Bottom-Up Enterprise Adoption of Figma
Matthew Moore, Head of Design at Lime, on Figma vs. Adobe
This is what product led enterprise adoption looks like when the user level workflow is obviously better than the incumbent. Uber did not switch because a central buyer picked a new design standard. Teams started using Figma because it removed the pain of passing around heavy local files, let multiple people work in the same browser file, and made the design file itself the place where PMs, engineers, and designers could make decisions together.
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The migration path was Photoshop to Sketch to Figma. Sketch solved interface design better than Photoshop, but still kept work in local files. Figma changed the operating model from file sharing to shared live documents, which is why adoption could spread team by team inside a company before formal enterprise rollout.
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The practical trigger was not just designer preference. At Lime and Sonder, the same pattern showed up, teams were sending around hundreds of megabytes of Sketch files, while Figma let people edit, comment, and reuse components in one place. That made switching feel like removing process overhead, not buying another design app.
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This also explains why Adobe XD struggled despite sitting inside Creative Cloud. In practice, the bundled tool was not enough if designers expected browser based multiplayer work and cross functional participation. Once Figma became the source of truth for specs, mocks, and feedback, it stopped being a single team tool and became infrastructure.
The next leg of growth comes from turning design collaboration into broader company workflow. Once PMs, writers, marketers, and engineers are already inside the file, Figma can keep expanding from design seats into planning, brainstorming, and adjacent document creation. That is how a bottom up tool becomes a standard system across the organization.