Figma's engineering teams eat their own dogfood

Figma's engineering organization has been using FigJam since before it launched, but the shift to hybrid work has turned the whiteboarding tool into a daily necessity. Engineering Manager Alice Ching, Technical Lead Joey Wang, and Software Engineer Greg Blaszczuk recently spoke about how they use FigJam to run interviews, onboard new hires, and keep a growing team connected.

Asynchronous stand-ups to fight meeting fatigue

When the team was fully in-office, stand-ups were a natural way to catch up. After going remote, Alice Ching's team found that Zoom stand-ups became transactional and started running late as the team grew. They moved the ritual into FigJam: a ten-minute timer, async updates, and stickies with personal updates and photos from the weekend. Teammates can react and chat individually without waiting for the meeting to finish.

Greg Blaszczuk notes that the format changed how the team winds down after meetings. Instead of hanging up and going straight back to work, teammates now stay on the canvas to play games, like "20-second animal," where one person picks an animal and everyone gets 20 seconds to draw it. The digital whiteboard turned a logistical meeting into something the team looks forward to.

Virtual whiteboards in the interview loop

Figma's engineering interviews rely on architecture and system design exercises, which are typically whiteboard sessions. When the team went hybrid, they swapped the physical whiteboard for a FigJam file. A candidate is given a prompt, asked to map a hypothetical architecture using shapes, and then writes code in a code block that is already formatted like an editor. The process mirrors what it was like in a conference room, with the added benefit of leaving a permanent record.

Since the file persists, interviewers can pull it up again during a post-interview debrief and reference specific parts of the candidate's solution instead of relying on memory. To get candidates started quickly, the team opens a FigJam open session and briefly shows how the tool works for anyone who is unfamiliar.

Interaction diagrams for faster onboarding

Joey Wang watched the mobile team grow from a small group to more than 20 engineers and was fielding constant questions about which team owns which codebase. To make those answers visible, he built an interaction diagram in FigJam: screenshots of the actual UI placed on a canvas with connections showing how each interaction flows. Folders and cylinders symbolize the services and teams underneath each interaction.

Having the full system in one place is a significant improvement over trying to narrate the architecture over Zoom. New team members can visualize dependencies before they start their first project, which makes their work easier to scope. Wang says this has become an invaluable reference as new people join.

A weekly critique for engineers

Figma's design teams have long used design critiques for feedback, but remote work made it harder for engineers to get input from peers outside their project team. Alice Ching's team stole a page from their design counterparts and started a weekly developer critique.

Engineers can post their work by dropping it into a FigJam file, sharing the link, and sometimes embedding code blocks so attendees can see the specific code in question. Feedback happens via stickies, which Joey Wang points out makes the loop more efficient than a verbal round-robin. Stickies inherently lower the barrier to participation, so more people comment, and the collective output is less biased by the order people speak in. Async feedback also gives people time to formulate their own opinions. The meeting was a tough sell at first, but it has become one of the team's most popular meetings because it helps engineers stress-test their ideas and see them from new perspectives.

What's next for the team

The team still sees room to push the tool further in their own workflows:

  • Virtual presence: Alice Ching would like to see teammates eventually just hang out together in FigJam files while working, recreating the casual conversations that used to happen in an office pod.
  • Live coding in interviews: Greg Blaszczuk is interested in trying the CoderPad widget for whiteboard interviews, since being able to see code output in real time makes mistakes visible as they happen.
  • Bug bashes: Joey Wang saw a Twitter post about teams using FigJam to collect and triage bugs in one place, a practice the FigJam team already follows. It seems like a natural fit for the rest of the engineering org to get a full picture of bugs and process them in a shared space.