Inside Figma: enterprise, explained | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)
Figma’s enterprise product work is not simply about implementing customer requests; it requires designing systems that serve organizations of vastly different sizes and roles. After learning that its original Admin Settings console no longer supported growing customer needs, Figma chose to redesign the experience around key administrative workflows rather than apply incremental UI changes. The project illustrates how customer research, cross-functional collaboration, and scalable foundations shape enterprise product development. ## Reassessing the Admin Experience - Figma Organization grew significantly after launching in early 2019, bringing more designers, developers, and collaborators into company workflows. - As organizations expanded, admins took on broader responsibilities, exposing limitations in the original Admin Settings console. - Feedback from customers, support, sales, and other teams revealed that admins: - Lacked enough information to make effective decisions during true-ups. - Were unaware of relevant features. - Had to export information manually. - Figma concluded that the existing interface constrained the value of individual features and needed a broader product redesign. ## Starting from First Principles - The team aimed to: - Improve member-management workflows. - Make existing functionality easier to discover. - Create a foundation for adding future features. - A cross-functional brainstorm included product, engineering, design, research, data, support, marketing, and sales. - Ideas were organized into “Do now,” “Worth considering,” and “Wild & crazy” categories. - The team synthesized these suggestions with user feedback to establish priorities. - What initially looked like a UI refresh became a full product update because the underlying information architecture prevented admins from making effective decisions. ## Designing for Organizations of All Sizes - Figma supports teams ranging from five people to thousands, unlike enterprise-only products focused on a narrow company profile. - Enterprise tooling must account for different organizational structures: - In small companies, one person may be an admin, design-operations lead, and active designer. - In larger companies, these responsibilities may belong to separate departments. - Different stakeholders need different information: - Budget owners need to understand organization-wide value. - Design-operations teams need appropriate permissions and resource access. - Security teams need confidence that company data is protected. - Individual users need tools that support their daily work. - Admin settings may be invisible or secondary to regular users, but they are central to admins’ daily responsibilities. ## A Scalable Product Foundation - Figma’s approach emphasizes building flexible foundations rather than narrowly targeting current customer requests. - The redesigned admin experience was intended to make future features easier to introduce and existing features more useful. - Effective enterprise development requires understanding not only individual users, but also buyers, stakeholders, organizational roles, and internal dynamics. Figma’s central recommendation is to treat enterprise products as evolving systems, not collections of one-off customer-requested features. Strong user research, broad cross-functional input, and an architecture designed for organizational scale can produce an admin experience that remains useful as customers and their needs grow.