Designer-led to procurement-led adoption
Figma
This reveals that Figma is still sold mostly as a team tool, not yet as a company wide software spend controlled by IT or procurement. In practice, the people choosing Figma are usually design leaders close to daily work, because the product is easy to try, implementation is light, and seat costs are still small enough that a VP of design or experience can approve them without a long enterprise buying process.
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Inside teams, expansion starts with viewers and commenters. Designers share a live file, then PMs, engineers, UX writers, or marketers ask for edit access once they need to change copy, reuse components, or build on the work. That creates seat growth from workflow pull, not from a top down rollout.
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The main trigger for decoupling is larger, more centralized contracts. Comparable PLG products hit this point when buyers start caring less about design workflow and more about SSO, access control, security, procurement, and bulk pricing across hundreds of seats.
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Figma had not fully crossed that line because it still lived beside other budgets rather than replacing them. Design teams often kept paying for Adobe Creative Cloud while also paying for Figma, which meant Figma won the end user but had not yet become the single standardized creative suite for the whole company.
The next phase is a shift from designer led adoption to budget owner led standardization. As Figma adds more products, broadens beyond core design seats, and increases the number of accounts above $100K, purchase authority should move upward toward IT, procurement, and finance, which is when end users and decision makers fully split apart.