How Figma's CMO thinks about community as a channel

In this episode, Sheila Vashee — CMO of Figma and a former marketing leader at Dropbox, Opendoor and Ethos — breaks down how Figma turned its community into its most powerful marketing channel. She argues that great marketing comes down to three things: understanding your audience deeply, finding the channels that uniquely reach them, and building systems to optimize those channels. Sheila explains why brand and performance aren't opposites, how she measures both across short and long time horizons, and shares the Opendoor experiment where a brand campaign doubled market share in three months. She also gets into where AI genuinely helps marketers (and where humans still set the bar), how Figma rebuilt customer support around AI, and why she spends 30–40% of her time hands-on with the latest tools. Along the way: the CEO as the 'real CMO,' Friends of Figma's 240+ volunteer chapters, and the brand she admires most outside tech.