From idea to interface: How four design teams use Figma Make
Figma Make, the prompt-to-app tool that became generally available alongside the rest of Figma's AI features, is changing how design teams move from concept to working product. Instead of spending hours on repetitive layouts and wiring up prototype connections, teams are using the tool to test ideas, secure stakeholder buy-in, and explore directions they might otherwise skip. The design teams at Maven Clinic, ServiceNow, Pendo, and LinkedIn show four different approaches to making Figma Make a practical part of the workflow.
Resurrecting a backlogged feature
Maven Clinic, a healthcare platform focused on women and families, launched its employer-sponsored Maven Managed Benefit program in early 2024. To meet launch deadlines, the team had to defer some features—including a map-based fertility clinic finder. When product design manager Loric Avanessian revisited the idea, she knew a static mockup wouldn't be enough to win support, so she turned to Figma Make.
Avanessian fed her initial designs into Figma Make and produced a high-fidelity, interactive prototype. "It looked like it belonged in our product, and it felt real," she says. The prototype circulated widely on Slack, caught the CEO's attention, and got the feature back on the roadmap when it risked falling below the priority cut line. Teams can now copy designs directly out of Figma Make previews and into Figma Design for further iteration.
The prototype went through additional rounds: another designer refined it in Figma Design and brought it back into Figma Make. That cycle helped surface the micro-interactions that tend to stay hidden until something becomes tangible, and it accelerated cross-functional review. The clinic finder MVP went from two years in the backlog to design, development, testing, and launch in under four sprints. "Because we started at 45% instead of zero," Avanessian explains, "we were able to design, develop, test, and launch."
On a more recent project, Figma Make actually preceded the Product Requirements Document (PRD)—the team wrote requirements based on what worked and what didn't in the first prototype. Avanessian sees this as a shift in the designer's role: less time on execution, more on taste, strategy, and vision. "Figma Make helps you solve the blank-canvas problem by giving you something to riff on," she says. "It also helps you try a bunch of ideas really fast, and then go back to your core designer skillset of refining and adding polish."
Getting a head start on the unknown
Some products have clear precedents to guide design. ServiceNow, the AI platform company, faced the opposite situation when building a dashboard that would show customers the ROI of various AI agents. Senior staff product designer Guy Meyer describes the space as full of unknowns that are difficult to research, making Figma Make useful for early exploration.
Different teams at ServiceNow had conflicting views on how to structure the dashboard's information hierarchy. Figma Make let Meyer generate something concrete within minutes. "Figma Make gave me a map to understand, on some level, what people would need to see on a dashboard," he says. "Within five minutes, I could validate some of our ideas." The tool also exposed what wouldn't hold up over time. The AI agents matrix it proposed, for example, wouldn't scale for customers who eventually work with thousands of systems. "It was a good solution for today," Meyer notes, "when most companies are nascent with their AI journey, but we're trying to lay the groundwork for the future." The team pivoted toward more custom solutions for that reason.
Making design this accessible has democratized the process at ServiceNow, according to Meyer. "Anyone can prompt their own version, and we're able to cherry-pick the pieces we like," he says. "It also removes the ego and time commitment that ties you to an idea." The team previously spent weeks designing multiple directions and gathering feedback. Figma Make shortens that loop to two or three days, giving cross-functional partners a concrete artifact to react to which, Meyer says, reframes the designer's contribution from execution to raising the quality bar of what AI produces.
Iterating on a conversational interface
Pendo, which makes tools for product analytics, in-app guides, and user feedback, turned to Figma Make when senior staff product designer Brian Greenbaum needed to design a conversational UI called Agent Mode. The requirements pushed him toward the prompt-to-app approach: the result had to feel like Pendo, it needed multiple variations, and it was an experiential design where timing and message flow mattered.
Greenbaum started with a frame from Figma Design and built an interface to explore how reasoning messages and tool call responses would stream in. A drop-down menu let him toggle between minimal and detailed views, or single-line and stacked text, making it easy for anyone to explore the feel of the UI. The team ultimately chose to keep a persistent message trail so users could stay oriented inside the tool.
The tangible artifact also invited contributions. When a collaborator suggested swapping the standard circular loading icon for an animated Pendo logo, Greenbaum prompted in a toggle for that change quickly. "Before, I would have mocked up static designs because the prototyping may not have been worth it with all these variations," he says. "But with code, I can get it done faster."
Design systems that scale inside Figma Make
LinkedIn’s design systems team has started treating Figma Make as part of its toolkit, not just for prototyping but for keeping early explorations aligned with the platform’s visual language. Staff Design Engineer Grant Blakeman describes the shift: designers already come to the team asking which pattern fits a given part of the app; now they are coming for tooling as well.
Templates in Figma Make help teams start from a file that already matches brand and product guidelines. LinkedIn’s template takes this a step further by generating three variations of a design on the first prompt, producing layouts for web, mobile, and tablet with the ability to switch between light and dark modes. Product Designer Cherin Yoo explains the motivation: “We were trying to get more deterministic outputs that would accurately abide by not just our components and styles, but our product patterns as well.” The template includes guidelines for frequently used components and internal CSS color ramps. “LLMs make choices within the boundaries we give them,” Yoo says, “and this template helps us narrow those boundaries.”
Protecting private data during prompts
Presentations can expose sensitive user information, so Product Designer Ray Sun customized the template’s code to include metadata that fills designs with mock content from fictional companies and people. That lets designers stay in the Figma Make flow knowing the data being pulled in has been legally vetted.
Stretching the Double Diamond
The Design Council’s Double Diamond model, introduced in 2003, breaks the design process into four phases: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver. Figma Make fits into that framework by accelerating the divergence and convergence work at each stage. Giuliano Manno, director of design systems at LinkedIn, sees it as a way to stretch the vertices of the diamond: “Figma Make allows us to do faster divergence and exploration work.” He also values it for cross-functional communication: “In five minutes, I can use Figma Make to generate something that helps the idea click for everybody.”
Blakeman agrees that the tool bridges a gap that older prototyping approaches couldn’t. “It’s a communication tool with a combination of fidelity and ease-of-use that we never had with other types of prototyping,” he says. He also sees a cultural effect: designers are becoming more comfortable working with code. “I think designers are going to evolve to get more technical, and I’m watching designers who use Figma Make become less afraid to go into the code to play with things. They can now create demos that would’ve taken an engineer a lot of time—or wouldn’t have gotten resourced in the first place.”
In the classic Double Diamond design thinking pattern, Figma Make allows us to stretch the two vertices of the diamond because it allows us to do faster divergence and exploration work.“In the classic Double Diamond design thinking pattern, Figma Make allows us to stretch the two vertices of the diamond because it allows us to do faster divergence and exploration work.”
Figma Make has exited beta and is now available for all users to try.
