Why Marketing Teams Love Figma and Developers Hate It (and How to Fix That)

Walk into almost any ecommerce company today and you will find a design team huddled around Figma. They love it. Marketing loves it too. Screens fly by, campaigns come alive, and new layouts get approved in hours instead of weeks. It feels like creativity finally has a proper home.

Then you wander over to the developers and the mood shifts. They roll their eyes at yet another handoff link. They mutter about inconsistent components and impossible timelines. For them, Figma is less of a revolution and more of a headache.

Why such a divide? And more importantly, how can ecommerce leaders bridge it?

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Why Marketers Swear by Figma

For marketing and design teams, Figma represents freedom. It is cloud based, easy to share, and allows real-time collaboration. No more static PDFs, no more emailing zip files back and forth, no more endless rounds of “final_v12.” A merchandiser can jump into a file, tweak a banner, and get buy-in from a creative director before a long lunch.

The pace of ecommerce campaigns demands this speed. Black Friday promotions, seasonal launches, and last-minute product pushes all benefit from a tool that makes iteration frictionless. Figma delivers that in spades.

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Why Developers Feel the Pain

Developers, on the other hand, live in a world of constraints. Their job is not just to make things look pretty but to make them work across devices, browsers, and code frameworks. What looks effortless in Figma often requires hours of engineering to recreate.

Marketing teams sometimes assume that if a design exists in Figma, it is already “almost done.” In reality, it might ignore accessibility standards, performance budgets, or responsive breakpoints. Developers inherit the frustration of explaining why a button cannot float exactly where the designer placed it without breaking the grid on mobile.

The resentment builds because developers feel like the tool encourages over-promising. Marketing gets attached to pixel perfect visions that collapse under the weight of real code.

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How to Fix the Divide

The answer is not to ditch Figma. It is too powerful (and too useful) a tool to ignore. The fix is to align how it is used.

The best ecommerce teams set clear rules for handoff. They negotiate and build shared design systems that developers help create, so the components in Figma actually match what exists in code. They involve developers earlier in the design cycle, not just at the end. When developers help shape the options, they can steer marketing toward designs that will actually ship fast. There is some sacrifice some of the time. A structured approach to design sounds like something a designer would want - but to get the bargain right with developers they have to do the work and turn a set of potential variations into a system which has limitations. Otherwise the design system is achieving nothing.

Some brands go further and integrate Figma directly into their component libraries. That way a change to a design element in Figma links to the exact code component developers will use. The result is less rework, less resentment, and more campaigns that launch on time.

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The Bigger Picture

At its core, the Figma divide is not about tools. It is about empathy. Marketers want speed and flexibility. Developers want stability and quality. Both are right. Both are necessary. The brands that will thrive and achieve actual rather than pretend agility are the ones that do the hard yards of recognizing the tension between the two crafts and turn it into collaboration (or at least a negotiation) instead of conflict.

So yes, marketing teams will keep bragging about how Figma saved the day. Developers will keep groaning when they see another unbuildable mockup. But with the right process in place, both sides can get what they want: campaigns that move fast and sites that do not break in the process.

Because in ecommerce, speed matters. But so does reliability. Figma can give you both if you use it to bridge teams instead of divide them.

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If you want honest advice about how to implement a design system effectively, we can help. We have built multiple composable projects where the design system bargain was central to the success of the work we did. We know the pitfalls. We know how to negotiate around them. If you want to upgrade how you do design on your site to a more modern collaborative truly agile approach, talk to 64labs.

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