Note: This Work Product assumes the problem statement has been validated through extensive data and user research. In other words, the problem is actually worth solving. The focus is to highlight two potential features, how they solve the problem, and how to effectively communicate their value to senior leadership and engineering teams.
Executive Summary
Develop features for linking notes and searching across multiple FigJam boards to enhance the note-taking capabilities of FigJam, retain users, and expand FigJam’s usage beyond the design community while growing Figma’s market.
Problem Statement
Our product team uses FigJam extensively for notes and brainstorming workshops, especially for problem discovery. However, many users, including members of our team and users online, report challenges with finding and linking notes across multiple boards. Without these features, users often turn to tools like Notion, Tana, or Confluence for transcription and organisation.
Pains
- Linking between notes is not possible
- It’s difficult to find and extract information from FigJam, especially with large boards and if you have several different files in a common folder (resulting in 100+ sticky notes)
Opportunity
FigJam can become a comprehensive tool not only for collaborative online whiteboarding but also for structuring information, recalling relevant data, and storing it for effective usage across roles like design, product, and engineering in the enterprise market.
Goals
User goals:
- Quickly find and retrieve data
- Link between notes to connect related data across multiple boards and sections
- Streamline note-taking workflows on mobile and desktop
Business Goals:
- Boost Figma user satisfaction by >10%
- Drive FigJam adoption by >5%
- Drive premium subscription growth through advanced features, like advanced linking and search functionalities, by >5%
- Position FigJam as a comprehensive note-taking and collaboration tool
Non-Goals:
- FigJam will remain focused on note-taking and collaboration without expanding into comprehensive project management features
- FigJam will continue to operate as an online tool, prioritising real-time collaboration and connectivity
User Stories
Persona: UX Researcher
Story: Sarah, a UX Researcher, is synthesising notes following a series of user interviews. She has set up a project folder with five different FigJam files, each having 20+ sections and 100+ notes. Sarah’s job is to cluster the notes and identify patterns in all the FigJam files. However, she’s unable to recall a specific note or piece of information that would help her. With the ability to extract information from notes, she can simply search by keywords.
FigJam Action: Figma AI scans the notes across all boards located in the same project folder, identifies key points from Sarah’s search, and highlights all relevant notes.
Result: Sarah can seamlessly search across multiple boards and sections to find the notes that are relevant, helping her proceed with her data synthesis.
Persona: Product Manager
Story: Naomi, a Product Manger, needs to write a PRD for a new feature. She knows there is a FigJam board that contains insights from a recent problem discovery workshop with her Tech Lead and UX Designer, but she also wants to connect findings from earlier discovery efforts. Without a way to efficiently consolidate this information, she risks missing critical details. Naomi uses the new linkage feature, which lets her click on a note with an embedded link that directs her to the user insights repository in another FigJam board.
Action: By navigating these linked boards, Naomi quickly gathers relevant insights from both current and past discovery efforts. She compiles a more informed PRD, including a clear problem statement, user pain points, and market positioning, based on a comprehensive understanding of the data.
Result: Naomi saves significant time and ensures her PRD is aligned with team insights, user and market needs, as well as business goals.
Pricing and Packaging
Continue providing FigJam to individual consumers at no cost to drive adoption and stickiness. In other words, Figma’s freemium strategy remains unchanged.
Revenue will continue to come from paid plans for enterprise customers, starting at $5/mo per user (an increase from today’s $3/mo), based on organisational needs. The price increase reflects higher computational costs, which will need to be weighed carefully.
Competitive and Market Analysis
FigJam has untapped potential to outperform competitors, not only as a collaborative tool for real-time brainstorming, but also as a visual note-taking and insights repository.
Unlike Notion, Tana, and Confluence, FigJam’s visual-first approach gives it a unique positioning. We’re building on this visual advantage by adding:
- Users can easily create visual hierarchies and relationships between ideas, something neither Notion, Tana, or Confluence can replicate efficiently
- Linking between notes and ideas across different FigJam boards, similar to Tana, but with visual components
- Visualising connections between notes and ideas across multiple FigJam boards through expanded search, allowing users to discover new relationships and insights, something that Notion, Tana, and Confluence currently lack
- The new feature to create a Figma slide outline based on a FigJam board (which is already awesome) will be further enhanced by enabling users to more easily canvas across boards and consolidate information
Equally, Figma’s positioning against Miro, which admittedly already offers these functionalities, lies in FigJam’s integration with Figma, an advantage unique to FigJam. This target market positioning means it could dominate the design and product market segments, unlike Miro, which caters to diverse industries. Additionally, at $5/mo per user, it’s more cost-effective for product teams to adopt (Miro pricing currently starts at $8/mo per user)
By doubling down on its visual-first positioning, FigJam can dominate the design and creative sectors and extend its reach to product, engineering, and other cross-functional teams.
Key Use Cases for Phase 1
- Quick search: Users can instantly find notes across boards with keyword search
- Linking notes: Users can connect related ideas by linking notes across boards
- Visual relationships: Users can visualise connections between notes across boards
These features are prioritised as they solve key user needs. The outcomes are to save users time searching for information, reduce cognitive load by organising scattered data, and help uncover patterns and insights to solve complex problems as well as enhance productivity.
Equally, it support business goals by boosting retention, increasing engagement, and expanding FigJam’s use beyond design teams. The aim is to reduce reliance on competitors and drive broader cross-functional adoption.
Technical Considerations
- Make search fast and scalable across large datasets
- Support linking notes and boards with error handling for broken links
- Use graph databases to map and query relationships between notes and boards
- Optimise performance for large boards with many links
- Ensure compatibility across browsers, devices, and existing APIs
Go-To-Market Plan
- Position FigJam as a trustworthy visual note-taker. Emphasise intuitiveness and seamless integration with Figma and Figma Slides
- Pre-launch beta with power users to build buzz. Targeted marketing to drive activations*
- Showcase FigJam at the next Config and other industry events to drive enterprise adoption
* Note: I’m a big fan of Figma’s organic growth strategy and word-of-mouth targeted marketing. If you’re interested to learn more, this episode from Lenny’s Podcast was pretty inspiring.
Product Metrics
Business Impact
- Percentage of active and retained FigJam users
- Growth in enterprise customers (measured in total numbers and monthly percentage increase)
- Freemium-to-paid conversion rate for individual and enterprise users
Engagement
- Average searches per user
- Average links and cross-linkages per user
- Time spent on boards per sessions
- Frequency of templates and Figma AI usage to organise ideas and generate visuals
- Numbers of boards created or reused per user
Expansion
- Adoption by non-design roles, tracked via in-app surveys and usage of templates like stand-ups and roadmapping
- Cross-functional collaboration within teams, measured through in-app surveys and activity tracking
Final Words
FigJam’s potential goes beyond the design and creative community. Its note-taking and visual capabilities can extend to roles across product and engineering teams alike.
By focusing on intuitive workflows, advanced features like search and linking, FigJam can transform how teams ideate, document, and execute projects. It showcases FigJam’s opportunity to truly redefine team collaboration.
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