Slack From the Start

A few weeks ago, we launched Figma, a collaborative interface design tool. Our integration with Slack is foundational to how users collaborate inside Figma.

Let me explain. As we built Figma over the past few years, we talked with countless designers about how they collaborate with the rest of their team. In these conversations, we dove into everything from storing files to creating specifications to making product decisions.

We learned a lot about how our customers like to work, and one of the biggest surprises was how popular Slack was with our target market. Seemingly overnight, over half of the designers we were talking with started to report using Slack all day, every day. We also realized that Slack usage was highly correlated with other behaviors; for example, many designers who used Slack were more open and transparent about their design process.

Figma is a tool that helps teams communicate about design, so it was tempting for us to recreate a lot of the features that are already in Slack. But we also knew, from our own usage of Slack, that we didn’t want to create yet another place to check messages. Rather than duplicate features and make designers set up teams twice, we decided to build the core of Figma’s collaboration experience on top of Slack. A Figma team is a Slack team. Notifications about files in Figma come through Slack, not Figma itself.

Tonight we’re celebrating the launch of the Slack platform. Given that we’ve thought of Slack as a platform for the past year, this wasn’t a huge surprise to us. Tightly integrating Figma with Slack was a big bet, but it seems to be paying off. We’re excited to watch many other companies follow a similar path!