It’s Figma Config week, and their new feature announcements reminded me of this little story.
When I joined Litmus in 2019, our product design stack was a combination of Sketch, InVision, Abstract. I absolutely did not want to be the “hey let’s use this other tool instead” guy — I’m not a tools nerd at all — but the whole process felt inefficient from my new hire perspective. Abstract in particular was really difficult for me to wrap my head around, despite being more than comfortable with git workflows for code.
About a month after I started, I suggested to our team lead Adnan that Figma seemed to do everything we were using these other three tools for, with a more integrated workflow, and cheaper. I hadn’t really used it yet but everyone online seemed to be talking about it as the Sketch killer — maybe it was worth investigating? I caveated: Please take this suggestion with a grain of salt and if you all like the status quo, I’ll learn to like it, too.
Adnan is at least a bit of a tools nerd, so he took the action to explore Figma. Does it really do everything we need or is it missing critical features? What will be able to migrate or recreate our existing Sketch components? Will this have any negative effects on our workflow as a design team or with collaborators?
The fact that those were among our concerns seems laughable in hindsight, but more than anything it speaks to how far Figma has come in a relatively short amount of time. They were the challenger at the time and it didn’t feel like a clear cut decision. The sheer quality and speed with which they have shipped and continue to ship the right features and iterations is enviable. I can’t think of a better team in product right now.
Our team cut over to using Figma for new work a few weeks after that initial conversation and I, luckily, avoided ever having to use InVision again. Good bet.