How Qonto reduces lead times and brings PDE teams together

Paris-based Qonto, which provides banking, invoice and expenses management services to more than 300,000 businesses globally, has praised design and prototyping tools Figma and FigJam for optimising workflows across its product, design and engineering teams. Figma has become the company's go-to platform for product design, while FigJam is used to brainstorm ideas, create visual specs of existing products and democratising product development across the organisation. The tools have helped improve collaboration and reduce the time it takes to deliver final products to customers, the company said.

When your product, design and engineering (PDE) teams build digital services that help customers handle day-to-day tasks more efficiently, it helps to practice what you preach.

Paris-based Qonto takes away the pain of financial admin for 300,000 businesses globally, offering banking, expenses and invoice management, and more. Efficiency, accuracy and timeliness are key to the product. And those responsible for making it live these values too.

“Over 400 people at Qonto are involved in product design and development, including designers, engineers, UX writers, product marketing managers and more,” says Aryaman Mandhana, Senior Lead, Product Design at Qonto. “Most of us are makers at heart, we love creating cool new stuff. However, it takes a tremendous, collaborative effort to create products at scale, and so over the past couple of years Figma and FigJam have helped us optimise our workflows across product, design and engineering.”

Qonto’s team work to a regular release cycle, even when going through a major rebrand in 2022… a process that heavily relied on Figma, as Marion Echevard and Gabrielle Houeix discussed in their presentation at Schema London 2022, Figma’s design systems conference.

One of the outcomes of the ambitious rebrand was better collaboration between Qonto’s teams, so we thought we’d check in with them again to see exactly how Figma and FigJam are helping across the business.

Creating great customer experiences… efficiently

So, what motivates the PDE teams at Qonto? All of them are driven by a determination to create products that delight users. To do that, you need to bring value to the customer, and the product needs to be right first time. For Aryaman, the key here is efficiency - improving lead time, and launching quality services without errors.

“Lead times are the time between when we identify a need, to when we deliver the final product to the customer,” he says. “We aim to release features every few weeks and have multiple projects on the go at all times, so we need to be super efficient. To keep things as simple as possible, we minimise unnecessary tools and that’s been a big factor in our move to Figma.”

With teams scattered around the Europe, and most collaboration happening remotely, Qonto’s PDE teams use FigJam to brainstorm ideas. Product squads comprised of product managers, product marketing managers, product designers, UX writers and engineers work independently and autonomously on product development. And they find it’s critical to know the history of the service or feature when thinking about ways to improve it.

“When creating new versions of something, you first need to understand what you have already, and so we use our visual spec of the existing product in Figma as a starting point, and then work from there,” says Aryaman. “One of the key reasons we’ve started using FigJam is that the structure of a screen and all the libraries get preserved when copying and pasting previous designs from Figma. Even this simple step has made a tangible difference to the process.”

FigJam has proved critical to democratising product development across the organisation. It’s simplicity and ease of use means that, at the concept stage, those who may not use design tools on a daily basis now have a voice. Web engineers, mobile engineers, UX writers, product managers and product marketing managers come together to discuss and document ideas.

“Without FigJam, we would not be able to hear everyone's perspective,” says Aryaman. “The richness of the information we process is quite complex, but FigJam makes it easier for us to quickly make decisions.” Often, 20 people are simultaneously providing feedback with sticky notes and comments.

“Brand and product work better together now, and while product managers never used to go into a project before, now they love the process,” adds Marion, a design systems expert at Qonto. “They’re regularly asking questions in Figma and FigJam and making suggestions. It also helps us educate other teams about design.”

Whereas FigJam is used in the discovery phase, Figma is Qonto’s go-to platform for product design. With shared libraries and different folders - by features or projects - it has become the foundation linking different teams.

“What’s cool is when there’s an issue or someone needs support, we call an Andon meeting. Everyone stops what they’re working on, and gets in the file. We all put our comments on the Figma file so we can quickly add feedback and discuss solutions. It means we can be together no matter where we are in the world. With Figma, we can solve things easily and design more quickly.“

Figma has also helped smooth the developer hand-off process. Once designs have been handed over, engineers are given editor rights so they can go further into the components - with full access to all libraries and files in Figma, they can dig into the details.

“When we change things now, we’re handing over a branch of the whole product,” says Marion.

“Anything that can possibly change is reflected to developers. They have greater autonomy, and they can see the repercussions of any changes they make…. and that reduces defects.”

Documentation and naming has improved too, while legacy files have been cleaned up. “We went from 138 to 31 colours,” says Marion. “We have a dedicated team for the design system now, and one for the visual specs. All of this has helped bring the tech and brand teams closer together.”

So, what’s the impact on lead time?

“We have reduced our lead time significantly by optimising how we handover specs to developers in Figma,” says Aryaman.

"Overall, this has reduced the number of steps required in our workflow, and Figma has reduced our workload as a team by 30%. Two processes that we used are no longer required thanks to our smart use of Figma as a source of truth."

With collaboration across the company improved, Qonto is working more seamlessly, with streamlined workflows, better specs and, ultimately, better products.