https://www.figma.com/organization/

Inside Figma: enterprise, explained

https://www.figma.com/blog/inside-figma-enterprise-explained/

Since Figma Organization first launched just over a year and a half ago, we’ve been committed to building a tool that supports companies of all sizes. Engineer Aashima Garg shares an inside look at Figma’s enterprise team and the work they do, spotlighting a recent project to improve the Organization admin experience. She dives into how they understand complex users, build partnerships with cross-functional teams, and why Figma’s approach to enterprise is a little different.

“Enterprise” means so many different things at different companies. A common misconception I often hear is that enterprise product roadmaps are always dictated top-down: customers request something, and we build it. In reality, developing a product that scales well, supports a wide range of customers, and delivers a delightful experience is so much more complex (and interesting!) than just shipping the most recent request.

Figma’s enterprise product team develops tooling that helps Organization admins manage their accounts and ensure that designers, developers, and collaborators have the access they need. Day to day, that involves joining sales calls with prospective clients to learn about their needs, meeting with existing customers to gather feedback, and partnering with stakeholders across marketing, engineering, and design to build cohesive solutions.

Since launching Figma Organization in early 2019, Figma’s usage within our existing customers has grown immensely. Especially in our new remote world, it’s more important than ever for everyone involved in the product development process to be on the same page, and we often see that happening in Figma. But as more and more collaborators join Figma to participate and contribute to their company’s design process, the scope of an Organization admin’s work in Figma broadens.

Figma’s original Admin Settings console was designed before we knew what tooling would be most valuable to admins. Now, over a year into the product’s life, we’ve learned a lot more about who our customers are and what they need. Through conversations with customers, support, and sales, we started to understand what worked well, what didn’t, and what admins need to efficiently do their jobs. It became clear that our customers had outgrown the Admin Settings' original design.

So, we set out to redesign it.

We knew that Figma worked well for designers, but for admins who manage their team’s day-to-day operation, there was room for improvement. We decided to reimagine Figma for our admin users, optimize their member management workflows, highlight existing functionality, and leave room to allow us to more easily build new features in the future.

With those goals in mind, we decided to run a brainstorm with the team, categorizing ideas into “Do now,” “Worth considering,” and “Wild & crazy.” We invited the working group: PM Ben Stern, engineering manager Thomas Wright, designer Jordan Hsu, engineers Josh Tabak and Stanley Huang, in addition to many other cross-functional partners from the research, data, support, marketing, and sales teams.

Marketing offered design ideas, product shared feedback on research, and engineers wrote suggestions for UX. We couldn’t have generated such a diverse list of ideas without everyone on board, and even though everyone came from a different perspective, we were excited to see common themes emerge. To synthesize input, we grouped related ideas into those main themes. Then, Ben mapped suggestions to the user feedback that we received, and derived a shortlist of priorities.

The enterprise team’s initial brainstorm session in Figma

After the brainstorm, we wondered how to scope this project. Should it be a simple UI update or a larger overhaul? Initially, we thought we might be able to layer different views and options onto our existing Admin Settings. But when we partnered with the sales team to better understand points of friction, we heard that admins didn’t have enough information to make good decisions at true-up, weren’t aware of the features most relevant to them, and were exporting information manually.

The design of the Admin Settings view was limiting the value any individual feature could provide; redesigning it to optimize for certain key workflows would allow us to not only add new features easily, but also make better use of the features we had previously built. Instead of just addressing the symptom, Ben advocated for turning this workstream into a full product update.

Unlike enterprise companies that are enterprise-only (and often only build for companies with a certain number of employees or functions), Figma supports organizations of all sizes. Beyond providing a better user experience for admins and end users alike, developing a tool that scales well is central to what we do. To us, that means creating a strong foundation that also gives us the flexibility to add and update features as user needs evolve.