My former colleague at Figma, Claire Butler, recently wrote a really great post about what she learned working at Figma. The lesson that stood out to me most was this one, “When you’re stuck, commit to action. Strategy will follow.” 

In other words, if you’re making something new, planning too far ahead will likely just get you stuck. Claire’s approach feels like textbook effectual reasoning. She describes an example using Figma’s annual conference, Config:

We had talked about doing a conference for years, but we were overwhelmed. So step one was to commit and book a venue. (Too small, it turned out—thousands applied, forcing us to change venues two months out.) Then we had to figure out our speakers. What to do… aha source from the community. And too many people applied, who should attend? Make the application annoying enough to filter for the truly excited. From those choices, our strategy became clear: for the community, by the community. But if we’d waited to get it perfect on paper, it never would’ve happened.

This feels right to me. You commit to a goal, then you use whatever resources you have to make it happen. Strategy emerges as you bump into the constraints. 

When I was tasked with figuring out distribution for Figma’s Story Studio, I felt really confused at first. I knew how to do this at an article level, of course—but how could I scale it? What did that even mean? I asked around, and nobody was sure. 

I first tried figuring this out on my own. I wrote documentation that nobody else wanted to read. I tried finding a place for it in our other group meetings. I added a checklist to our article templates. Nothing really stuck.

Eventually, the breakthrough came in the form of a bi-weekly Distribution Workshop meeting that I set with the team. Once those 30 minutes were on the calendar, I had to commit to making the most of our group time. 

I showed up with articles selected and outlining different channels we could promote through. We eventually made the meeting better—let’s invite recurring guests, let’s post thought starters for what we could do with each channel, and let’s use most of the time to generate ideas. I would drive and triage all action steps after. 

Committing to kicking off that meeting, and promoting two articles every couple of weeks, made things happen.

The momentum that comes from committing and focusing on one challenge at a time—the one that’s in front of you—keeps you from worrying about the dozens of challenges that might happen.