What Figma’s S-1 Tells Us About the Future of Customer Success

Customer Success is a strategy embedded in how a product is built, sold, and grown.

🎟️ Limited-time offer: Get your $499 ticket to NYC Customer Success Week for just $99 with code Substack. Join 1,000+ CS leaders this September in NYC!

---

Figma filed their S-1 this week with numbers any CS leader would dream of. The numbers are incredible, 132% net revenue retention, 96% GRR on top of an incredible business: $913M in ARR, 46% YoY growth. My friend OnlyCFO was quick to call it one of the cleanest IPO-ready businesses we’ve seen in recent years. But beyond the headline metrics, there’s something more instructive in the filing. For anyone building or leading Customer Success inside an AI-native company, Figma’s S-1 is a mirror. It reflects a future that many of us have been talking about where Customer Success isn’t just a department, but a strategy embedded in how a product is built, sold, and grown.

Figma’s approach is the future: it’s a product-led AI native (transformed) company that’s still deeply human. You can see it in the way they support users, the way they layered in sales without compromising product trust, and the way they’ve built AI not as a feature but as a force-multiplier for time-to-value. It’s the same through-line I’ve written about in posts on forward-deployed CS and founder-led renewal loops.

Figma gives hard proof that those instincts scale.

1. AI-Native Means Time-to-Value Is Everything

One of the clearest themes in the S-1 is just how much Figma is betting on AI to compress the time between idea and output. Whether it’s FigJam auto-sorting sticky notes, Make Designs generating production-ready UI from a prompt, or Figma Sites instantly publishing a live website, the company is rebuilding its product surface around velocity. This isn’t UI polish, it’s a strategic shift. In a world where multiple products can “do the thing,” the one that gets users to value fastest wins.

This is exactly what forward-deployed CS is built for. When we talk about embedding Customer Success into onboarding, implementation, or even prompt engineering, this is what we mean—CS as a multiplier on momentum.

One thing I though was really special was that two-thirds of Figma’s 13 million MAUs aren’t even designers. That only works if your product and CS motion are built to serve the first-time user, the confused evaluator, the internal champion trying to get a budget approved. Figma’s AI is not a bolt-on—it’s foundational to how they get people to “aha” faster than anyone else in their category.

2. Sales Only Works When CS Comes First

You can’t talk about Figma’s go-to-market without mentioning my friend Kyle Parrish’s first month on the job. Instead of pushing him to hit quota, Dylan Field told him to start by answering support tickets. That story—now bordering on folklore in product-led circles—wasn’t just symbolic. It was cultural. A reminder that support isn’t separate from product. It is how you build it.

That mindset stuck. Figma didn’t scale sales by layering reps on top of a product—they waited until usage inside companies like Microsoft and Google made the need self-evident. Then they stitched those usage clusters together with enterprise contracts. They paired AEs with Designer Advocates (if your CSMs are truly domain experts, why not call them something that reflects that?) and let champions sell internally before procurement got involved. Sales was a support function before it became a revenue engine.

In my own writing, I’ve said that founder-led Customer Success is where real product-market fit is earned—not just in the first deal, but in the first renewal. Figma built a model where every early user became a path to enterprise, and the job of sales was to reduce friction, not create pressure. You see that in their no-discount pricing, in their transparency with customers, and in how deeply every GTM hire is expected to understand the product before selling it.

3. Retention and Expansion Is the Business—And CS Amplifies It

The retention numbers tell the real story. Figma is posting 132% net revenue retention and 96% gross revenue retention—not by chance, but by design. Expansion is the outcome of a product that delivers real value, and the layer cake chart in the S-1 shows just how much customers grow after the first deal.

The expansion feedback loop moves even faster in AI-native companies. Why? Because AI shortens time-to-value—and when time-to-value shrinks, the next expansion milestone comes sooner. In traditional SaaS, it might take months of implementation and manual workflows before a customer is ready to buy more. But in AI-native products, value is unlocked incrementally and interactively. Every time the product delivers a new insight, automates a task, or accelerates a workflow, it opens the door to new use cases, additional seats, or broader deployment.

That’s what makes the Customer Success motion in AI-native companies fundamentally different. You’re not just guiding the customer through a fixed playbook—you’re helping them discover new value paths in real time. Every success moment becomes an on-ramp to the next one. And if your CS team is forward-deployed—truly embedded as Figma’s Design Advocates are—that expansion loop gets even tighter.

Figma’s numbers reflect that. The faster users get to value, the faster they grow. The role of Customer Success in this world isn’t just retention—it’s acceleration.

4. The Community Is the Motion That Never Stops Working

Figma never needed as many outbound SDRs to build the top of their funnel. They had the community. The maker culture around design meant that every new feature became a shared artifact—files, templates, plug-ins, and walkthroughs that users shared with each other. Today there are more than 100 AI plug-ins in the community. The work of Customer Success is already being done before a user ever logs in.

But community isn’t just top-of-funnel. It’s also retention. Figma’s champions are not just loyal—they’re loud. They host meetups. They speak at Config. They run workshops for their own teams. If you’ve read my thoughts on founder-led CS or the Customer Success Meetup community we’ve built, you’ll know how strongly I believe in this. Champions are the most credible sellers in any CS motion. Figma gave them the tools and trust to carry the torch.

The Future, Filed

Figma’s S-1 validates what many of us already know: when Customer Success is part of a company’s culture, it drives expansion. When AI is built with empathy, it speeds up time-to-value instead of adding complexity. And the best growth teams lead with support, not sales.

For founders, this is a wake-up call—if CS isn’t embedded in your product, you’re playing defense. For CS leaders, it’s time to go on offense. Get closer to your champions. Master the AI inside your product. Don’t just respond—accelerate outcomes.

The companies that win are the ones whose customers win faster, grow bigger, and stay longer. Figma just gave us the blueprint.