It can be intimidating to move from one tool to another, so we’ve built this migration guide to help you understand what to expect and plan for when you migrate to FigJam from another tool.

We usually recommend having a migration lead to manage the transition along with the support of Leadership, Team Leads, IT, Design, and L&D.

Typically, you can expect this process to take 2-4 weeks. This will vary depending on the size of your organization and the current use of your whiteboarding tool. Read more below about how to plan for your migration and what to expect along the way.

As part of the transition, we recommend focusing on the following goals:

• Ensure all users at your organization are aware of the transition and feel confident in managing their whiteboarding workflows in FigJam
• Enable users to prioritize which content needs to be migrated and support them in migrating their essential boards
• Utilize FigJam as a tool to improve meeting facilitation, foster a culture of collaboration, and support your employee engagement priorities

Below are the phases we recommend preparing as part of the migration process. Each phase will vary depending on the size and complexity of your team’s whiteboarding needs. Time spent planning for each phase will help ensure a smoother transition.

Phase 1: Discover and plan

The goal of the first phase is to understand the current state of your whiteboarding tool usage, get stakeholders on board, and align on key priorities and content to migrate.

Estimated time: 1-2 days

Who’s involved:

• Migration lead
• Board owners
• Leadership

Activities to complete:

• Put together your migration plan with a timeline
• Assemble and confirm the migration team
• Hold a kickoff meeting with the team to discuss the plan
• Review file structure of your current whiteboarding tool
• Complete a discovery and start an index of the existing whiteboards
• Communicate with board owners (see sample email below)

Phase 2: Prioritize and prepare

The goal of this phase is to design your Figma environment for company-wide use, prioritize boards, and export content.

Estimated time: 2-3 days

Who’s involved:

• Migration lead
• Board owners
• Team leads

Activities to complete:

Prioritize boards to migrate:

Just like physical whiteboards that regularly get erased, most digital whiteboard files are ephemeral. So while your organization may have thousands of boards in your existing whiteboarding tool, you will find that only a fraction of them are still being edited or duplicated and need to be migrated to FigJam.

We recommend saving and archiving the boards that need only to be referenced, which will be the majority of boards. This will leave a subset of boards that you need to migrate or recreate in FigJam. Below is a reference of the typical approach we see customers take to the migration:

Fully recreate:

• Template boards
• Boards for upcoming meetings
• Actively used boards
• ~5-10% of boards should fall in this category

Static transfer:

• Commonly referenced boards
• Boards from recent meetings
• ~20-30% of boards

Export & Archive:

• Commonly referenced boards
• Boards from recent meetings
• ~60-75% of boards

Export all boards: Once you’ve prioritized and indexed your boards, we recommend exporting the necessary boards and archiving reference boards in shared drives.

Admin review: Along with exporting and preparing your boards, we recommend establishing the admin plans and organization structure in Figma for your org. This includes:

• Organize workspaces, teams, and projects
• User provisioning

Phase 3: Import and design

The goal of this phase is to import boards into FigJam, clean up content, and add custom templates, colors, and assets.

Estimated time: 1 week

Who’s involved:

• Migration lead
• Board owners
• Design
• IT

Activities to complete:

• Import Priority boards (see import guide)
• Import active and reference boards
• Board clean up / recreation
• Create and publish custom templates
• Set up custom colors
• Add custom libraries

Phase 4: Deploy and train

The goal of this phase is to launch FigJam, provide education and enablement for the team, and begin using FigJam to drive more engagement and collaboration.

Estimated time: 1-2 days and ongoing

Who’s involved:

• Migration lead
• Board owners
• Leadership
• Team leads
• L&D

Activities to complete:

• Roll out training & enablement (partner with L&D)
• Conduct FigJam training for managers, end users, and/or IT (all optional)
• Can also include facilitation workshops such as:
  • Facilitating engaging meetings
  • Design thinking
  • Running retros & crits
  • Interactive user research