How Figma coordinated their biggest product launch day of the year, in Coda.
Lawrence Luk, Virginia Feng, and Andrew Forbes needed Config to run perfectly. They share why they chose Coda to make it all happen.
Lawrence Luk
Technical Product Manager at Figma
How Figma coordinated their biggest product launch day of the year, in Coda.
By Lawrence Luk
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Case studies > Figma · 5 min read
The problem: So many teams, so many tools.
The whole planning process actually began 10 months earlier, with teams having exploratory discussions around goals, narratives, and product launches. During a near year of planning, Andrew, Virginia, and Lawrence estimated they worked with hundreds of people across Figma to make sure the company became aligned on what they were going to release during the conference. And since the breadth of work was varied, so were the tools teams used; some worked in Google Docs and Sheets, others planned in Asana, product decisions were moved forward with Coda, and plenty jammed (to no one’s surprise) in FigJam. The trio didn’t want to force any new behavior, but they still needed all the work to come together once they got to the point of actually running the event.It’s the biggest launch event of the year, so we can’t have anything fail. Which means our teams need to be in sync both in-person and online to make sure our product roll outs are super seamless.
Lawrence Luk
Manager, Product TPM at Figma
The Solution: Coda, the (flexible) source of truth.
It was exactly 7:59 am on event day and the Figma product and marketing teams anxiously huddled around their laptops, dispersed between two separate rooms at the vast Moscone conference center. Together, they met in their Coda “run of show” doc, which was set up to coordinate the launch of the conference livestreams and over ten product and feature releases. The doc also included the detailed rollout of the post-keynote tweets, email sends, webpage updates, and press releases so cross-functional teams knew exactly when to launch their channels Sixty seconds later, Lawrence clicked a single green button in Coda and each person on the team received a Slack notification that it was time to push the “Day Of” site experience. Config 2024 had officially begun.
When you need things to just work.
This minute-by-minute process played out over the ensuing day, with the launch process for 91 “mini-events” jumping from Coda to Slack and back again, all behind the scenes as conference attendees were able to simply enjoy the nearly flawless experience. Virginia, Andrew, Lawrence, and the rest of their teammates had worked extremely hard for this moment. Leading up to Config, teams had been able to work in whatever environment fit their specific needs. This day demanded absolute alignment. To remove any confusion, it was key that the run of show, feature and marketing launch information, as well as bug-bashing discussions, were all in one spot. Coda’s Slack integration was truly a star, as Virginia put it, “The combination of Coda and Slack was really helpful, it made it easy to problem-solve in real time and we were able to keep everyone updated in our coordination channel so each team member was ready to do their part as pieces went live.”
Success with ease.
After the Figma community had eagerly absorbed the new product launches, Andrew reflected on the experience, “We definitely put in a lot of planning on the launch side. We had so many web surfaces that got updated. We had so many pieces of content that went live across our blog...and sure, we had a minor hiccup here and there, but overall it went really smoothly.” The hundreds of thousands of users testing out the newest features and the praiseworthy press articles would tend to agree. Coda provided the stability and flexibility which helped make that possible, but most importantly, it didn’t add stress by creating a bunch of extra work. With Lawrence noting, “It was nice and consolidated. We could create all the pages for the different teams that had to do different things...it just felt really natural.” Luckily the process felt just as easy for outside teams too, with Virginia expanding, “It was like planning choreography. Everyone was able to consolidate their work and then we did a table read to iron any issues out and keep the process moving.”
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