Real-time file collaboration helps mitigate “design drifting”—defined as either misinterpreting or straying from an agreed-upon design. Design drifting usually happens when an idea is conceived and quickly implemented while a project is in progress. Unfortunately, this often leads to deviating from the established design, causing friction and re-work.

Using Figma, a design lead can check in to see what the team is designing in real time by simply opening a shared file. If a designer somehow misinterprets the brief or user story, this feature allows the design lead to intervene, correct course, and save countless hours that would have otherwise been wasted. (By comparison, teams using Sketch have no immediate way of telling if designers are going astray.)

Side note: Some designers don’t like to be “spied on” when they’re working, so it’s up to the design lead to explain the benefits. In general, most designers quickly see the value in such a feature and easily adapt to working in a shared environment.

Figma Project Files Reside in One Place—Online

Since Figma is an online app, it handles file organization by displaying projects and their files in a dedicated view. Figma also supports multiple pages per file, like Sketch, so Agile teams can organize their projects logically:

• Create a project for the feature theme.

• Create a file for an epic or large feature.

• Create pages in that file for each user story.

This is just one method of organizing files that could be made more or less granular depending on what the process demands.