Team, project, and file organization

Organization is hard.

As product teams scale and naturally land on cross functional ‘squad’ models of working—with contributors from across the business—the way we structure and present our work can make or break our ability to align as a team towards broader goals, stay on the same page, and even know where to find the latest version of a design—registration-flow-v1-final10.jpg, anyone?

Being efficient within our design software can trim down the hours we spend digging around and ensure that we can confidently make the design-to-development handshake as smooth as we’d like.

All designers strive for a robust file organization to match our pixel-perfect designs, but it can be tough to know where to start, how to maintain a system, and what it means to build one that uniquely works for your team. While every team is different, and we all have opinions about what works for us, there are some common workflow tips that we can all use to do our best work in Figma.

Working at Figma, I speak to design teams across the world on a daily basis. This has allowed me to collate different organizational workflows for tackling a team’s structure. Having taken a look at these approaches, I’ve settled on a rhythm that shouldn’t require too much overhead to kickstart, and will prove the value with your wider teams moving forward.