Analyzing Figma's Maker Week Tradition

Every year, Figmates take a week to build "something that helps Figma" during Maker Week. It’s billed as “a chance for the entire company to take a step back, think big, connect with one another, and create new projects.” The company goes all out: a brand, swag, leadership commitment, etc. The images you see here are from internal meetings. If you’re curious, you can read about past Maker Weeks here and here. 

2022’s edition of Maker Week was last week. And it was pretty exciting for someone new to Figma. I can't share specifics (sworn to secrecy), but can confirm there were so many useful, inspiring, amazing and funny ideas. 

My own project involved knowledge management to make my team’s life easier. It was not good, but I plan to keep improving it. That’s kind of the point of Maker Week. The week ended with the entire company watching 20 demos and joining a Figjam link to see everything else people created. 

Because I’m an analyst, I couldn’t just participate and enjoy the process, I had to think about why this was working. Many companies do something similar (hackathons, sprints, etc) but why did Maker Week feel different? And was it even that different? 

Beyond the interesting branding, I think there are powerful principles at work that build Figma culture and embody a concept called collaborative creativity (slides). This collaborative creativity theory explains how people build on each others' ideas and is woven through the structure of Maker Week.

If your company runs similar exercises, if your group has the freedom to explore or if you want to think about what you do in a different way, I think there’s something to take away from Maker Week.

I think these are the key aspects of Maker Week and their relationship to the principles of collaborative creativity:

• Prompts for new ideas. New ideas require bisociation, or the connection of two unrelated things to come up with a new idea. By asking the entire company for new ideas, every individual starts thinking about what they might do.
• Suggestions to make artifacts. Maker Week features an end of week demo suggestion that encourages Figmates to make something others can look at (an artifact). This act of making something usually reveals something new to the individual. In the collaborative creativity model, this is personal iteration.
• Nudges to find a group. Slack channels, idea pitch meetings and company meetings encourage people to share their ideas, recruit collaborators or join other groups. This helps build a group for collaborative iteration and feedback during Maker Week. These connections carry through the normal course of work, creating other benefits.
• Group demo viewing. The entire company joins a Zoom and hears a collection of demos. This collective viewing inspires others, creating more bisociation and ideas.
• Informal (and formal) debriefs and discussions... People naturally talk about what they saw and some ideas move to production. During this process, other people have feedback that might improve the idea. This is collaborative iteration and it creates….
• …a long tail of new ideas. After seeing and discussing demos, individuals then generate even more new ideas. Hearing new ideas, seeing new artifacts and talking about those experiences helps inform people about new topics or areas they might not have thought about before.
• Conditions for creativity. Crucially there's also leadership commitment. It's visible in the investment in brand; explicit time set aside for Maker Week; cultural acceptance for failure/iteration; humor in the way it's all presented; and a formal deadline. These are all important elements for more creative ideas.

How might these principles be helpful in your own work? Thinking about it in these basic terms might help unlock time, space or process to do more. Here are five things to try (inspired by Niko Klein’s Config 2021 talk):

1. Try to clear focused time to work on a problem.
2. Make an artifact (prototype, sketch, diagram), then think about whether it helps with the problem. Make a different artifact if you have new ideas.
3. Share the artifact(s) with users, with your team, with anyone who can give you feedback. Ask them how they’d make it differently. Think and talk about whether this helps solve the problem better.
4. If you can, try to get a group iterating together, sharing work in progress, providing more constructive feedback and processing feedback from users.
5. If you’re a leader, work especially hard to participate and show you’re also trying and failing at new things. Make a joke, build something new, praise something inventive but not obviously useful. It will set the right tone.

Hope you enjoyed this glimpse inside Figma culture and the Maker Week tradition from one person’s perspective. Have similar practices? Or effective methods? I’d love to hear from you.