My Dear Friends of Figma in Now with that i’m excited to introduce our speaker for the day today we have andy ford who is the global head of ux at kimberly clark now andy is no stranger to the figma community he’s spoken at our design leaders meetup and is also featured in one of our blog posts there are probably a million challenges to scale very very large.
Design teams so i’m excited for what andy is going to share with us today please give him a warm figma welcome and over to you andy awesome thank you very much all right well i’m going to do some uh some screen sharing here and we will hop right into it all right you guys able to see my screen.
Yep we see it awesome okay cool all right well first and foremost i want to uh give a little shout out to clara and vanessa they have been great uh as we ran through this and we were kind of framing up what this discussion was going to look like they asked me they’re like well what you know do you intend for people to be able.
To get out of this and at the end of the day i said i wish there was somebody like me to be able to provide some guidance on some of the lessons that we have learned here in terms of what um we’ve had to traverse and so my hope is that for all of you first and foremost thank you for making some time uh here today and.
Hopefully you’re able to glean some insights from a lot of road that we’ve traveled and be able to take a lot of that to your own organizations and to be able to have some insights about potentially what the the road ahead looks like so let me uh real quick just do a.
Background on kimberly clark you can kind of see the uh nascar sponsorship that we’ve got there with cottonell we uh make a lot of uh great products you’ve probably heard of before in the form of huggies kotex kleenex cottonell the pen pull-ups little swimmers viva scott.
Tiles list goes on and on we are a global organization we are somewhere in the neighborhood of about 46 000 employees uh globally we’re in 175 countries um and i think the cool thing about kimberly clark is that uh statistically anywhere between a quarter to a third of the world’s population touches a kimberley clark product on a.
Daily basis so we’re big and with that uh scale comes a lot of uh a lot of unique challenges um so i lead the ux team uh for kimberly clark we brought figment to the organization uh in late 2019 so we’ve been on this journey with them you know for about two and a half years now and.
Have learned a lot of things along the way uh first and foremost if you’re not currently working with figma you know i would highly encourage you to really great people uh we have really kind of received you know excellent excellent attention treatment you know and those types of things so you know from my perspective.
When i look at who we work with from from from a vendor perspective you know really kind of having a lot of great people to work with uh is certainly key to all that and helps to make a lot of this uh go a lot better um and so with that i will dive into uh the road that we’ve traveled and uh.
And talk about some of the things that we’ve learned and then talk about kind of where that led us to currently so that you guys have uh some sort of an indication as to some things that you might need to think about uh in terms of bringing figma into your organization or at a point where you may be kind of like us where this thing exploded uh in terms.
Of popularity and then uh you know a lot of the realities that you’re gonna have to sort of navigate when that happens so let me talk about uh first and foremost uh lessons learned so like i said we brought figma into the organization back in 2019 and a lot of the challenges that we have are that we have multiple many different work streams so going back to.
What was mentioned previously we have 500 and over 550 digital property properties worldwide so you think about all those brands that i just listed in 175 countries and you can see how these things you know multiply very quickly and so we’ve got a lot of different work that’s taking place a lot of it originates.
Internally with the ux team we also work with a lot of external agencies and a lot of other organizations in general and so we’ve always just got a lot of work that is going on in general and so what we needed to do as we began to walk with figma and we began to really kind of.
See what uh how we needed to get it organized really kind of needed to templatize the way that we’re doing it and so what we we’ve done from an organizational standpoint is to really kind of be able to start to frame up uh the way and areas that work is going to land based on geography so for the most part uh it.
Was really kind of uh the i guess the easiest place for us to start let’s kind of look at uh how we’re going about tackling this work from a regional perspective so if you think about the four corners of the earth that’s kind of how we are organized as well and so we just needed to find ways to really.
Kind of uh you know make sure that we are we’re organized and credit to a lot of the people on my team in terms of really kind of giving some thought as to as to how that was going to work and so but at the end of the day you know the thing that you’re going to have to be able to do is be able to find this work so that you can reuse it.
Be able to share it uh whatever the case may be you know six months from now somebody comes to you and they go hey where’s that thing that you were working on you know you need an ability to be able to uh to find it quickly you know and so you know as you begin to think about you know how things are going to scale.
Think about how you want to be organized first and foremost because when you get to this point where six months down the line somebody’s asking for something you’ve got a way to be able to uh to easily find it so just know that if you’re in an organization where you’ve got a lot of moving parts and pieces you know a lot.
Of that upfront strategy is going to make your life a lot easier uh in terms of what the road ahead’s going to look like now for us in terms of like what this means from a global design perspective again we have a lot of people we work with either internal or uh or external and so.
For us when we brought figm into the organization we started to use it you know as a design tool and we started to use it for prototyping then we started using it for testing of the prototyping and that sort of thing and so what happened is um we had a lot of editors that all of a sudden um hopped on the platform and.
I was conscious of this sort of in the back of my mind but at the same time you know as we began to start put a lot more focus on this here recently we started to realize we have had quite the explosion and so one of the things i would say is to keep an eye on these things uh you know for the most part uh in our particular case you know it was.
One of those things where we had a lot of people who had editor licenses we didn’t necessarily need an editor license and so i think you know going into it it’s good to start to have some awareness of who really kind of needs what uh and to be able to kind of lay out sort of a framework for everyone up front as well so if they understand.
Truly what they need and really kind of how you uh you know sort of ingratiate uh users into the platform itself the other thing too is that we’ve got just a tremendous amount of work that’s taken place so if you think about again 550 websites typically there’s probably about 20 to 30.
Of those that are uh you know in in the markets and the brands that we work with that are probably the most active so if you think about going through and doing like full-on you know app design website design we do a lot of enterprise design as well those screens are going to add up you know those files are going to add up and.
Everything’s just going to begin to uh to scale and so you know keep in mind the amount of volume of work that’s taken place in your organization as well and ultimately what that led us to is really kind of the need for governance and so we’re actually really just kind of getting started on our journey in terms.
Of what that looks like but as part of this process we’re not the only design team inside of kimberly clarks we’ve got other design teams that we work with as well they’re a little bit smaller they’re a little bit more spread out but at the end of the day they hopped on the platform and they’re a factor as well you know and so it’s.
One of those things where we really kind of need to craft sort of a collaborative vision uh in terms of what this looks like and how we want to scale it throughout the organization because again it just kind of went like uh you know through the roof and so we really kind of needed a way to.
Really kind of rethink a lot of that so for us you know we’ve got a lot of uh global brands and so we needed to really kind of be able to start to move in a direction where we get a lot of this connected so as i mentioned we’ve got other design groups that are inside the organization.
What this ultimately led to is that we started having to build a lot more closer relationships with the with the overall broader design organization and two what it has really kind of began to make us really think about is how we need to spin up design systems at.
Scale so a lot of the ways that we had approached this in the past was that we had a certain site that we were working on with a certain brand in a certain region and so we’d go and spin up a design system for that and then we’d have same brand in another region and we.
Just spin up a design system for that and so as you can imagine we had a ton of design systems and at the end of the day now we’re starting to think rethink the way that we’ve approached design systems because design systems much like i had mentioned uh before with the files and those sorts of things can begin to get.
Quite quite out of control as well and so now we’re starting to think about you know how do we branch design systems we had a discussion this morning we’re talking about headless design systems so it really kind of just depends uh you know based on your situation in our particular case because we just have so.
Many brands and we have so many sites that uh you know uh we’re having to really kind of come to terms with the reality that these things can get uh these things get quite complex fairly quick you know and so at the end of the day there are a number of different approaches to design systems my recommendation would be that you.
Really can give some thought as to the type of organization that you’re in and and really kind of what’s going to work best so now we’re moving towards uh an enterprise uh plan and as part of that uh overall uh you know one of the things that i think has been sort of uh an upside to a.
Lot of a lot of this is that other you know leaders have wanted to be a part of that journey as well so we have for example like i mentioned kind of other design groups here inside the organization we also have an innovation group as well they’re usually kind of poking and.
Pressing on some things and uh and and so what that’s really kind of allowed us to do is to really kind of prevent present a lot more opportunities throughout the organization in terms of where we can leverage figma so i think a lot of groups have really kind of seen a lot of upside and benefit uh to working.
In the ways that we work and so they’re really kind of wanting to become part of that as well and so that’s even led to another discussion about you know how we really scale figma inside the enterprise to become more of a collaborative tool uh that others can use.
Typically it’s kind of one of those things it’s uh you know it’s very sort of designer heavy designer led that sort of thing but even with products like fig jam for example it’s a collaboration platform anybody can jump in and start using and so when we start.
Working with a lot of our other teams there are other aspects to figma that really kind of parlay into a lot of the work that we’re doing and so again you know just thinking a little bit more broader in terms of context think about you know others inside the organization that might benefit from figma as well and.
Really you know try to roll out the red carpet as much as you’re able to to to really kind of help them understand you know how to use the tool where and when you know and that sort of thing as well and as i just mentioned you know for us uh design systems at scale has be begun.
To become something that we’re we’re needing to kind of rethink i think ideally what we ideally would like would be able to have sort of this this backbone of a design system that we can branch you have all your core components in there the things that you would typically expect but with us because.
We’ve got so many different brands we need to kind of be able to branch those in different ways to really kind of be able to to make this thing as flexible as possible i had worked at a previous uh large organization where before they were called design systems they had this concept of a design system.
And it had gotten to the point that it was very rigid and inflexible at which point they pretty much kind of had to break the mold and kind of start all over again you know so again just give some thought as to uh you know the scale of your design systems where they’re going to get plugged in who’s going to be using them you know and.
Those sorts of things that will uh i think really kind of uh you know give you some some pointers in terms of how you want to set up your design systems so for us a lot of this really kind of boils down to our work spaces as business units so in terms of the way.
That we’re set up today as i kind of mentioned it’s more so regional we kind of have uh you know you think about it in terms of what region and then what brand and then what project and that that sort of thing ultimately what i think we’re going to wind up doing is rethinking that in terms of one just from the.
Organizational structure in the in the way that we’re going is to really kind of start to align these things say a little bit more so to say like business unit versus region uh in which case then you know we’d be able to go into say uh for us like a business unit for example would be uh baby and child care which is going to be.
Huggies pull-ups good nights and so when we think about uh our business units and the brands that are aligned within there that should then make it a lot easier for one to be able to have design resources who are dedicated to these specific business units and then two you know as we kind of start to move towards maybe a little bit more of a global type.
Of approach per se it allows us to be a little bit more agnostic as to regions and really kind of be able to focus on the brands themselves so you can kind of see here even in our own journey you know uh you’re gonna have to have some checks and balances along the way you’re just gonna have to.
Sit there and kind of reflect on where you’re at where things are trending and you know i think overall just be as flexible as you can and really kind of give some thought as to what the road ahead is going to look like because for us and hopefully this is the.
Big takeaway from from this is that you know a lot of these things we had to figure out you know we were building the parachute on the way down so to speak so we had this uh explosive growth that happened uh throughout the organization and there were really kind of two things that we really needed to address one first and foremost is protecting our ip.
So we’ve got again a lot of external agencies and organizations that we work with they don’t need access to you know the full extent of everything that we’re doing they may just be focused on you know one particular thing so in that sense you know uh really kind.
Of give some thought as to how you’re going to bring users into the organization and uh you know plant them where they need to to be focused so that they don’t get into other things mess up files and and do all sorts of other things that are going to cause a.
Lot of headache and then the other thing is it uh just general uh platform and tooling change management i’ve got a link here to an article that is on figma’s blog it was actually done i.
Think a couple of years ago i want to say and it talks about how we brought figma into the organization for us it really kind of boiled down to a few simple things one we had been on some other competitor platforms one they were kind of proprietary to a certain type of hardware.
We found out is that we cannot make the assumption that everybody is going to be on a nice brand new mac a lot of a lot of the the groups that we work with offshore or on pcs and there’s nothing they can do about that so so we needed to be very much platform agnostic in that sense and then uh and then the other thing was that we also.
Then had this disparate kind of feature tool uh where the pricing started to get a little out of control and and we needed something that was a little bit more affordable and then and then really the straw that broke the camel’s back is that.
We had a person on the team who had all of this work that was on her hard drive and her hard drive had become corrupted and we had no backup so at that point when all those things added up i said okay we’ve got to make a move to something that’s cloud-based we’re not losing work uh we have something that’s you know just very.
Straightforward in terms of pricing and then as i kind of mentioned before i think you know a lot of the benefit the upside is that the people at figma are really great so i work with a lot of vendors um you know and they vary quite a bit um and i will say that the people at figma are really awesome so uh you know.
They’re they’re gonna be they’re to be very helpful in terms of uh managing this i have had other people who’ve approached me and they said how did you bring figma into the organization i think in our particular situation we were fortunate because we were just kind of getting started on this path i think.
Other design leaders i’ve spoken with are kind of locked into uh ecosystems that they don’t have a whole lot of flexibility but i would say that you know just use my own story as as a bit of a testament as to um you know how you bring something into the organization and uh and really kind of be able to.
Spin it up and scale it you know taking into account all the things that i’ve mentioned as well in terms of how you’re going to be organized how are you going to go about work how you’re going to be able to provide access to others and really just keep a lot of oversight in terms of everything that’s going on i think for us the one i guess upside.
For a lot of that is that i had to go through and really kind of start to take a lot deeper look at a lot of the work that was taking place here and uh the great thing is is that i discovered a lot of good things that are going on you know so uh so i would say you know from a grooming standpoint probably helps to really kind of keep an.
Eye as to an eye as to everything that’s uh currently going on so that uh you got an idea as to uh all the work that that’s taking place under under your roof so what that’s led us to is that we really have needed to put a lot of emphasis and focus.
As we stand today in terms of governance so first and foremost we need flexible access so again we work a lot of different types of organizations both internal and external uh you know we need it to be very simple and easy for users to be able to get the access.
That they need and at the same time make sure they have the right access that they need so since we have a lot of uh multiple and complex design systems we want everybody to be able to plug into those things very simply and easily so that they can get spun up and going uh very quickly uh certainly at the.
Pace that i think all of us want to move at you know as quickly as possible uh you know just reducing the amount of friction is just going to make life a lot easier for everybody so what we needed to move to though is that again that adoption of a permissions-based uh process model so that’s one where.
You know we we’ve got to really kind of put some constraints in place so that uh those who need access uh have access they have the right level of access and again they’re kind of you know dropped into a container so that uh for the most part they’re really kind of uh only accessing the things they really need.
Uh and you know prevents you know other headaches down the line as part of that and then you know overall from uh from an admin level you know uh we need to look at things from from that management perspective and so right now we’re going to do is set up some quarterly touch points so that.
Again all these other design leaders throughout the organization and really anybody else who we work with we’ve got that ability to sort of have some checks and balances in place to really kind of be able to say okay here’s where we’re at what are we doing well what needs improvement uh how do we really kind of.
Double down on the strengths minimize the weaknesses and that sort of thing and so you know from that perspective i think it is healthy for us to have these moments in time where we kind of uh you know uh reflect upon where we’ve been and where we need to go there’s discussion right now within our organization as to how we really scale.
Figma beyond just what design teams are leveraging it for and so that’s a healthy discussion that we need to have because we certainly want to invite more people to be able to collaborate on the platform and then to just reduce the number of platforms that we’re using as well.
And so um you know for us again this is we’re on a we’re on a we’re on a a journey here of continuing growth so yeah again i kind of have already touched upon the need for us to really kind of think about what internal and external teams are doing with the platform um and so again you know.
Not only think about you know just your immediate design teams but also think about you know external external groups that that are going to need access as well we have an onboarding process you know uh so for anybody who we bring on board for example um speak more so to tour the internal teams we.
Have videos and things that we’ve set up around our design systems so that they know how to what our ways of work look like same type of thing for external teams if you’ve got some groups that we’re going to bring on sort of long term uh we really kind of want to be able to help to get them up and.
Going as quickly as possible so uh some folks on my team have gone through and really kind of designed some very robust design systems and uh as part of that you know uh we just want to make it easy for everybody to get in and be able to start doing work and carrying out you know a lot of things that we’re looking to do here kimberly clark.
And you’re gonna need to be able to provide those design systems at scale so in our case you know again 175 countries uh we have um you know left to right in terms of the way languages are uh read and then we also have right to left uh it’s very easy to be able to say some things you know within about two or three words in.
English it may be two to three sentences in in other languages so you know uh in terms of flexibility i really kind of need to be able to have design systems that scale you know in that sense and then the other thing that we’re really focusing on this has been something that we’ve been working on since about the.
Middle part of last year is really what that designer to developer workflow is going to look like so we don’t have very many many internal development teams here at kc so a lot of the groups that we work with are external and a lot of times they’re different external teams.
And they are also in all four corners of the earth as well so we’ve got a lot of different groups that we work with uh and i i would say for us when i look at things from my perspective uh i have to really kind of take into consideration things that are going to affect performance and so when we initially started we thought okay well.
This is great we have inspect mode we’ll hand it off to our developers and uh they can run with it from there realize there was a lot of education that was needed uh to really kind of help them understand how to make all that work with development teams you know it’s uh it can be a bit of a mixed bag.
We have certain groups that we’ve worked with for example who have been able to really kind of nail it you know from a pixel perfection standpoint and then we have others that uh it’s just a bit more of a challenge let’s put it that way and so what we needed to do is really kind of.
Understand what a lot of those workflows look like and how we can begin to optimize them we’ve got a third-party tool that we’re introducing into this uh discussion that really kind of packages up everything that is in inspect mode from a front-end development standpoint with a lot of.
That css code uh that then uh pipes into their development platforms and really kind of minimizes a lot of that overhead guesswork having to eye the design and translate that into uh development and so the other benefit to that too is that much like design systems uh for the most.
Part it saves a lot of overhead uh for developers as well and so uh and so that’s really kind of another uh factor uh as far as all this is concerned is that while you may be focused on everything you’re trying to drive out from a design standpoint it then has to move on somewhere else you know and as part of that you know i.
Noticed that we were spending quite a bit of time in qa and it was creating a lot of drag on the team and so we needed to really kind of find some ways to optimize a lot of uh of what we’re doing um so with that one of the things i want to do is really kind of showcase some of.
The work that we’ve done here recently i’m going to use huggies uh in our design system that we’ve got for huggies to really kind of be able to showcase uh how we have approached this now granted there’s many different ways you could go about this so you know this is this is our approach and again we’re kind of starting to rethink some of this.
As well i’d say one of the things that we notice going through a lot of this was that um there were a lot of things that uh you know these files can tend to get you know bloated fairly quickly and so we’re even looking at ways that we can go through and sort of optimize our current approach.
But uh but overall you can kind of see here in terms of the way that the um the file and the file structure is laid out it’s a lot of things that you would kind of expect you know so up front we’ve just got some basics in terms of like you know here’s how you get started here’s how you jump into this again you know sort.
Of think about the fact that we do work with a lot of external groups so we need to be able to have some primers to be able to get them in up and going uh fairly quickly and then we just kind of break it down into a lot of the uh you know the basics so uh going back to the theory of atomic.
Design you know we’re really kind of seeing that uh play out in terms of um of everything that we’ve got framed up here from from a design system standpoint so we recently just relaunched uh this site uh i think about a month ago and so you can see where in particular you know a lot of uh.
Of the the the things that were designed uh in general uh you know made their way uh through our design system and so as we go through and we continue the improvement of this uh digital property we have a way to kind of go back and reconcile a lot of that so you can kind of see some of those elements that i was just showing a moment ago.
But you know for the most part you know we were kind of guilty of doing a little bit of set it and forget it and so one of the things now that we’re starting to do is put a lot more focus on continual improvement as such you know we may not have the same people who were working on this previously and if that’s the case and we really kind of need some ways for.
Them to be able to jump in get up and going very quickly be able to access the design systems to drive out a lot of what they’re doing and the other thing too it’s a component of this is just overall governance so inevitably you know while the design looks like this today uh things may change so.
Where we sit inside the organization we kind of really pick up everything from a program level that’s driven out up top from a design direction standpoint and these are really kind of the folks who are thinking about the brand in general um they’re working with a lot of our agencies uh really kind of setting a lot.
Of the the direction and the tone and those sorts of things we had a super bowl commercial that came out last year and that really kind of prompted a lot of the evolution of the brand in terms of where it’s at today in terms of this look and feel and those sorts of things.
And those are going to evolve over time you know and so with that being the case while we may be making periodic adjustments uh you know for short durations of time ultimately you know about every two or three years these things go through an evolution and so as such you know we’re going to need for our design systems to.
Be able to uh be able to bend and flex as well and so when you think about everything that i’ve spoken about here you know ultimately for us this is kind of where a lot of these these land so again this is just one of 550 um and so.
You know there’s a lot of moving parts and pieces and so hence the reason that it’s important for uh you know having a strategy going into this really thinking about how you’re going to do design at scale ultimately where this is going to land and then two you know how you’re going.
To continually improve upon it so for us one of the things that i are really kind of impressing on us to do is is really kind of keeping a lot of focus on what’s happening with the performance of these digital properties so then we start to get into where we’re tying back into everything from an.
Analytics perspective a performance perspective those sorts of things we have some things that are going well we have some things inevitably that we’re going to need to improve and so when we go back and we think about that continual improvement loop that’s one where we’ve got to be able to make adjustments.
Fairly easily and ultimately it’s going to go back through the same cycles we’re still going to have you know developers who are going to have to develop and that sort of thing but ultimately we want to create you know a very easily approachable system that allows us to be able to drive out uh you know speed to market so.
How do we get a lot of this great design uh out as quickly as possible and then two or we need to go back and maybe course correct or whatever the case may be we’ve got that ability to do so in a highly flexible format and one that allows us to really kind of keep an eye on the future we’re just going to continue to do more.
And more of this we’re going to continue to work with more and more groups and uh you know as such we really kind of have to have a lot of our ducks in a row so to speak so that we can uh we can really kind of make make life a lot easier for all of us so for us i’ll uh i’ll wrap it up here and then we can uh get into a.
Little qa so for us we really just again we just need to streamline a lot of our processes uh what that means for us is that we’re going to realize some optimizations as part of that cost being one of them again we do work with a lot of external groups so so there is cost that’s associated with.
That we needed to remove a lot of repetitive tasks for us it kind of meant really we were at a point where we were doing the same things over and over and over again again 175 markets you know 550 websites that sort of thing we were doing a lot of the same things over and over and.
Over again so we needed to find some ways to really kind of be able to streamline that one of the keys to that again is going to be that designer to developer handoff and how we optimize those processes and then in general uh really kind of thinking about this more so from a governance perspective.
Again we brought figma into the organization it was great uh we were leveraging it to drive out a lot of design work that we’re doing prototyping testing all that sort of stuff and then it just went through the roof and so uh you know as part of that while that is a great problem to have it’s still a challenge that uh you know uh.
Caught us a little off guard to be completely honest and it was the type of thing that you know we needed to really kind of start to put some focus on in terms of what governance looks like moving forward so that we can again kind of move through these things in a very streamlined manner to uh to really kind.
Of you know increase speed to market friction less friction for everybody involved and help us to drive out you know better products at the end of the day awesome i’ll cap it at that thanks so much for sharing andy um the q a is blowing up so let’s just jump into it i have some of them.
On my slide deck so i’ll go ahead and share that um now you shared a ton of considerations with this move there’s so many moving pieces i’m curious to hear more about some of those challenges that came with this twin change what were some of those.
Things that popped up yeah i would say for the most part really kind of uh know your team so for us uh it was kind of one of those things where i had used figment of previous organization and so we kind of tiptoed into it a little bit but at the same time i realized that for.
The most part with our design team it wasn’t going to be that much of a stretch i mean they understood the basic concepts in general then you start to get into some of the nuances in terms of the ways that you spin up design systems how you’re going to do a lot of that designer to developer handoff and that sort of thing.
And so i think for the most part one just know your team you know if you know your team i think that’s going to make things a lot easier to be able to introduce it we kind of did it you know sort of in a soft launch so so to speak you know it’s kind of one of those things where it’s like hey guys if you want to you know go use this and.
So they started to gravitate towards it slowly wasn’t one of those things where i said okay guys we’re you know lying in the sand and uh you know from this point forward this is the way we’ve got to go so it just kind of happened organically over time i would say with anything you do typically speaking probably best to just start with a small.
Group of people uh see how it goes and then if all goes well then i begin thinking about scaling it from there but yeah overall you know i would say just know know your team if you know your team then i think that’s going to make it a lot easier yeah i love that personalized approach just because i hear that question on how.
To implement figma a lot and oftentimes it just starts with knowing what the needs are and what the pain points are first otherwise it’s hard to address anything and so yeah i love that point all right our next question from austin cole and moore what’s the name of the.
Third-party integration you’re using in your dev workflows zero height so uh zero height is a tool that like i said a platform i should say that packages up a lot of that front-end code that figma generates it had been you know like i mentioned the type of thing where uh our.
Developers some of them knew you could go into inspect mode copy and paste css others didn’t and so and so we noticed there was a lot of disconnect in terms of the things that we were looking at and so we piloted this last year with some of our internal teams and i didn’t know what to expect from a.
Results standpoint to be completely honest but when i saw that they were recreating exactly what we had designed that into itself was a a bit of a groundbreaking moment uh and then two you know now we’re starting on this journey uh to move you know in that manner but one of the things i asked our.
Developer what at the time as he had gone through this i said you know how much time did this save you and he was like yeah roughly about two or three days and um and so uh if you think about that we touch probably about 100 sites per year so two to three days per site all of a.
Sudden we’re starting to shave off like years you know of time uh in terms of how we get to market wow awesome ryan asks do you have a dedicated centrally located design system team if so how many associates work on systems we do not have necessarily a dedicated centrally located design system team.
One of the things that i have really kind of um been preaching to our group is for everybody to learn design systems so anybody who on the team i guess let me back up i’ll say this our internal teams really kind of work on design systems but it’s not there’s not a.
Specific team that’s working on it the main thing i have encouraged everybody to do is to learn how to spin up design systems know how they work we did uh craft i guess you could say a template per se and we have everybody basically kind of copy and paste that template but i think you know that’s where we’re starting to.
Get to a point now we really do need to create a central design system that we can branch you know we’ll use a button for example button maybe red on huggies it may be green on depend it may be purple on pull-ups you know but at the end of the day a button’s a button and so uh it’d be ideal if we were to move to something.
Where you know we’ve got something that perhaps branches or in the case if we look at something that’s maybe headless for example we have all of those components so it really just depends on how complex your design systems are going to be but i would say for the most part really.
Just encourage everybody to learn the principles of atomic design how that relates to design systems and then really kind of how you can integrate that into your own workflows yeah totally just being systems minded for every ic to sort of have that integrated in their workflow totally agree.
Now this one is sort of related to this question more into the technical setup with bus is each design system so like huggies in each of those brands managed by a centralized team per bu so like a huggies design system team and then another brand design system team uh versus global which you see which you mentioned you don’t have.
Yeah i mean i think you know uh we’ll see how this goes but i think we’ll wind up moving in that direction so again you know huggies is huggies um now granted it’s portrayed in many different languages but uh for the most part you know the brand is the brand you know and we need for it to.
Really look consistent you know from a global perspective there are nuances you know uh from that perspective so not everything kind of is a one-to-one per se but uh but they’re definitely i think you know in terms of the way that we’re beginning to move i think it is going to start to look a little bit more like this.
Yeah absolutely now this question from ashley and laura how do you use figma as a design system as opposed to a style guide okay so we do technically have style guides here those are as i kind of mentioned previously you know at the program level uh those groups really kind of drive out.
They call they call them their brand identity guidelines so that really kind of is the the overall style guide we pick up a lot of those brand assets and then translate them into digital and so for us that’s really kind of where a design system uh comes into play but now we’re starting to move beyond just it being uh you know a centralized.
Repository of assets to now needing to really kind of leverage it for the development side of things as well and so as far as all that’s concerned you know um all right we already have these brand identity guidelines same thing as a style guide but for us design systems really kind of.
Translates more into everything that we’re doing from a digital perspective so again we just spin it up for anybody who is going to work with us uh but then you know as i mentioned kind of the next step here is what that designer to develop our handoff looks like and so from that perspective you know we really.
Are uh beginning to use uh figma in the form of uh being able to leverage design systems versus just a reference for like a style guide type thing because a lot of these things now as we’re starting to get into this designer to develop our handoff the naming conventions that we have for components uh the ways that we’re.
Leveraging design tokens for example is all going to become much more important and so in that sense we’re going to be able to really kind of leverage figma as a true design system from that perspective yeah totally now i think this audience loves all things design systems so we’ve got more.
Design system questions coming how do you handle multi-branded design systems with different themes and styles but still keep components connected globally so i think that’s probably something that again is kind of um right now the way we’ve we’ve done it in.
Terms of our overall evolution we’ve spun up design systems uh for each brand and again kind of uh for each region for the most part a lot of them have a lot of similarities in terms of overall themes and styles there are some nuances based on market but but overall in terms like keeping these.
Components connected globally to a core component library so for the most part really kind of getting to think about this uh you know theory of branching per se uh i would say that’s probably some work that we need to do i think what we’ve done up to this point is that we’ve really kind of stretched the limit of a.
Design system uh in terms of like how big these files can get and i think one of the things that we’re starting to learn is that uh you know we’ve got to figure out some ways to really kind of optimize that so that could take on some different forms moving forward those are some things.
That we’re really thinking about you know at this point in time but i mean ultimately yes we would ideally my vision was initially well and we’ll see how feasible this is that we just stand up basically this core backbone of a design system and then we just branch it based on uh whatever the uh.
The brand is yeah yeah that’s definitely a challenge i hear this question come up time and time again and i think those really large organizations are still working through this next up just going back to the beginning of your journey you shared so much ben.
Is wondering what were you using before figma and how much effort was getting how much effort was there in getting those existing assets into figma so we were using sort of your standard suite of tools uh things that are currently out there in the marketplace uh i think we’re all familiar with them um and i think the thing that uh you.
Know in terms of like how much effort was there you know to get existing assets uh into figma uh for the most part uh wasn’t i mean we were kind of at a point where we were starting from scratch i mean we had done a lot of work and it existed in a lot of these other platforms and.
Whatnot but i think at the end of the day when we kind of looked at it was one of those things where you know we realized we were kind of basically starting with a clean slate so there really to be honest it wasn’t much that we wanted to actually leverage from existing tools i think we really kind of just wanted to to start from.
Scratch but i will say this it is relatively uh easy to get a lot of those um things into figma so if you are coming from other platforms in particular if those assets are already in a vector format it’s not going to be a stretch for you to be able to get them implemented into figma.
I would say for the most part you know those things should be relatively easy and i think the the key thing is to really kind of think about what your strategy is going to look like what the road ahead is going to look like because this this stuff should be relatively low level uh so to speak.
You’re going to really kind of need to think about you know what the road ahead’s going to look like yeah some of that long-term governance which you sort of mentioned earlier yeah totally it’s not just the actual asset but all the workflows that surround being in this new ecosystem all right next one.
So we have a question the terms like headless design system and management to admin those are just really large enterprise challenges do you have mindset issues at the management level and can you explain how you deal with that i guess we’re a little fortunate in that we don’t um you know for the most part.
Uh we really kind of get i guess we’re fortunate in the respect that we kind of really got you know the the ability to really kind of you know call our own shots uh so to speak you know um but you know in terms of like uh mindset issues and management levels and and those sorts of things i think for us i.
Mean the key thing is is that we show one high speed to market you know uh so if we spin up some very optimized science systems how can we get all this work done a lot faster you know so i think if you’re trying to make an argument in terms of of those types of things figma certainly is is great at that um.
You know and the other thing too is that we use a lot of that for our testing you know so we’ve got uh testing platforms we put a lot of this out in front of our users we’re doing a lot of that testing validation that sort of thing great thing is pig figma pipes in uh quite seamlessly with a lot of these platforms so.
You know i would say overall uh you know the the key thing for us has been that we’ve just found ways to optimize doing a lot of the work you know so uh so for us i think you know the key thing is is that we’re just able to get things going a lot faster than we had ways we had been doing this in the past which creates a lot less friction and uh.
You know for us we’ve got a lot we gotta we gotta conquer you know on any given day and so for us we got to find optimized ways to go about doing that yeah definitely last couple of questions here how closely do your designers work with brand designers and what is that working.
Relationship like great question so on the one hand up until recently we had not been working very closely with uh the the folks that really kind of drive out a lot of that uh design direction from a programmatic level we’ve had a few things that have occurred uh here where we have needed to.
Button up a lot of uh things that we we cross paths on um and as a result of that that has inherently kind of forced us to have to work a lot more closely together it had always been my vision that we would work very closely with them but now we’re starting to see where all of that really has an impact so on the.
One hand uh our brand you gotta think about us uh our organization we’re 150 year old company we’re very traditional in terms of you know a lot of what our media spend looks like digital is still a relatively you know new thing here again 150 year old company relatively.
Speaking and so what does that working relationship look like so now we’re at a point where we have had to tighten up a lot of this and they can see the implications of these things from where they start at the program level to where they land uh on our websites you know and so we’ve got.
To have the ways to be able to tighten a lot of that up so that uh you know a lot of what they’re hoping to see driven out in a program level is what lines up you know in digital and it’s just been simple things you know like uh so going back to that question about like style guides for example so they create their style guides they didn’t have a whole.
Lot of digital that was incorporated into that so now we started to work with them so they understand you know a lot more of what that looks like they have the ability now to start to influence some of that as well and then two overall they’re starting to see what that means you know in terms of the way that that work is shaping up uh globally.
So they have not had that ability to have that reach into digital and we ourselves have not had that ability to have that reach back into the brand but because of just sort of the organic way that these things have begun to shape up now we’re starting to work a lot more closely and then i think everybody is.
Able to see kind of end to end you know really what that means yeah i love that and then our last question to wrap things up what’s one thing you’d like attendees to walk away with from this talk learn from the mistakes that we have made uh so you know again i i think that uh.
You know hopefully um you’re able to kind of understand that um you know you just have to think about these things you know uh beyond kind of where you’re at right now like i said we kind of took our eye off the ball a little bit realized that sigma was exploding uh exponentially and then that caused us to.
Have to then go back and reconcile there was a lot of reconciliation uh that really required us to start to think about okay we’ve got these groups over here we’ve got to connect with them we’ve got to bring them into the fold we’ve got these other groups that are doing this other stuff we need to integrate them into our workflows and.
We’ve got these other groups that influence you know overall design direction how do we bring all of this together and not only what does that look like today what is that going to look like tomorrow next year you know that sort of thing and so i would say for the most part you know.
Hopefully you’re hearing in a lot of what i’m saying you know give some thought as to what the road ahead is going to look like um you know think about your own design teams the ways that you’re currently working ways you’re working with your organization.
Ultimately what that translates into the digital products that you’re creating and ultimately what that’s going to look like from a results standpoint you know so one thing i kind of didn’t touch a whole lot on is uh when we talk about the effectiveness of what we’re doing.
A lot of what really kind of helps to drive some things home is to be able to speak about how that has resulted in the marketplace and so when you’re able to show you know green up arrows and a lot of you know positives that’s going to certainly make it a lot easier for getting a lot of this type of work done.
Because let’s be honest it is challenging it’s complex for those of you who are designers and close to doing design work as you know putting yourself out in front of people every day you’re going to hear some things that probably don’t want to hear and that sort of thing in terms of feedback but at the end of the day it’s.
All intended for all of us to get to a much better place and you know again you know think about all these things uh in context to to your own organization and and ultimately how you can come out uh to be a lot more successful and hopefully you’ve learned a few things that we’ve had to figure.
Out the hard way amazing thank you so much for sharing your insights andy um just some closing statements um thank you all for being an engaged audience as usual if you dialed in later have no fear we’ll include any links that were shared during the talk as well as the recording in a follow-up email later this week if you enjoyed our.
Live stream today and you want more content you can learn about them at figma.com forward slash events or if you want to watch previous live streams you can always head on over to our youtube channel to catch them we also love hearing from our community and what they want to hear about in future live streams so if you do have.
Ideas or suggestions feel free to email us at community figma.com and then my very last announcement our annual user conference config is happening next month from may 10th to 11th if you’re able to join we’d love to have you it’s free and you can register at config.figma.com well that’s all for me thank you andy.
And thank you all for spending time with us see you next time bye thanks guys
Hear from Andy Ford, the Global Head of UX at Kimberly-Clark, to hear how his team has set the foundation for global design …
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