Migrating to Figma: How Blibli Design Managed the Change
By: Bella Vierena
Tags: Designops, Figma, Change Management, User Experience, Experience

Migrating to Figma: How Blibli Design Managed the Change

How Blibli Design migrated from Sketch, Zeplin, and Invision to Figma. Bella Vierena Follow Sep 13 · 5 min read

Recently, Blibli Design team migrated our design software suite to Figma. To give more context, our design team consists of 40+ designers, ranging from UX Designers, UI Designers, UX Copywriters, UX Researchers, and UX Engineers. We also work with hundreds of Developers, Product Managers, and many, many other stakeholders. This pushes our need for a real-time collaboration tool, amongst other things, and Figma was a no-brainer solution to this.

Having major process changes that would impact so many lines of the company might sound like such a daunting challenge, but we’re here to share our process and what we’ve learned from it. We hope that you — whether you lead a large or a smaller design team — can pick up a thing or two from our story.

Why did we migrate to Figma?

Before we decided to migrate to Figma, we had a few inefficiencies in our design workflow. Some of them being:

Baton pass process — We had to pass our design file from one person to the other in Sketch, and then make the prototype in Invision, and then hand over our designs to the developer with Zeplin. This results in a lot of back and forth between software.

We had to pass our design file from one person to the other in Sketch, and then make the prototype in Invision, and then hand over our designs to the developer with Zeplin. This results in a lot of back and forth between software. Collaboration challenges — Previously, multiple people couldn’t collaborate in one file, and it was harder to include product managers or business users early in the design process.

As our team was growing bigger and bigger, we had to address these roadblocks. We saw that Figma offered a solution that would end our pain points and hence, our managers kicked off the migration project.

Laying the foundation

So to start, we created a migration strategy that complemented our environment consisting of:

Team structures

Collaborators

Project types

Project timelines

We also assembled all the leads within the UX team to help determine the scope of work and responsibility of each function. With these in mind, we constructed a single guideline to share with the entire team.

Understanding our team was the single most crucial thing at the start of the migration. Like the design process, we strived to empathize with the needs and pain points from our team first and then built a solution around it.

Aside from taking internal cues, we also sought direction from the various tutorials and testimonies on Figma’s site. Spotify team also published their migration guideline (here), which helped us a lot in creating a base for ours.

It’s good to learn from our mistakes, but it’s critical to learn from the successes and failures of other companies during their migration.

Selecting changeover strategies

As we have had an existing tool before the migration, deciding how to transition from the previous tool to Figma, our new design tool, was the next important thing. There were 4 main changeover strategies namely:

Direct cutover

Pilot running

Phased implementation

Parallel running

Each of these has its own pros and cons. Due to the complexity of our processes, Blibli Design opted for a mix of a pilot and parallel changeover strategies with the following steps:

First, Figma was piloted to a single squad where the designers were adept Figma users. This was done to see if it worked for our design team and also to get feedback from other departments such as PMs, developers, and business users. Next, we built our design system, BLUE, from scratch in Figma. This was a challenge because we were unsure of how to create an efficient library structure, but after trials and errors, we managed to create a system that worked. During this time, the designers were given time to try out and play around with Figma to familiarize ourselves with the tool. Lastly, once BLUE was ready, it was time to include everyone in the change. We had Figma rolled out in parallel with our past design tool as some projects were already in development; therefore, we still needed our old tools. This went for about a quarter, and even the timeline got extended before everyone could fully settle in.

Do not be afraid to have changes in the strategy or slow down a bit if it’s going to take you further in the long run.

General overview of Blibli Design’s migration timeline.

Aligning the entire organization

As this migration would have organization-wide effects, we had to socialize the guidelines multiple times to other departments regarding these big changes. To help ease the pain, we gathered some of our members in the design team and assigned them to be ‘Figma Advocates’.

Figma Advocates were responsible to socialize the guidelines to their respective squads or tribes, or simply just to spread the word around. With everyone’s support and teamwork, we could easily share the news and updates about Figma within the company.

Once everyone was introduced to Figma and as soon as we’ve started to imbue it in our day-to-day work, we did the following actions to ensure a smooth migration process:

Have health checks with the team to see if the current guidelines are effective and tweak whichever could be improved.

to see if the current guidelines are effective and tweak whichever could be improved. Monitor the progress of the migration to see if adjustments to the timeline were needed.

to see if adjustments to the timeline were needed. Address challenges and blockers. When faced with resistant users, work out the issue and remind them on how it would benefit them in the long run.

Luckily for us, everyone in Blibli was excited and supported the initiative. It’s essential to have support from the team to ensure a successful migration.

Product tribes in Blibli who now collaborate seamlessly in Figma.

After successfully migrating to Figma, we saw that our processes were much faster and it was easier to collaborate with our teammates. Product managers and software developers also commented positively on the change and felt the benefit of the migration.

To this day, our guidelines are still living documents, with new cases emerging and feedbacks coming in as we go. We strive to always improve our processes for a more efficient workflow so that we can deliver the best experience for you.