How Figma's Strategy Weaponizes Design to Be Your Business's Secret Advantage
Reverse-engineering Figma’s transformation into the command center empowering design-led companies to crush siloed competitors
When a sophisticated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack took down Linear's website in 2022, they faced a crisis that would have sent most tech companies into an engineering war room, frantically coding their way back to existence.
But Linear isn't most companies.
Instead of diving into server logs and firewalls, Linear’s emergency response came from an unlikely source: its Design Team. Within hours, they used Figma, their go-to secret weapon, to transform what could have been a brand-destroying outage into a collaborative public design party.
Linear designers shared their Figma files and engaged with fans in real time as they spread the word. The crisis became such a viral sensation that some even accused Linear of staging the attack as a publicity stunt for its new redesign.
Linear’s “luck” in turning the tables on looming disaster was the direct result of Figma's strategic transformation from "just another design tool" to an end-to-end product development command center.
While most companies still treat design as the "make it pretty" department, forward-thinking organizations like Linear have figured out how to weaponize Figma's strengths to crush competitors still stuck in siloed workflows.
Pedal to the Metal: 40% Faster to Leave Competitors in the Digital Dust
Last year, when the Linear team embarked on their most ambitious UI redesign to date, they pushed the Figma envelope even further.
Most product teams lose precious time, quality, and shared understanding through the traditional design-to-development workflow, where approved designs get thrown "over the wall" to developers, who are inevitably blocked implementation questions. It becomes a bad game of “telephone,” as each small mistake gets increasingly garbled with every transfer.
In line with its strategy of removing workflow friction, Linear created its own Figma plugin to empower real-time collaboration between Product, Design, and Engineering. By enabling faster decision-making, Linear accelerated the transition from approved designs to coded features by 40%, faster than most competitors can schedule their first kickoff call.
What the Linear team gets that most businesses don’t is how much more than just a design tool Figma is– it’s their key to unprecedented speed, design excellence, collaboration, and resilience.
What Figma Has Done For Linear, It Can Do For You
Face it: Figma is far more than just a design tool. It's more like a big-screen digital war room where anyone can see, take action, and make moves in real time from anywhere in the world.
Figma forms the core of modern software product development, enabling companies like Linear to go beyond making cutting-edge interfaces and become their central nervous system to accelerate their ability to respond to opportunities and threats.
By decoding Figma's strategy, we’ll see exactly how you can apply these same principles before your competitors do to both use Figma, and apply Figma’s best of strategic choices to your product.
From Digital Canvas to Corporate Nervous System
Think of Figma like NASA’s Mission Control for product teams: A central command center where everyone can see the same real-time data, make decisions, and execute changes without waiting for approvals to cascade through hierarchies or information to be translated between departments.
Figma was also instrumental in Spotify’s shift to making better, faster, more aligned product decisions, eventually bringing every platform together in a unified design system.
Notion’s Ivan Zhao was similarly enthusiastic about the power Figma brought to their collaborative product development process during their design turnaround:
“With Figma, it’s easy enough for anyone to get a vision out of their head and onto the page for others to see. It’s truly a tool for thought, just like Notion. So we feel like kindred spirits in that way.”
All this is the result of a very specific set of choices, which offer key insights into building sustainable product strategies.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Product Strategy Decoded to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.