How Figma Made Design a Team Sport Instead of a Handoff
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Design tools used to work the way word processors did before cloud documents: one person owns the file, saves a version, and sends it to someone else, who opens their own copy and makes changes that then need to be manually merged back in.
What changed when design went to the browser
Figma rebuilt a professional-grade design tool to run entirely in a browser, with multiple people editing the same file at the same time — the way Google Docs changed writing, Figma changed design. A designer, a product manager, and an engineer could all be looking at, and commenting on, the exact same canvas in real time.
Handoff stopped being a separate step
Before this, "design handoff" to engineering was its own process, often involving exported images and a separate spec document. With everyone looking at a live file, a lot of that translation step simply disappeared.
It's a good example of collaboration tools removing a handoff rather than speeding it up — the same shift that happens when a customer can see a delivery status directly instead of waiting for someone to relay it to them over the phone.