How Elsewhen builds digital products for their clients | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Elsewhen, a UK-based digital product consultancy, uses Figma as a collaborative workspace throughout the product-development process—not just for final designs. Its partnerships with Spotify and Inmarsat show how shared tools, reusable assets, and structured collaboration can reduce operational friction while supporting creativity and faster delivery.

Improving Design Productivity at Spotify

• Spotify wanted to measure and improve designer productivity without reducing creative quality.
• Rather than counting screens, components, or hours spent, Spotify and Elsewhen focused on identifying workflow obstacles and opportunities for improvement.
• They created the Design Productivity Blueprint, an open-source Figma file containing:
  • Workshops
  • Interview templates
  • Frameworks for analyzing design-team workflows
• The goal is to help designers spend less time on routine work and more time exploring and solving problems creatively.

Creating a Design System for Inmarsat

• Inmarsat’s distributed workforce and reliance on external design agencies made collaboration difficult.
• Designers and developers lacked a shared source of truth for components, files, and assets.
• Designers frequently rebuilt common components from scratch, slowing product development and making onboarding harder.
• Elsewhen created Inmarsat’s first Figma-based design system using an existing self-service portal project as its foundation.
• The system established reusable standards for:
  • Typography
  • Buttons
  • Icons
  • Grids
  • Other common interface components
• Centralizing these assets allowed internal teams, developers, and partner agencies to access the same resources and build products more quickly.

Figma as a Collaborative Home Base

• Elsewhen uses Figma across exploration, workshops, prototyping, and client collaboration.
• Real-time access removes routine steps such as exporting, uploading, and distributing design assets.
• Shared files and component libraries improve communication between consultants, clients, designers, and developers.
• The broader lesson is that better collaboration systems can improve both productivity and the quality of creative work.

Elsewhen’s work suggests that organizations should treat design tools as shared operational infrastructure. Establishing common workflows, reusable components, and accessible sources of truth can help teams reduce duplication, onboard faster, and deliver stronger products.