Early-stage client discovery used to mean an in-person workshop with sticky notes on a whiteboard — mapping user flows, brainstorming feature priorities, that kind of loosely structured collaborative session. With in-person meetings off the table this year, we needed a genuine replacement, not just a video call with someone sharing their screen.
FigJam, Figma's collaborative whiteboard product, has become our go-to for these sessions. Client stakeholders and our team can all add sticky notes, draw connections, and vote on priorities simultaneously, from wherever they are, with the same real-time multiplayer feel that won us over on Figma for design work itself. It is not a perfect substitute for being in a room together — some of the informal, hallway-conversation value of an in-person workshop does not translate — but as a working session tool it has genuinely held up, and we expect to keep using it for discovery workshops even once in-person meetings are an option again.
What we changed about workshop facilitation for the remote format
An in-person workshop facilitator can read the room — sensing when energy is flagging, when a quiet participant has something to say but is not jumping into an open discussion — in ways that do not translate automatically to a video call with a shared whiteboard. We adjusted our facilitation approach specifically for FigJam sessions, building in more structured, explicitly timed individual sticky-note brainstorming before any open group discussion, which gives quieter participants a guaranteed way to contribute that does not depend on finding a natural opening in a group conversation the way an in-person session more easily allows.
A specific client reaction that surprised us
One client stakeholder who had been visibly skeptical about a remote discovery workshop replacing what they expected to be an in-person session told us afterward that they found it easier to review the workshop's output later, since FigJam's board persists exactly as the group left it and can be revisited and annotated further after the session ends, unlike a physical whiteboard that someone eventually has to photograph and erase before the room is needed for something else.
Where the format still falls short of being in the same room
Some of the informal, hallway-conversation value of an in-person workshop does not translate — the side conversation during a coffee break that surfaces an idea nobody would have raised in the structured session itself is a real loss we do not think any remote tool fully replaces. We try to partially compensate with a deliberately loose, unstructured five minutes at the very start of each session for informal check-in conversation, though we are candid with ourselves that it is a partial substitute rather than a full replacement for genuine informal interaction.