moving-bonfire-to-figma

A thrilling story on how a medium-sized startup moved all of their design files from one software to another

Dan Strogiy

It all started with a master Sketch file. A single file with 5 projects inside (one for each area of the Bonfire website). Things were perfect, until… they weren’t.

How it felt to wait for a Sketch file to load

It was taking longer and longer to open up the file. As features grew, the loading time became unbearably slow.

No problem, we said — let’s make a file for each component of the Bonfire platform. The account dashboard, internal tools, t-shirt design tool, and all the other areas of the app each got their own home.

This worked well for another year, until I started to get lost inside my own Sketch files. Each file had tens of pages with hundreds of artboards inside (well over a thousand artboards altogether). After realizing that sometimes it takes longer to find the right file than do actually complete a task, it was obvious that something had to change.

A list of files in Mac Finder

A list of files in Mac Finder

The Bonfire product design system (circa early 2019)

The idea of Figma has been floating around the Bonfire product team for years. Back in 2016, when it was first released, the prospect of collaborating on memes seemed really exciting. However, we didn’t seriously consider it for the product design process, mostly because it was so new, and the existing process worked just fine.

The primary Figma use case that we discovered in 2016

Three years later, we finally decided to give it a try. After a transitional period of about a month, it turned out to be quite successful. ✨

Even though Figma has a neat auto-import feature for Sketch files, this seemed like a great opportunity to redraw all of the UI from scratch (based mostly on the screenshots from the live website). It may sound tedious, but it actually didn’t take long at all. One of the benefits of this was to get all of the components up to date with how they actually looked & worked in our Angular app.

My goal was to spend as little time on managing & organizing the design system as possible, thus freeing up more time for experimenting. As Florent Crivello writes in The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up, efficiency tends to look messy, and good looks tend to be inefficient. It’s important not to be caught up in spending hours or days on polishing the internal design system (that practically no one is going to see). This allows to allocate more free time to tinkering with new ideas & refining the actual product that needs to be shipped.

A simpler software stack

We previously used InVision and Google Gallery for mockup sharing, Principle for animation and Google Drive for asset storage. Using Figma for handoff allowed us to eliminate (almost) all of these services. Getting rid of the need to export static screenshots just for internal feedback processes really sped up the process of design iteration as well.

A simple micro-interaction that would’ve required 3 separate tools to create

Built-in prototyping (with GIFs)

My favorite thing about Figma is the native prototyping functionality. Being able to use GIFs for loaders is an extra bonus that really makes the prototypes feel like the real deal. Smart Animate is a relatively new Figma feature that is also a game changer when it comes to prototyping micro-interactions, since it allows to create seamless transitions that can be easily replicated in code.

Even a simple loader icon can make a prototype feel real

The cloud ☁️

It’s liberating to not have to think about file structure, or sharing files between multiple computers. The only downside of using more cloud-based services like Figma is that I actually keep forgetting to save work in other, non-cloud apps since I’m so used to auto-save.

Since every team is different, there’s no right or wrong way to organize design files. By analyzing other teams’ design organization, I noticed a few common patterns and tried to implement them in the Bonfire system where appropriate.

Projects

The projects are organized alphabetically, with the exception of the Design System library. Those styles are shared by all editors across multiple departments.

The global project structure

Cards

We use a customizable card component to quickly generate a thumbnail for each Figma project. This way, PMs, designers & developers can easily find the right file and see the “ready for development” status at a glance.

Brand, marketing & product design files can all live in one place — no need to worry about duplicated icons, or missing logo files. The era of “hey, can you send me that Sketch file” is finally in the past. ?*

*well, for the most part. Parting with familiar design tools can take some time.

Pages

We usually dedicate a page to each part of a project. All the pages that are ready for the developers get a number assignment and a checkmark emoji. Initial flows/explorations usually go after that, often helpful to explain or present the mockups & reasoning behind certain decisions to stakeholders. The archive page usually hosts all the miscellaneous bits that never make it to production. Those can be quite useful when looking back at older projects and iterating on features.

A typical page structure for a project

While Figma is overall a vast improvement over most design tools out there, there are some aspects of it that could definitely be improved.

The flat user interface

The Figma user interface is, sadly, just not quite as pleasant as Sketch’s. Embracing the flat aesthetic, which does a good job of not distracting from the canvas, makes it hard to tell some of the controls apart. Adding some skeuomorphic depth to the buttons & other UI elements could really make an impactful difference.

Comments

It’s easy to get lost in long comment discussion threads. Sometimes it’s hard to tell at a glance which comments are addressed to you, especially when many stakeholders have different “mention” etiquettes. With some comments left in prototype mode, and some in the regular mode, it’s easy to lose track of discussion.

Layers Assets

After selecting an icon from the asset library, you have to click back to the Layers panel to keep working with the file structure. The extra clicks really add up and slow down the process.

The Layers / Assets switch panel

Overall, these quirks are pretty minimal and don’t have much detriment to the everyday design process. I have high hopes in the Figma folks improving them soon.

Figma seems like the design tool of choice for digital product design teams in 2019. It makes it super easy to create low & high fidelity flows, collaborate, prototype, and iterate, all within a single app. Most importantly, it’s super fast (and speed really matters) ❤️

To quote Tim Van Damme, we live in the golden age of digital design tools.

It’s exciting to see what the future holds for the digital design industry. Design tools like Modulz blur the lines between front end development and design even further. Both Sketch & Framer are actively working on cloud collaboration features as well. The more efficient these tools get, the more time designers can actually dedicate to solving the right problems (and create memes in the down time).

Disclaimer: I was not paid or sponsored by Figma to write this.

marketers-moving-away-from-home-grown-tools,-hiring-fresh-teams-for-new-martech

As the marketing technology landscape and capabilities continue to evolve, organizations are on an ongoing quest to update and improve their technology stacks. In fact, the vast majority (83%) upgraded at least one martech application in the past year, according to our MarTech Replacement Survey 2020 published Monday.

To better understand the frequency and motivations behind organizational martech updates, we surveyed 398 digital marketers in October. Several interesting trends emerged.

Organizations are moving away from in-house solutions. In a striking find, many companies are migrating away from marketing technologies developed in-house. Respondents were nearly as likely to have upgraded or replaced a homegrown technology (49%) as a commercially available solution (51%), with many of those replacing homegrown tech moving to commercial applications.

The number one reason marketers said they shifted from in-house technology was that available SaaS software had better features, with 49% of those who switched to a commercial solution citing that as a reason.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is MarTech-Survey-Upgrade-2-800x422.png

Nearly one in four said their homegrown system was being replaced because management decided their enterprise was “not a software company,” and nearly one in five because their homegrown system was too expensive to maintain.

New martech adds new people. Fear of job losses caused by machine learning and AI-based technologies may be unfounded — at least when it comes to the need for human oversight and management of marketing technologies.

With new martech features designed to increase efficiencies, a surprising 43% of respondents indicated that they hired a new team to support their new tools. One in four said they combined retraining existing staff with news hires, while another 25% said they retrained exclusively.

Martech replacement trends in 2020. The findings of this report hint at several trends we expect to see in the coming year. Organizations will continue to focus on maximizing the return on their marketing technology investments — whether through ongoing upgrades and new hires or retraining. Rather than a threat, new technologies present opportunities for marketers who keep their skills relevant and transferrable as technologies evolve and change.

As SaaS products improve — and natively support integrations with other solutions — it’s becoming harder to justify developing or maintaining homegrown applications. We can expect to see more acquisitions by martech vendors as well as integrations as providers aim to give marketing teams more comprehensive, one-stop-shop solutions.

To read more findings, insights and key takeaways for marketers, click here to download The MarTech 2020 Replacement Survey.



About The Author

Jennifer Videtta Cannon serves as Third Door Media’s Senior Editor, covering topics from email marketing and analytics to CRM and project management. With over a decade of organizational digital marketing experience, she has overseen digital marketing operations for NHL franchises and held roles at tech companies including Salesforce, advising enterprise marketers on maximizing their martech capabilities. Jennifer formerly organized the Inbound Marketing Summit and holds a certificate in Digital Marketing Analytics from MIT Sloan School of Management.



moving-holiday-email-campaigns-over-the-finish-line

I have a great career because I get to play in different sandboxes. This week, for example, I got to meet with a client in financial services, one that has little to do with the holiday retail onslaught that’s beginning to descend on us from every marketing channel.

As I presented on industry trends, I said, “We’re in the fourth quarter, and that means retailers are going to flood inboxes. Take that into consideration when doing your email campaigns. Everybody’s going to be overwhelmed by the sale of the minute.”

How different it is, I reflected later, to be working for a client that doesn’t do holiday email marketing and for marketers who don’t know the feeling you get in mid-December when it’s fourth down and 20 yards from the goal line with the clock running out. 

After all the years I put in working on retail email, I can tell you what it’s like: You’re just trying to find the energy to get that touchdown. And daydreaming how nice it would be to have someone ring your bell hard enough that Coach pulls you out of the game so someone else can finish. 

Many marketers find this time of year invigorating. And it is – at the start. But, after a few weeks, I would struggle to get motivated enough to head into the office and work on holiday email 24/7.

My goal here is to help you find that motivation and gear up to survive the slog. 

1. Find your motivation from within

If you’re the only person at your company working on email, the best source for inspiration can come from beyond your department. Ask for a meeting with your company founders, if they’re still around, and find out what motivated them to stick with the company in its early days.

Don’t ask why they started the company (you’ve probably heard that story a million times). Interview them with questions nobody has asked yet. What was the weather like when they started the company? How scared were they? What makes them get up and go to work every day?

Take inspiration from their motivation to power yourself. Try to get as excited as they were when they founded the company.

2. Gear up for the big game

If you’re part of a team, take your team out for drinks. Sports teams meet before the big game to learn strategy, hear inspiring speeches and get each other fired up. There’s no better way for marketers to do that than through a group dinner or drinks.

Talk with your team about their lives and what motivates them. Help your team members create bonds. Talk about work and ask what excites everybody. Draw inspiration from that excitement. Waylay any fear or concerns by reinforcing team spirit.

The best holiday season I spent – either as a consultant or on the front lines of email – was being part of a connected team that had a goal in mind.  

3. Put your personal touch on something

Don’t be just a cog in the wheel of your organization’s deployment of campaigns to make a buck. Be the wheel, the one that drives the gears that move your program forward. Try to find one campaign a week to put your mark on.

How can you do this? 

Look for a trigger where you can change the text to reflect the season. Or consider an automation that you’ve always wanted to do. The goal is to choose a campaign that can give you a good sense of impact thanks to high seasonal traffic.

4. Schedule a mid-season pick-me-up …. now

I stress this whenever I’m coaching marketers. Always start a big project by taking a moment for yourself and your team to be sure you’re all starting at the right place. That’s when you take your team out for drinks or dinner or some other team event.

Halfway through the season, do it again. Schedule a group meeting now, because if you don’t, you’ll forget. You might have to reschedule it to accommodate business needs, but at least you have it on the calendar and it’s something to look forward to in the middle of the madness.

Motivation at the midpoint of the holiday season is as important as motivation at the beginning. You can’t wilt when you’re on second down and inches from the goal.  

Wrapping up

I’m not going to tell you what kind of new trigger program to try. If you don’t have it in place by now, you’re too late. This isn’t the time to strategize. It’s execution time. 

Now is the time to buckle up and be ready. The only way I know to do this successfully is to stick together as a team and dig deep.

If the going gets tough, just remember what somebody smarter than I once said: “It’s just an email. We aren’t saving babies or curing cancer.”

More about retail for the winter holidays


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.



About The Author

Ryan Phelan is co-founder of Origin Email and brings nearly two decades of worldwide online marketing and email experience. Ryan is a respected thought leader and nationally distinguished speaker with a history of experience from Adestra, Acxiom, BlueHornet, Sears Holdings, Responsys and infoUSA. In 2013 he was named one of the top 30 strategists in online marketing and is the Chairman Emeritus of the EEC Advisory Board. Ryan also works with start-up companies as an advisor, board member and investor.



moving-up:-adjusting-to-larger-web-projects

For designers who are just starting out, smaller projects provide a tremendous opportunity. We use them to put our skills into practice, develop a workflow and make a little bit of money. Building these types of websites serves as the perfect proving ground.

Over time, though, working exclusively on small projects can become unsustainable. To make a decent living, it can take a constant flow of new and repeat business. That means more time spent on marketing and less on actual design and development. Not to mention that, as our skills improve, there is a natural desire to take on more complex challenges.

That’s when it makes sense to start aiming your sights a little higher. Just think, bringing in a few larger clients can supply you with lots of work and cash. The result is that you aren’t spending as much time searching for new projects. In theory, you’ll be able to focus more on the fun stuff.

However, moving up in the web design world brings its own challenges. Here are some tips on making the transition.

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Pay Close Attention to Detail

Big or small, every project deserves your attention when it comes to the little details. But it becomes especially crucial on the larger ones.

That’s because these websites tend to have more mission-critical functionality and a lot more traffic. In other words: The stakes are higher.

Mistakes will be noticed more quickly and could result in a real financial cost for your client. This also means that you (and/or your client) could be inundated with complaints, thus touching off a panic to put things right again.

To avoid this kind of situation, it’s important to have processes in place to help. The use of a staging environment allows you test out software updates or custom code before it goes public. Keeping routine backups will enable you to restore the site if something does go wrong.

And those are just a few examples. The overarching idea is to be aware of what you’re doing and the potential consequences of your actions. Mistakes will still happen, but you’ll be in a better position to recover quickly if you have a process.

A person holding a magnifying glass.expectations for our clients, in addition to the right priorities for ourselves. While we may love all (or most) of our clients, there does need to be a distinction between what needs done now and what can wait.

This can be a difficult part of the transition to bigger projects. However, it’s also necessary for managing your schedule.

Speaking of schedules, it’s also a good idea to ensure that you have enough empty space to take on that prestigious new client. You’ll be doing yourself a favor by reducing stress and having more time to concentrate on the task in front of you.

A daily planner.reputation. And it probably won’t help you book those larger gigs, either.

This is a common issue in our industry. Web designers often sell themselves short and give away services that they should be charging for. It may be a symptom of being very experienced at design, but not so much when it comes to running a business.

There’s an old saying that goes something like this: “Dress for the job you want.” If we tweak it to fit our narrative, it becomes: “Charge for the type of clients you want.”

Larger clients are usually willing to pay more for the services of an expert (that’s you). Quite often, it’s just a matter of having enough confidence in yourself to charge what your time is really worth. If that happens to scare away some small-time projects, so be it.

A person counting money.inherited a site that has already been built by another designer, then you may as well be walking that course blindfolded.

As difficult as this all sounds, it’s also a fairly common experience. Even the “rock-star” designers and developers out there go through it.

But eventually the situation calms down. You start to figure things out and progress is made. If you’re really fortunate, you complete the project and benefit from some newfound confidence.

The best part? You’ve proven to yourself that you can indeed handle a large project. Now, you can go and book another one.

5-ways-to-grow-abm-performance-by-moving-beyond-your-basic-persona-framework

In an article from a couple of years ago, Hasse Jansen curated 33 statistics on why your marketing organization should employ buyer personas to drive better demand gen results. Back in 2016 when he was writing, 44% of B2B marketers had already implemented personas and a full 83% expected they’d be using personas in the near future. Therefore, as of now, practically every one of us is applying persona thinking in some form or another, so it’s a good time to look at how to avoid some common mistakes and improve on the approaches you already have in place. 

Why do we have personas in the first place?

B2B marketing can be surprisingly complex. One peek into any company’s CRM system can be pretty overwhelming. In the presence of so much diverse information, personas provide a framework that can help us make better sense of all the data and take more useful action on it. Persona work helps drive efficiency because it focuses us on truly important groups according to their roles, responsibilities and more. Personas help drive effectiveness, especially in one-to-many executions, because they stimulate us to create messaging and content that is more relevant to buyers in our markets. 

Personas and ABM

At its core, ABM is about selecting a group of accounts based on a rigorous examination of your company’s potential revenue from them and then making a commitment to do better at pursuing a larger share of that potential. For marketers and sellers alike, this usually involves working hard at better understanding the companies on your ABM list and better addressing their needs – certainly with respect to how you communicate and interact with them and also in the solutions you propose. In ABM, you are necessarily working hard at becoming as relevant as you can possibly be. Your efforts are more targeted, more personalized, less based on models built for efficiency. And that’s exactly why as you progress in ABM, you’ll want to move beyond the limits of persona-based approaches. Here are five areas where opportunities exist to grow ABM program performance by moving beyond your basic persona framework.

5 ways to grow ABM performance by moving beyond your basic persona framework

Apply market insights to persona building

My company practices exclusively in the enterprise technology space. Since these markets are particularly dynamic, market insight is all the more critical to more effective marketing and selling, especially to an identified set of accounts.

If you are proposing a new use case for your technology, at a minimum, you’ll need to check whether or not your persona framework should be tweaked. If you’re impacting new processes, you could easily be impacting different roles from those you’ve traditionally targeted. You’ll need evolved messaging and you’ll need changes to your sales motions. These changes may be small, but if you neglect them up front, a lack of early momentum could cause significant problems for the success of your idea. To mitigate these risks, your marketers need to pay close attention to how prospects are thinking about solving their challenges within the categories you seek to break into. Do this by studying the conversations and information flows occurring around your target use cases. See what people are reading; what granular key word strings they’re using; what connections they’re probing between what they already have interest in and that which you’re proposing they consider.

When you’re introducing an entirely new concept to the market, insight grows in importance – and because the topic is new, you’ll have to work that much harder to find it. No matter how brilliant your breakthrough, most people gravitate to the familiar. Markets are no different. In fact, there’s a good chance that your breakthrough is so new that no substantive, identifiable “market” exists in a “targetable” way. Likewise, a persona framework built on historical examples can’t get you very far on your path to high-performing ABM. To make progress here, you’ll have to double down on trying to understand facets of your potential market where momentum could be gained. Few people are searching for what you do, because they don’t understand it enough to see the connection to their needs. But they will be studying areas where you make a difference – so start to target and engage them there. Discover the new personas that should be interested in you by understanding the upstream and downstream areas impacted by the changes you’re bringing.

Evolve your ABM list by expanding ‘account’ personas

While we usually think of personas as applying to the roles and responsibilities of people, the same idea can be useful in describing and distinguishing between different companies in your total addressable market. If you’ve already done the good work of defining your ideal customer profile, you’ve created a form of persona framework – applied here instead to the companies you want to include for specialized ABM treatments. Yet as we’ve seen with personas and people, here as well, it’s easy to fall prey to too much rearview-mirror thinking – developing an ABM list based on successes of the past rather than what’s best going forward. Without change, this will reduce your ABM success.

Here’s an over-simplified example: In the enterprise technology industry, practically every solution provider wants to target companies in the top 1,000, because “that’s where the money is.” But if you’re marketing something new, there’s a good chance that you really don’t know where pockets of momentum are most likely to pop up. Instead of limiting yourself to an ABM list comprising the usual suspects, construct a process that allows valuable targets to be added to the program as they become more visible and understandable to you.

Beware of overweighting persona frameworks toward typical titles and targeting

Experienced business people have developed useful instincts. Over the years, they’ve honed their approaches and optimized their pitches. While it’s important to leverage institutional learning into the creation of a persona framework, always stay cognizant of the fact that the learning embedded in this insight reflects both historical and functional (role-based) preferences and biases. To put it simply, persona targeting inputs commonly reflect who was critical at the end of deal processes rather than when they started or who is actually using the solution on a daily basis.  We commonly experience persona frameworks that are overly weighted towards deal makers in the form of targeting list specifications. If most deals have to involve a business decision-maker (BDM “director or above”), the CFO, the CTO, et al, why not go after them and only them? I’m not arguing here that you shouldn’t develop relevant content for those personas. I’m saying that if you limit yourself to them, you’re putting the success of your own efforts at risk. While you need to influence senior people, targeting them directly is the hardest way in.

At best, the usual suspects are table stakes. If you’re marketing a new use for your tech or a whole new paradigm, it’s important (especially early on in the process) to make your case to the people more directly impacted by the benefits you bring. Instead of narrowing your targeting based on expert inputs, you should be broadening your target personas and expanding your list specifications. The goal is to enable your marketing to probe for interest that you don’t yet fully understand.

Always remember that while marketing and sales persona frameworks will certainly overlap, they’re rarely 100% identical. Marketing has the responsibility for positively influencing as many people as it can whereas sales needs to martial its resources to focus on those with the most pull. In an ABM program, this fundamental difference between our two assignments is often magnified. Marketing can and should be expected to engage a broader cross-section of roles if this would be beneficial to opening doors to new opportunity and strengthening existing footholds alike.

Understand that personas change. In fact, they might not even exist.

Here are two examples where classic persona thinking can limit marketers’ ability to make progress against their company’s business objectives:

  1. New intersections creating important net-new personas – Like in the field of medicine, as enterprise technology advances, expertise grows more and more specialized. From a persona targeting perspective, for a time, that seemed to make things a little bit easier for the marketer: if you sold a security product, you just targeted the security guys. Now, however, just as in medicine, organizations have realized that solutions targeting one type of issue can have important implications in other areas. To adapt, companies are emphasizing the broadening of skill within their technology teams. New titles are being created reflecting cross-pollination between areas. To be maximally effective, therefore, a vendor’s persona frameworks need to accommodate this new reality.
  2. Big, exciting ideas in search of fans – Companies get started because their founders see real possibilities where others notice little opportunity at all. Then they make progress by finding a few early-adopter advocates of the same idea. Things get more difficult, however, when they start to push up against the mainstream. While it would be great if they could simply project the personas of their early adopters on the market at large, this is rarely easily done because it’s still too early for either the market or the relevant roles to be clearly articulated. Take big ideas like the Internet of Things (IoT) or digital transformation, for example. It’s still too early yet to be able to put together a powerful persona framework. Instead, a marketer should be focused on educating markets broadly and evaluating engagement evidence towards establishing a pathway to repeatable, scalable success. Rather than trying to find personas that don’t yet exist at any useful scale, it’s out of investigating those pathways that newly arising useful personas will eventually become apparent.

Lead and opportunity management: Transition to real people

ABM has shined a spotlight on the continuing challenges most companies face that start with targeting and flow from lead management all the way down the pipeline. It’s become more and more obvious that on the one hand, companies are underinvesting in the potential of accounts on their ABM lists, and on the other, underperforming in capturing the demand they do actually pursue there. These observations intersect with persona thinking on at least three fronts:

  • The most obvious of these is similar to my list specification example: If all the potential buying centers in an account are not mapped into your CRM, then you have much less chance of influencing and engaging them. This is particularly obvious if you are looking to extend your use cases into new areas within existing accounts.
  • And once you’ve populated all the roles in CRM, you need to adjust your scoring, your MQL definitions and your lead tracking and follow-up processes so that upstream targeting changes are not undermined elsewhere in your process.  
  • Furthermore, as we’ve discussed, whenever you’re pushing into new areas, there’s an even greater need for new insight and learning. This is exactly where an evolution in your approach to opportunity management – like SiriusDecisions’ Demand Unit Waterfall concept – can deliver tremendous benefits.

When you look to promote new use cases or an entirely new concept, you can’t fairly claim to really understand how opportunities will appear in and move through your pipeline. If, as is true of most companies, you’re not capturing much information at all (or you’re not able to easily extract it) about the people involved in the selling interactions as they take shape, you won’t be able to analyze and learn as quickly as you should about areas of progress and points of failure. If you’re working on this kind of challenge, now is the time to think seriously about first proactively populating your opportunities with prospective personas and, going forward, updating these with the real people who you are discovering and interacting with. The sooner you can introduce some form of this concept, the faster you will be able to capitalize on new insight as you generate it. At a minimum, this will help you understand your progress and challenges. Going forward, it will help grow account penetration, accelerate product ramp times, and optimize investments up and down the customer lifecycle management continuum.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.



About The Author