Inside Figma: building a more collaborative design process | Figma Blog

Figma’s product design team uses FigJam to make early-stage design more inclusive, collaborative, and focused on ideas rather than polish. Moving brainstorming, feedback, and co-design into a shared whiteboard helps designers, product managers, and engineers contribute asynchronously and visibly. The result is a process that brings together emotional insight, product thinking, and technical constraints earlier.

Keeping Early Ideation Focused

• Figma’s detailed design tools can encourage teams to refine visuals too soon.
• FigJam’s lighter, more flexible format keeps attention on brainstorming and concepts instead of pixel-perfect execution.
• Product Designer Jenny Wen used reusable tweet and Slack-message components to imagine how users might react to upcoming features.
• Limiting the workshop’s format helped the team generate ideas quickly without getting distracted by exact wording or visual details.
• The strongest concepts were later moved into Figma for more detailed design work.

Organizing Asynchronous Feedback

• Designing sticky-note attribution raised complex questions about editable names, ownership changes, and copied content.
• Jenny collected feedback from alpha testers and teammates directly in FigJam.
• She grouped related input and created a decision tree to explain possible solutions.
• Sharing the file through Slack allowed collaborators to review the reasoning, add comments, and vote with stamps without scheduling a meeting.
• The visual format made both the feedback and the decision-making process easier to follow.

Co-Designing with Product and Engineering

• Product Designer Keeyen Yeo used FigJam to explore the high-five feature by diagramming how people high-five in real life.
• Unlike paper sketches, the shared FigJam file let product partners contribute directly and co-design the interaction.
• Engineer Willy Wu mapped the technical behavior, including when a cursor should enter high-five mode.
• Iterating together helped the team balance technical feasibility with a natural user experience.

Figma’s experience suggests that using a lightweight collaborative tool for early exploration can make design processes more open and productive. Teams should defer detailed execution until after designers, product partners, and engineers have jointly developed and tested the core ideas.