The collaboration tax on enterprise design
In the agency world, we could manage. A small team, a couple of Sketch files, maybe a shared Dropbox; it was tactical and fast. But when you move to an enterprise context, where dozens of designers, product managers, and engineers are working on a single, sprawling platform, the traditional workflow becomes a heavy tax on productivity.
Until recently, our reality as a UX Lead was a workflow of friction. A designer saves a file in Sketch; they upload it to Abstract for version control; product management views it in InVision, and engineering pulls specifications from Zeplin. This complex chain is a house of cards: it’s fragile, slow, and breeds errors. Every ‘Save’ and ‘Sync’ is a moment where the source of truth diverges. The time we spend resolving merge conflicts and checking if we have the latest ‘V3_Final_Joe_Edits.sketch’ is time taken away from genuinely solving user problems.
The solution isn’t to add another tool to the chain; it’s to eliminate the chain entirely. This is where Figma’s browser-first, single-file model steps in, offering a strategic answer to a tactical problem. It’s a unifying force that forces everyone to work from one canonical location, which is a judgement call I am now making for all our product teams.
One source of truth, zero sync issues
The single most powerful feature Figma provides for enterprise-level work is its inherent multiplayer capability. The design file is no longer a document; it’s a live URL. This might sound simplistic, but its implications for a scaled organisation are profound. We can organise sprint reviews and workshops where everyone, regardless of their operating system or installed software, is looking at the exact same screen, in real time.
This centralisation allows us to completely rethink how we manage permissions and access, which is crucial in a regulated broadcast or enterprise environment. Product Owners and stakeholders can comment directly on the canvas, engineers can inspect properties without needing a separate spec tool, and our UX team is freed from the low-value work of constantly publishing and syncing files across disparate platforms. It removes the dependency on Abstract for version control and InVision for prototyping; it bundles all of it into one place. This constraint, this one-tool policy, is not a limitation on creativity; it’s a strategy for efficiency. Just as imposing a creative constraint can sharpen focus, adopting a single platform sharpens our execution.
Scaling with components, not symbols
For a product to scale, its design system must be robust, reliable, and easily maintainable. Sketch’s symbols, while powerful, felt like local libraries that had to be manually pushed and pulled into a shared ecosystem, often resulting in fragmentation and drift. In the enterprise setting, this is unacceptable: every change to a core component, such as a navigation bar or an alert style, needs to propagate reliably across dozens of files and hundreds of screens.
Figma’s approach to components is simply a superior architecture for scale. Master components live in a centralised file; instances in every other file update instantly. This allows our small team to manage a vast library for an entire enterprise platform, ensuring a consistent user experience and reducing technical debt. We can now analyse usage, manage changes, and organise documentation all from one dashboard. This strategic move from fragmented file management to a single, live design system will be the differentiator for high-performing product teams over the next few years.
The future is in the browser
he choice of a design tool for an enterprise team is a strategic business decision, not a purely creative one. It’s about operational efficiency, risk mitigation, and scaling capability. For us, the shift to Figma is the future because it elegantly solves the complexity of collaboration at scale. It removes the friction that slows us down, replacing a complicated, multi-app workflow with one frictionless, browser-based experience. The time it saves isn’t just design time; it’s engineering time, product time, and leadership time, all of which allows us to focus on the truly hard work: delivering value to our users.