Figma's Push Beyond Design Tools
Matthew Moore, Head of Design at Lime, on Figma vs. Adobe
The real prize for Figma was never just replacing design software, it was turning occasional viewers into everyday editors across the company. In the interview, product managers, engineers, and other teams already use Figma as the place where product decisions live, but moving executives and broader business teams into active creation requires a simpler document or slides workflow. That is why the comparison to Dropbox Paper matters. It points to the hard jump from a beloved specialist tool into a general collaboration product.
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Inside Lime, Figma had already expanded beyond designers because teams could comment, edit, and reuse live files instead of exporting mockups into Google Slides. That made Figma the source of truth for product work, but not yet the default writing or presentation tool for the whole company.
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A second Figma interview shows the same adoption pattern. Viewers get pulled in through shared files, then some become editors when their role gets more hands on. That bottom up path works well for design adjacent work, but broader company adoption needs lighter weight use cases like whiteboarding, documents, or marketing content.
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Dropbox followed a similar logic when it bought Hackpad and launched Dropbox Paper in 2017, trying to add a collaborative workspace on top of file storage. The product shipped, but it did not become a default work surface at the same scale. That is the warning in the comparison. Adjacent expansion is intuitive, but hard to win without a clearly better workflow.
This is where Figma has kept pushing. It launched Figma Slides at Config 2024 after users had already created millions of slide files inside the product, showing that presentations were a natural next wedge. The path forward is a broader bundle for product, marketing, and communication teams, where Figma wins when the work stays connected to live design systems instead of becoming a separate document.