Whether sharing concepts with major stakeholders or fellow designers, their perceived quality hinges on the quality of your pitch,” he said.

When preparing a presentation, there are some proven ways to help your audience better understand the material.

• Structure the presentation using a single unifying theme or narrative arc that is supported by individual talking points.
• Use the Three Letter Acronym (TLA) Structure to reframe complex ideas to tell a concise story when making an individual talking point.
  • Problem → Solution → Benefit
• Use a single word or visual per slide rather than one long list of talking points to reduce the noise on screen.
• Punctuate talking points with hooks such as large graphics and imagery to excite, engage, and avoid predictability.
• Use transitional animation to cue different types of talking points.

Your presentations should be points of connection that bring people together, and a well-structured and considerate approach to the material can keep people engaged and excited about your new ideas.

Jason Jaring: Design system journeys are a collaborative experience between designers and developers.

The realities of product design and development don’t always coexist easily. Product design involves exploration, discovery, and iterative improvement. There is no one way to approach a problem, and designers seek to find the best solution for the user. Development defines the way something must be and solidifies it. Developers translate the design into a functional product, using the logic and constraints of the chosen technology. While design could be more fluid and adapt, development makes it rigid.

To ensure both sides benefit each other, it’s important to meet early and ask each other questions. Make sure the design considers the system’s technical limitations. Define the technology boundaries early. When the design needs to be fluid, knowing the edges of possibility and development requirements keeps things in alignment and on track.

For more, check out Figma’s Designer’s Handbook for Developer Handoff.

Heather Maupin: Define quality by how well your product serves the user’s needs.

When we talk about “quality” in product design, it’s often a vague ambition rather than a clearly defined goal. Teams and clients alike may associate quality with visual polish, speed, or aesthetics, but these don’t necessarily align with what users actually need. Without a shared understanding, tied to user behaviors, goals, and outcomes, teams risk building well-crafted but ineffective products. Defining quality begins by clearly framing the problem and aligning around metrics that reflect the behavior we’re designing for. This alignment not only avoids miscommunication but helps prioritize user outcomes over subjective preferences.

One effective approach is to create collaborative tools like Problem Framing Cards and Product Principles. Problem Framing Cards help teams gain clarity across functions by identifying user jobs, hypotheses, goals, and success benchmarks rooted in research. Product Principles, on the other hand, guide decisions throughout the design and development process—for example, prioritizing the user’s task, reducing friction, or creating moments of delight. These frameworks encourage cross-functional ownership of quality, bridging the gap between design and engineering.

By embedding this shared language into discovery, definition, and validation phases, teams build trust, avoid scope creep, and shift the focus from subjective design to measurable user impact. As Ricardo Vazquez, Director, Product Design at Dropbox put it in his Config 2025 talk Crossing the Chasm Between Quality and Performance, “If we’re not aligned on the problem, it doesn’t matter how good the design is or how fast the engineering is—we’re building in different directions.”