Figma CCO Nairi Tashjian Hourdajian on Config community-building, four-to-eight product suite, and the brand strategy behind B2B going consumer

Summary

Nairi Tashjian Hourdajian, Figma's Chief Communications Officer, sat down at Config 2025 to talk through the brand strategy, community philosophy, and release decisions behind what turned out to be Figma's biggest product launch yet — four new products announced in a single day, doubling the suite from four to eight.

The product moment

Figma has never shipped four products in one launch before. Hourdajian frames this year's Config less as a scheduled annual drop and more as a natural convergence of a particularly strong roadmap. The release cadence isn't fixed — the team's stated philosophy is to ship early and iterate, with Config acting as a catalyst rather than a deadline. That said, the concentration of four launches into one day creates a comms advantage that's hard to replicate: a single window of maximum attention that a steady drip of quarterly releases cannot match.

Community versus customer base

The distinction Hourdajian draws between a community and a customer base is the lens through which Figma runs its events strategy. Config is explicitly designed as an event for the community by the community — talks delivered by practitioners, activations organized by attendees, and satellite events (including a block party on Howard Street the day before) that pull in people who stumble past without knowing what's happening. Last year's overcrowding was taken seriously enough that the venue layout was redesigned for 2025. Following San Francisco, Config moves to London for a smaller venue in the low thousands.

B2B brand with a consumer feel

Figma's clearest brand bet is that a B2B SaaS company can carry a consumer-grade identity. For Config, that meant renaming social handles to "Config Crave" — a deliberate riff on Pop Crave and similar celebrity stan accounts — and treating community members as the celebrities worth featuring. The aim is to balance entertainment with clear product information: what's launching, when you can get your hands on it.

Who Figma is actually building for

The core customer is anyone making software — from idea to shipped product — and that population is widening. Designers remain the anchor, but engineers, product managers, and increasingly non-technical roles are all part of the workflow Figma is trying to serve. Hourdajian's framing: the entire org chart can now make things, including one-off internal tools or marketing assets built by people in legal. AI is accelerating that blurring of roles.