How I helped Stepstone shift from buying tools to building them, using AI-powered workflows and Figma Make to create a new generation of internal design tooling.
Read the Figma customer storyAt Stepstone, our design organisation was scaling rapidly across more than 20 product designers embedded across 40+ product development teams. As that growth continued, so did our reliance on third-party tools to support documentation, localisation, and internal workflows.
These tools solved individual problems but introduced new ones: fragmented workflows, high costs, limited flexibility, and slow iteration cycles. We reached a point where our processes were being shaped by the limitations of our tools rather than the needs of our teams.
"The moment Figma integrated Supabase into AI platforms, the game changed. This was no longer a question of whether it was possible. It was possible now."
Andy Gordon, Design Operations & Design Systems, Stepstone
Advancements in AI and tools like Figma Make fundamentally changed what designers could do. Instead of relying on engineering for internal tools, designers could create functional prototypes that behave like real products, connect to live data sources, and build and iterate on internal workflows independently.
This led to a key shift in mindset:
Designers shouldn't just design interfaces. They should design the systems that power how design works.
Documentation was spread across multiple tools, difficult to maintain, and inconsistent in structure. It lacked a scalable system for managing and publishing content.
I designed and built a CMS-style documentation platform using Figma Make, powered by a Supabase backend, with structured component-driven pages, a Gutenberg-style editing experience, role-based permissions, and dynamic page generation.
"We explored how Figma Make could help us rethink how operational knowledge is created and maintained across the organization. The aim was to bring guidance from design systems, brand, content, and accessibility into a single source of truth."
Rachel Lumley, Lead Product Designer for Design Systems, Stepstone
"It's the kind of governance functionality that design teams typically rely on external platforms for, built entirely in-house and tailored to how the team actually works."
Andy Gordon
Localisation workflows were disconnected from design, manual processes, inconsistent translation handling, and no direct link between design files and translation systems.
A Figma-integrated translation management system and plugin that lets designers switch between languages while working. At the centre is an internal AI model built on Claude, trained on Stepstone's tone of voice documentation.
"What's powerful is that I could tailor the dashboards to provide the level of operational visibility that off-the-shelf tools rarely give you. Being able to experiment and adjust these dashboards myself makes it much easier to continuously evaluate and improve the system."
Mala Vadhia, Senior Design Operations Specialist, Stepstone
Writing and maintaining documentation was time-consuming, inconsistent, and difficult to scale across teams contributing at different rates.
An AI-powered content assistant integrated directly into the documentation platform, context-aware generation per component section, structured prompts aligned to design system standards, supporting guidelines, usage notes, and accessibility documentation.
Traditional prototypes required artificial scenarios during research, couldn't handle real user input, and lacked realistic data, limiting the quality of findings.
Using Figma Make and AI tooling, fully functional prototypes that behave like real products, with real data integration, functional input handling, dynamic responses, and persistent data via Supabase.
This work wasn't just about building tools. It changed how design operated within the organisation.
"By combining Figma Make with our own solutions-focused culture, we've seen a shift in what's possible for operational teams within design organizations."
Matt Gottschalk, Senior Manager of Design Operations, Stepstone
This project is featured in Figma's official customer stories.
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