Figma ships features at a pace that would break most marketing organizations. New products, new audiences, new messaging, and new positioning arrive faster than a traditional handoff process can handle.
Reema Batta, VP of Growth Marketing at Figma, solved this by building what she calls a "context layer." Product marketing managers maintain a database of up-to-date positioning, messaging, and value propositions for every product and feature Figma ships. Channel teams reference that layer through internal skills, which pull the latest information without requiring a meeting, a Slack thread, or a recorded walkthrough that half the team won't watch.
The context layer eliminates that tax. A channel marketer writing an email can ping a skill, pull the latest product messaging, and update the draft without waiting for a sync. The product marketing manager's role is codified in the skill. The information lives in the database. The handoff happens in seconds.
The person who built this was a product marketing manager
The context layer at Figma was built by a product marketing manager with systems thinking skills. Reema calls that combination a marketing engineer. Post a marketing engineer job on the official job board, or if you’re looking to become a marketing engineer you can browse a list of open roles there (including at Figma).
The skill set combines two things that don't always overlap: deep domain knowledge in a specific area of marketing, and the ability to design workflows that solve problems across teams.
At Figma, that means identifying people on the team who already think this way and giving them the space to build. It also means hiring for the role explicitly. Reema's team is actively recruiting marketing engineers, and she expects the role to specialize by domain. A marketing engineer in SEO will look different from a marketing engineer in lifecycle or paid acquisition.
The common thread is judgment. "Production bottlenecks are going away, and the bottleneck is moving way more upstream, and that upstream is judgment," Reema said.
How the context layer works in practice
The context layer is a database that product marketing managers keep updated with the latest positioning, messaging, and value propositions for every product and feature. Channel teams access it through skills that reference the database.
If a channel marketer is writing an email and needs the latest product messaging, they ping the skill and get the information immediately. The skill pulls from the context layer, which the product marketing manager maintains. No meeting required. No Slack follow-up. No recorded walkthrough that gets watched at 1.5x speed three days later.
The system works because the product marketing manager's role is codified in the skill. The information lives in one place. The handoff is instant.
That process doesn't scale when Figma is launching products and features at the pace they are now. The context layer does.
AI is lowering the floor so humans can raise the ceiling
Reema sees AI changing what marketing teams optimize for. "AI is lowering the floor so humans can raise the ceiling," she said.
The floor is table stakes content, localization, programmatic pages, and the kind of work that used to require a writer but didn't require taste. The ceiling is storytelling, narrative, and the strategic judgment that decides what Figma should say in the first place.
Figma has a team called Story Studios that does exactly this. They focus on raising the ceiling while AI handles the floor.
The shift also changes what matters for hiring. Reema looks for people who can combine systems thinking with domain expertise. She wants people who can decide what direction to go in, not just people who can execute faster.
Judgment is the new bottleneck
When you can generate five versions of a page in the time it used to take to write one, the scarce resource isn't writing. It's knowing which version to ship, what question to answer, and what point of view to take.
Reema pointed to this shift when talking about AI-generated content. "It's not because AI writes better than humans. AI enables faster production."
Figma's content team still owns strategy, point of view, and quality bar. AI compresses the production cycle, which means the team can test multiple iterations of an answer to the same question, review them in parallel, and ship programmatic pages at a pace that wasn't possible when humans were the bottleneck.
The result is a team that can keep up with Figma's product velocity without adding headcount or coordination overhead.
How to prioritize when AI means you can do everything
Reema gets asked this question a lot from her team and other marketers. Her answer starts with the business.
Marketing has always built the brand, built awareness, and driven users to a website. But how marketing does it should be in the context of the business strategy.
The best marketing leaders can decide what the business uniquely needs to solve for in a given period of time, what marketing's role is in solving for that, and provide clarity to the team at that level.
Reema also warned that product roadmaps are evolving at a rapid pace, and they should.
Listen to the full conversation
Reema Batta covers more ground in the full episode, including how Figma's Story Studios team raises the ceiling on brand storytelling, what she looks for when hiring for growth mindset, and why the user funnel has fundamentally changed now that people ask questions in LLMs instead of searching on Google.
