Case study
Building Figma's EMEA field and events function from zero
No EMEA events program existed. I built it: webinars, regional playbooks, and Config London, the first-ever EMEA flagship, launched in a month and sold out.
Context
I joined Figma in 2022 as the first of three marketers in international, owning events and field marketing for EMEA. There was no EMEA events program. No webinars, no field calendar, no playbooks, no regional motion. I built it.
For a period I also covered APAC, before teams were in place there to run it locally.
Approach
I built the function in layers, not all at once.
The demand layer
First, an online webinar presence in the region, built around customer stories. I worked with sales to onboard customers onto these and share their stories virtually. It was the cheapest, fastest way to create top-of-funnel reach while the bigger pieces were being built.
The brand-and-pipeline layer
Then the in-person motion. Office launches in Berlin and Paris, run as full-funnel campaigns rather than parties. Field events across European regions. Each one designed to produce content that kept working after the day, and each one mapped back to pipeline, not attendance.
The function layer
The part that outlasts any single event: playbooks and process. I worked with the regional marketers in Germany and France, who owned North and South EMEA, building the playbooks with them rather than for them, using their local-market knowledge so we had real on-the-ground intelligence of each culture and market. That included the practical work most people skip, like localisation across France and right-to-left markets.
This is the difference between running a calendar and building a function. When I started, the events motion was me. By the end, regional marketers were running local field events with my support, against shared goals, off playbooks we built together.
The number
Events owned roughly 20% of EMEA’s sourced pipeline target. In year one that was mine alone, because I was the events function. As the German and French marketers came on board around the end of that first year, they contributed to the goal through their local activity, and I supported them while still covering the rest of EMEA directly.
So the honest shape of it is: I owned the events share of the pipeline number solo to start, then led the contribution to it as the team grew.
Capstone: Config London
The clearest proof of the function working is the thing it produced at the end. Config London, the first-ever EMEA flagship, a regional counterpart to Figma’s San Francisco flagship.
The timeline was the hard part. One month from approval to public launch: a live website and paid tickets on sale. In that month I had to secure a venue for 3,000 people at short notice, which meant working with the venue to reallocate other confirmed events, get the event website built with the San Francisco HQ team, start sourcing speakers, and run the production search. I led it with one other person.
Inside the flagship, I built the Leadership Collective: a director-plus track for current and prospective customers and our EMEA total addressable market. That was the pipeline engine inside the brand moment, about 500 seats. Both the main event and the Leadership Collective sold out.
I want to be precise about what I claim here. I left Figma just before the event ran, so the on-the-day delivery and any pipeline attribution belong to the team that ran it. My work was the build and the launch, and the sellout happened on my watch.
Artifacts
To assemble: webinar program structure, regional playbook templates, the Config London launch site and Leadership Collective materials. Redact anything not cleared for public sharing.
What this proves
I can walk into a region with no events function and leave behind a working engine: demand generation, a regional team running off shared playbooks, and a flagship that sells out. Built from zero, measured in pipeline, handed over so it runs without me.