From whiteboard idea to shipped product: Emily Lin on FigJam’s path to GA
Figma introduced FigJam in beta in April 2021. Now that the whiteboard tool is generally available, product manager Emily Lin sat down to talk about how the team took it from a rough concept to a shipped second product for the company.
Starting from a moment of need
Lin joined Figma nearly two years before the GA release, at the moment the company first decided to build an online whiteboard. She describes herself as straddling product and design worlds since a college UX internship, and says the role appealed to her because it combined those interests. At Figma, she says, the PM role is less about being the sole decision-maker and more about serving as a facilitator—guiding collaborative teams toward decisions that benefit everyone.
The initial push for FigJam came out of the shift to remote work. Figma’s own team, like its users, was looking for a space to gather beyond the design files—for brainstorms, icebreakers, and social connection. Because that need was urgent and clearly felt company-wide, FigJam had strong momentum from the outset, even with a tight timeline. “It was all hands on deck,” Lin recalls.
Building Figma’s second product
FigJam carried a particular weight as Figma’s second product: the team wanted to ship something they could iterate on and maintain with the same care as Figma itself. Launching in beta was a deliberate move to avoid perfectionism and stay responsive to user needs while still mapping to a longer-term vision.
Priorities were set by solving problems that could block later decisions. One of the first big questions was the relationship between Figma and FigJam—whether they'd need a separate app. Beyond those structural questions, the team made calls quickly and gathered feedback from stakeholders and users as they went. A working group ran a shared Slack workspace with a few hundred alpha testers who provided a steady stream of insights. Feedback was sorted into “must fix before initial launch” and “fast follows,” with authors on sticky notes marked as a launch requirement and the timer slated as a post-launch follow-up.
Where ideas come from
Feature ideas at Figma come from everywhere—product, design, support, sales, and marketing all weigh in, as do users via Slack, support channels, and Twitter. The company’s twice-yearly Maker Week has been a particularly fertile source for FigJam: code blocks and widgets, two of the product’s most popular features, both originated there.
Each quarter, the team runs a prioritization process to decide what will meaningfully improve the product, balancing functional gaps with moments of delight. Once a feature is chosen, a kickoff meeting brings together product, design, research, and engineering to align on the core user motivation before ideating on the solution. The team builds, tests internally, iterates, and ships.
Pivots and surprises
The initial strategy centered on solving designers’ problems, since designers are Figma’s core user base. The team quickly realized that visual collaboration is not just a design problem—it’s a universal need for cross-functional communication across the whole product development process. That pushed FigJam toward a more expansive view of who it serves.
One surprise for the working group was how emotionally connected users felt to FigJam. Watching those visceral reactions changed the team’s strategy. They stepped back to ask why they themselves love Figma—what makes working together in one space feel magical—and built features like cursor chat, stamps, emotes, and high fives to recreate that feeling. “Getting at how it feels to brainstorm and connect in FigJam became a North Star,” Lin says.
Beyond brainstorming and diagramming
FigJam launched with brainstorming and diagramming as its primary use cases. As hybrid and remote work settle in, though, teams are using it to connect on a deeper level. Going forward, Lin is focused on how the product can foster rapport within teams: helping meeting facilitators draw in hesitant participants, creating a safe psychological space for collaboration, and bringing energy back to meetings. But the process hasn’t changed—the team will continue turning to user feedback to guide the way.
