‘We make people feel something as a result of our work:’ Figma’s chief design officer on how to build impactful technology

Loredana Crisan says her relationship with creativity started when she was 7 years old, sitting with her mother in her family’s kitchen in Bucharest, Romania. “The question she posed was, ‘Do you want to learn piano,’ and as a kid I was like, ‘Yes!’ –– probably because I was singing in the house.” From then on, says Crisan, she never stopped playing. In fact, she ended up as a student studying classical music in a conservatory. 

“I was very dedicated to music for a very long period of my life,” says Crisan. Now, as Chief Design Officer at Figma, Crisan says her musical training has informed her relationship with her work in ways she never expected. “If we are successful, we make people feel something as a result of our work,” she says. Here, she shares how her relationship with creativity has been informed by growing up with the iPhone, her love of cross-disciplinary work and the fight against burnout. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

I studied classical piano. As a teenager, I actually rebelled against classical music and picked up techno and other types of music production. This is Romania, like, transitioning from communism to actually being open to Western music and other types of things coming into the country. That was my first exploration phase. That career in music production actually brought me to the United States, where I worked in recording studios as a sound engineer and as a producer. And I did this in San Francisco, coming from Romania to the United States. When I realized that San Francisco was not the recording industry, I realized I had two options in front of me: move to L.A. or join a startup. Again, my exploratory bent was like, “Let’s join a startup, and figure out what this thing is about.” So I joined a startup called Lexy as a sound engineer to prototype audio interfaces for an assistant-like experience. 

I was not a visual designer, but what I knew was what it feels to be comfortable creating in a medium. That created this really deep desire for me to learn pixels and be as comfortable with pixels as I was with sound. The only way that I know how to do this is through apprenticeship. You dive in and you learn how to see, just like with piano, you dive in and you learn how to hear.

I’m big into neuroscience. I think about how my brain reacts to different environments that I create for it. If you just go for a walk without any stimulation at all, this thing in your brain that’s kind of like always active, just comes through the surface. Ideas come from there.

Burnout is real. Oftentimes what I focus on is like making sure that people have the time to breathe. I actually have a framework for how I lead teams that I come back to often: purpose, progress, and community. All of these have to be in great balance for work to be meaningful and for people not to burn out.

I am very fortunate that at Figma, my seat is across disciplines: the product design team, the research team, the branding team. It allows me to think across all of all parts of the product development because research obviously helps us understand what we want to build next and what the market wants from us. Design looks at what shape that might take. And of course, we collaborate with PMs and engineers. And then on the brand side, we talk about our purpose, how we communicate and what the narrative is about the products that we build. I really thrive in the ability to look across things. 

Being a musician and being a designer, you are focused on your audience. When you’re playing music, of course it’s for you, too. It’s something that you want to feel, but you’re transmitting something. And great design also transmits something. If we are successful, we make people feel something as a result of our work. And so that translation always felt very, very smooth to me. 

I work out daily, and that’s one of my foundations. The first thing that I do when I wake up is a strength training session. This kind of helps set the day and during that, I’m often listening to podcasts, so there’s a lot of inspiration coming in. I’m very deep into neuroscience, so some of the podcasts that I listen to are about how our brains process the world. As a leader, that’s quite helpful. I try to start the day with somewhat of an agenda. I get into the office and start working with people. This might mean anything from bringing designers together to talk through some problems, or looking at work that they’re proposing. It could be spending time with the leadership team exploring strategies.

Collaboration is so important. The more people end up finishing each other’s sentences, the more they have rituals in place where they don’t have to overthink each other and the process by which they work together. I always think about the teams and the environment around them and the longevity of their relationships. That’s really important. Bringing different points of view into the mix always makes the product better. Building rituals can be as simple as the times that the teams come together. On Mondays, do they come together to decide what the week is gonna look like? Do they wrap it up on Friday with a reflection? Getting the team together, putting them in front of users to ask questions to really build shared language has been really successful.