Jenny Wen
I was most recently Director of Design at Figma, where I led the products and teams at the frontier of our business (FigJam, Slides, Community, Growth, and two other top secret products). As a designer, I brought FigJam to market, poured myself into so many little details, and grew it into a tool people love using.
In lots of parts of my life, I'm a generalist. I'm good at helping teams be more ambitious together. To imagine novel solutions, to ship higher quality products, and most importantly—to have fun through it all.
Navigating a design career — The Figma at Waterloo crew had me over to chat about career stuff. I came with a few lessons I learned from my career, and I left with hope and optimism about the design community in Waterloo.
Figma Slides — I had the honor of supporting Keeyen Yeo, Khalil Cader, and Jakub Swiadek through the year in which they launched Figma's third product.
Why we build what we build — A short panel for the Leadership Collective at Config 2024 around the things we build at Figma. In collab with Katie Szeto, Marcel Weekes, and Sho Kuwamato
FigJam AI — We launched a bundle of AI features — summarization, clustering, board generation, and Jambot. I'm very proud to have supported the team that made this happen: Natasha Tenggoro, Rocky Chen, Aosheng Ran, Matt Chan, and many other cross-functional folks.
Putting joy on the roadmap — A battle cry to make software less boring and more joyful. I did this talk twice—at CanUX in October 2022, and at Config in June 2023 with Mihika Kapoor and Keeyen Yeo. And I also got to host Config again— this time on the big stage, in front of 8,000 people.
First Round Angel Track — I had the privilege of joining First Round's Spring 2023 cohort to kick off my investing journey. Investing always felt like a black box process, with lots going on behind closed doors. But Angel Track peeled back the curtain and made me a more intentional investor.
Building a product people love — A Q&A I did with Designer Fund. I got to talk shop about FigJam, raising the craft bar, designing with business objectives in mind, and running workshops.
Design hiring fireside chat — For Figma's Early Career Week, I got to be on a panel with some stellar industry leaders. We chatted about how to stand out and get hired as an early career designer.
FigJam onboarding — An experiment we ran that had new users pick between four simple templates. Such a fun one to jam with Andrew Schmidt on.
Quality of life updates — Our first quality-of-life drop of the year! I worked on adding resizing to sticky notes, custom colors, and a wider set of font sizes. Still keeping a simple, opinionated set of defaults, but also allowing more powerful customization for those who need it.
This or that widget — For the launch of widgets in FigJam, I fiddled around with the new widget API and made a little poll with just two choices. Perfect for this or that, yes or no, would you rather, and other divisive questions.
Word magnets — Turn any text in your FigJam or design file into a set of fridge magnets. Great for writers' block or a team poetry writing jam.
FigJam templates — No need to start from scratch anymore. I designed the end-to-end experience of templates — bringing our Community's best templates directly into the product.
Layout: Designing FigJam — Keeyen and I got to share a bit about the behind the scenes of FigJam with Kevin and Rafa.
Introducing FigJam — I spent most of 2020 driving the direction, leading the design and executing on the details for the launch of FigJam. I designed the core experience for FigJam's launch — its shapes, sticky notes, text, and all of their core interactions. I also designed cursor chat, emotes, and reactions.
Short stories from the making of FigJam — Config 2021 was honestly a really big moment for me! I hosted the first day of our annual user conference. I also did a talk with Emily Lin and Priya Kotak on how we made FigJam.
Designing your design career — A talk for UW/UX (a club near and dear to my heart) on navigating early career opportunities and internships. I also shared my favourite goal setting framework, which you can try out, too.
A beautiful mess — A Q&A talk I did with Lizhi Fan on the messiness of how design and engineering work together at Figma.
Word count — In the spirit of Figma's plugins launch, I dipped my toes into our plugin API. It was surprisingly easy to use and I ended up making this popular plugin. Really proud of myself for remembering how to do recursion, without looking it up.
Community and collaboration — My first launch at Figma! I worked closely with Rasmus Andersson on the first version of our Community, alongside a refresh of our file browser.
Interface Lovers — A little feature I got to to do, where I shared some of my experiences working on Dropbox Paper and revealed to everyone that I used an Android.
