Inside Maker Week: more than a hackathon | Figma Blog

Maker Week is Figma’s twice-yearly, company-wide alternative to a traditional hackathon. It gives employees across disciplines, teams, and time zones dedicated time to pursue creative projects without requiring technical expertise. The program has produced hundreds of ideas since 2018, many of which became product features, community tools, or cultural initiatives.

A Maker Culture Open to Everyone

• Figma defines “maker” broadly—not just as an artist, engineer, or craftsperson, but as anyone expressing creativity in an authentic way.
• The company reinforces this culture during weekly All Hands meetings, where new employees explain how they are makers.
• This inclusive definition allows people who see themselves as curators, organizers, educators, or collaborators to participate.

Maker Week as a Cross-Functional Festival

• Maker Week happens twice a year and pauses normal day-to-day work for a week of experimentation and connection.
• Unlike many hackathons, which can favor engineering, product, and design teams, Maker Week invites employees from every function.
• Projects have included:
  • Recruiter-created employee baseball cards for candidates.
  • An intern-built “Name That Figmate” game.
  • A chemistry lesson taught through baking by data scientists.
• The format encourages cross-pollination, shared ownership, and a better understanding of how different teams contribute to Figma.

From Experiments to Shipped Work

• Figma has held five Maker Weeks since 2018, generating hundreds of projects.
• Some projects have become externally released products or features, including:
  • Auto Layout.
  • Interactive components.
  • Figma plugins.
• The company suggests that FigJam itself may represent the culmination of multiple Maker Week experiments.
• Other projects, such as Figma in Quarantine: The Musical, have offered glimpses into Figma’s internal culture.

Featured Maker Week Projects

Empathy-Building Cards

• Research, sales enablement, and brand design employees created cards combining user personas with different characteristics and situations.
• The cards help Figmates better understand users’ perspectives and contextualize the challenges they face.
• The project was shared with the broader Figma community.

Figma in 3D

• An engineer and product support employee collaborated to create an extension that projects layers off the canvas.
• Users can orbit around the design with a mouse, making Figma feel more like a 3D mapping application.
• The project explored new possibilities for spatial software.

User Collaboration Data Visualization

• A data scientist and enterprise sales employee built a Mode-based map showing collaboration between users in different countries within the same domain.
• The visualization helps organizations understand how teams collaborate across regions and time zones.

Maker Week demonstrates that innovation does not have to come only from formal product teams. Figma’s approach recommends creating structured time for broad participation, experimentation, and cross-functional collaboration—while allowing the most promising ideas to evolve into real products or cultural initiatives.