When should a design leader open Figma?

I don't think there is a right amount of Figma for a design leader.

Stay too far away from the work and, over time, you start losing context. Reviews become presentations and feedback becomes broader. You know something isn't working, but instead of being able to point to why, the vocabulary slowly shifts towards words like premium, intuitive, cleaner. They aren't necessarily wrong, but they aren't particularly useful to the person who has to go back and make the design better.

"The padding feels off" is a mood. If you can explain that the spacing above and below a heading is breaking the grouping, that's something a designer can take back to the screen and, more importantly, recognise the next time without you. I think staying close to the material is what keeps that kind of feedback within reach.

Being too hands-on creates a different problem. If every review eventually ends with you opening the file and showing how you would do it, you're no longer just helping someone design. You've given them another designer to compete with, except this designer also happens to be their boss.

That changes how people bring work to you. Instead of asking what the problem needs, they can start anticipating what you would like. Rough work becomes harder to share because nobody particularly enjoys having an unfinished thought redrawn in front of them. I've also seen perfectly reasonable design discussions become unnecessarily defensive simply because an alternative from a senior person starts feeling less like an exploration and more like the expected answer.

Still, there are plenty of times when I'd rather open Figma than continue talking.

We've all been in discussions where ten more minutes of conversation is only going to produce ten more minutes of conversation. Everyone understands the words, but each person has constructed a slightly different picture in their head. At that point, making the thought visible can be far more useful than finding another way to explain it.

Open a frame, move something around, make a crude wireframe or put two options beside each other. Prototype the interaction badly if that's enough to explain the thought. I've found that a rectangle and an arrow can sometimes close a discussion that a surprising amount of well-articulated feedback couldn't.

The distinction for me is what happens after that. I don't want to finish the design or leave behind a screen that now has to be followed because the design leader made it. The designer should still own the problem and decide where the solution goes. In that moment, Figma is just a shared piece of paper because language has reached its limit.

There is another, much simpler reason I still open it: I enjoy designing.

As you move into leadership, the job naturally fills up with hiring, planning, stakeholder conversations, reviews, budgets, performance discussions and a rather impressive number of documents and meetings. All of that matters, but I don't think becoming responsible for design should require becoming distant from the act of designing. The curiosity about how something could work, look or feel is probably one of the reasons many of us ended up doing this in the first place.

Now, of course, there is another layer to this. We can ask an LLM to write the copy, critique a screen, generate a prototype and increasingly produce the interface itself. I use these tools too, and there are plenty of things I'd rather let them do than spend an afternoon doing manually.

I just don't want to outsource every unfinished thought to them.

Every now and then I still want to move the rectangle myself, make the type ridiculously large to see what happens, break a component or try an idea that is probably stupid. Most of those experiments won't ship, nor should they, but spending time with the material keeps my judgement calibrated and, perhaps more importantly, keeps me curious.

After years of leading design teams, I still enjoy designing. I don't see much reason to apologise for that or turn it into a leadership principle.

So yes, open Figma once in a while. Just remember whose pen it is when you're done.