Figma Organization is out in the wild, and we’ve joined the ranks of what must surely be one of the world’s happiest creative departments. Since we’ve started using Figma, we’ve enjoyed a resurgence of inspiration and a sense of falling back in love with design — all because Figma understands how to get out of the way.

Don’t get us wrong, we've always loved design, but it’s pretty hard to feel that love when you’re forced to work with awful, bloated software and your machine is taking 10 minutes to attempt to save a file and then crashing anyway. Or when every feature you’ve ever known and loved since forever and use with the familiarity of breathing suddenly becomes hidden behind interactions you’ll rarely need to use. It’s really, really hard to love designing on those days.

We've already gone into some detail about why we love Figma. With Figma Organization, these newly found powers of collaboration we're leveraging with our colleagues, clients and peers are starting to take on on a wonderful rhythm of their own, and the feasibility of creating a scalable design universe for the brands and products we’re building together is finally solidifying, and it’s so much fun to be a part of — for us and for our clients.

Our first foray into Figma organization began in an Enterprise Beta environment. For the first time we were able to publish, share and collaborate on files, prototypes, components and styles across Enterprise teams — a real game-changer for global teams and those working remotely. Working closely — yet remotely — has been somewhat of a challenge until moving to Figma. Now our creative teams feel like they may as well be sitting across from us as we work to solve complex design challenges together, from anywhere in the world.

At first, the thought of having other teams, designers, project managers, developers and engineers inside our design process felt daunting, even a little unsettling. I have never been a fan of over-the-shoulder 'designers', giving me their 2 cents when they have limited visibility into the process that informs design decisions in the first place, but I can honestly say that after a solid 10 months using Figma — that this is different.

With Figma, you can set up your workflow to give your teams and clients greater visibility into the design process. One of the results of this is that good design solutions don't get railroaded for immaterial reasons. This happens because design decisions are now more deeply understood by everyone — not just the creative team. As a product designer you're able to share as much visibility into the design process as you like, helping to overcome barriers to your vision through open problem-solving and inclusion with everyone from engineers to project managers to clients — you decide. The permissions structure of Figma and Figma Organization gives you complete control over how teams, projects, files and assets are shared and presented. Leveraging these features to broaden ownership of the solution means more successful releases, more buy-in from engineering and less curveballs brought on because people on the team don't know where you're going and how you got there.

Another huge pain point for design teams is feedback. Collecting it, dissecting it, actioning it, tracking it — it's a massive pain in the design pants. Trying to whittle down opinions and direction from people in large teams through emails, Slack, water-cooler chats, formal and informal reviews while keeping everyone else in the loop about what's getting updated and why is a real challenge — especially whilst trying to keep the design vision intact. With Figma, there's a clean, open system of providing, tracking and actioning feedback through real-time comments and Slack integration that keeps everyone effortlessly in the loop. And because all feedback is open, it's much more constructive and easily managed. It has greatly reduced time-wasting meetings where people talk in circles, derailing progress with subjective opinions that have poorly-considered consequences — this simply cannot happen if the design process is visible. With Figma, we can work through problems and differing approaches with our clients in a collaborative, demonstrative and productive way.