The Figma Product Designer

“What was the moment this product clicked?” — share yours

A mid-to-senior product designer at a tech company with 3–8 years of experience. Figma is where they spend most of their working day — from rough explorations to polished specs. They work across a shared team library and collaborate with PMs in comments and engineers in dev mode. They are fast, opinionated about component architecture, and quietly frustrated by how the tools around Figma still slow everything down.

• →Move from concept to spec without losing fidelity at each stage
• →Maintain a component library that doesn't become a maintenance burden
• →Hand off designs to engineers without being the translation layer
• →Collaborate with PMs and stakeholders without the file becoming a mess

• —Engineers who don't use dev mode and ask questions already answered in the spec
• —Component libraries that drift from production because nobody owns the sync
• —Stakeholders who leave comments on the wrong version of a file
• —Figma performance when files get large — the scroll lag is its own kind of suffering

• Design is a conversation, not a deliverable — but it needs structure to be useful
• A design system is either maintained or it's lies
• The best handoff is the one nobody notices because it was clear from the start

Works in a team of 2–5 designers. Uses a shared component library maintained by a design systems designer (if they're lucky) or themselves (if they're not). Has a file naming convention they follow that nobody else does. Spends 20% of their time in meetings that involve their designs. Does usability testing irregularly. Uses Figma plugins — Unsplash, Stark, Content Reel — as standard operating procedure. Has opinions about auto-layout that they learned through pain.

• →Reliable dev mode adoption by engineers reduces back-and-forth by half
• →Better version history navigation means less time reconstructing what changed and why
• →Stronger library governance tools mean less drift between design and production
• →Faster performance on large files removes the friction that leads to smaller, worse files

Pairs with `frontend-engineer` for handoff workflow mapping. Contrast with `design-systems-engineer` to surface the gap between component design and implementation. Use with `product-manager` to map the design review and feedback loop.