How Figma improved their planning with Coda + FigJam
Lawrence Luk, TPM at Figma, shares the story of the Coda + FigJam widget.
Bri Strauss
Technology Partner Manager at Coda
Productivity · 6 min read
The quest for more collaborative planning.
When Lawrence first joined Figma, he was tasked with improving a somewhat messy process for making and sharing plans. The leadership team was keen for final plans to be documented in Coda, due to the simplicity and efficiency of having everything in one place. However, when it came to the first step of ideating, teams wanted a more visual and unstructured space to collaborate in. FigJam—Figma’s collaborative whiteboard product—became their go-to place, with teams using stickies and shapes to brainstorm ideas and visualize how plans would come together.Seamless planning with the Coda + FigJam widget.
The solution lay in connecting Coda and FigJam so the teams could get the benefits of using both tools together. Lawrence and the Figma design team worked closely with the Coda engineering team to build a widget to seamlessly share data between the two environments. The Figma team knew teams would need more than just a snapshot in time, so they made sure changes are reflected in both tools through two-way sync. The widget enables the team to use Coda as the official place to document plans, while giving them the freedom to work however they work best—whether that’s generating ideas on stickies in FigJam and converting them into Coda tables, or gathering ideas in Coda and porting them into FigJam for discussion and voting.Making brainstorms more actionable.
The team generated ideas with stickies in FigJam, then converted them into a Coda table to organize, prioritize, and assign next steps. They also brought task lists, goals, and feedback tables from Coda into FigJam to display relevant context.Keeping plans in sync across visual and structured environments.
Teams ideated and created their plans in FigJam, then sent action items directly to their centralized planning doc in Coda to document and track them all in one place. They also created visual, interactive roadmaps by turning their OKR (Objectives and Key Results) tracker in Coda into a FigJam board. Plus, updates synced between FigJam and Coda, which allowed everyone to easily discuss and iterate on plans from either tool.Running effective retros that lead to change.
When reflecting on the quarter, the Figma team turned sentiments into visual stickies in FigJam for discussion. They then ensured insights were actioned by porting stickies back into Coda to assign drivers and next steps, and track progress.Planning that works for everyone.
For Figma, the widget made planning much easier and much more efficient: “Teams can do their planning in FigJam, use the widget to send it over to Coda, and they don’t have to worry about copy-pasting things over or losing track of ideas,” Lawrence tells us. “They get the benefits of working in a collaborative space, but leadership still gets a high-level view of final plans in Coda.” Figma has now gone even deeper, syncing goals and project lists between FigJam and Coda too—for example, displaying goals from Coda while working on the roadmap in FigJam. The ability to copy the widget and drop it into other files has also ensured goals stay consistent, rather than risking them being changed as they get copied between different docs. “It’s created a lot more clarity in how we want our goals to be structured,” shares Lawrence. At the heart of the widget’s impact is a simple truth, believes Lawrence: “By synchronizing tooling geared toward visual versus systems thinkers, the widget lets us have the best of both worlds.” If you’re looking for a seamless way to collaborate, capture, and share plans across teams, the Coda + FigJam widget is the solution. It’s available and free for all Coda and Figma users. Experience the benefits for yourself—get started with the widget here.Related posts
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