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I just rolled of a contract project, and Figma’s handoff sucks. I request to better automate and cascade user permissions.


Situation: My fellow designer Winnie was taking over my design work I was rolling off from. As part of the transfer, first I made Winnie the Admin of the parent team. BUT as Admin, they did not have edit rights that cascaded down in to the sub-projects and files.


Then I made Winnie to full Owner of the parent team. BUT even as the team owner, they were blocked at an at-team level for each sub-project. AND Ownership didn’t cascade down into the sub-projects.


As a bug-report / feature request, my expected behavior would be:



  1. If a team member is elevated to Admin of a team, or Owner of team, that cascades down into all sub-projects belonging to that team automatically.

  2. Thus granting at least edit capability for Admins, and automatically makes the new team Owner the Owner of all sub-projects unless some manual override is done.


BUT actual behavior is:



  1. Promote team member to Admin or Owner on the Team

  2. Being team Admin or team Owner doesn’t grant any automatic access to sub-projects

  3. Current Owner manually forced to go thru each sub-project and grant edit access to fellow designer

  4. THEN ALSO elevate fellow designer to Owner of each project.


Screenshots below showing my fellow designer Winnie being made Admin, then Owner, and the sub-project Design Systems not cascading permisssions so Winnie was stuck at view-only until I manually added Winnie as Editor, then manually upgraded her to Owner.


figma - co-designer is Admin


figma - co-designer made owner


figma - admin or owner stuck on can view only until I manually added them as Editor and manually upgraded them to Owner


P.S. I checked out Make someone a team admin and Change the owner of a team and neither is helpful about cascading expected user permissions.

Hey @jpostdesign, thanks for the feedback and sorry for the frustration!


This is the current behavior when adding an Admin or changing the Owner of a team.


Access to files is determined by editor access on the team, project, or file itself. Being an admin and having an editor license doesn’t give you automatic access to everything.


Org admins with editor roles are not given automatic access to all teams/projects/files in the Organization. If you would like to have edit access to a team, you will need to have the team owner, an existing team admin or editor to provide you with edit access to the team.


More information on this can be found in our article on Team permissions.


That said, others in the community have definitely expressed the same frustration regarding new Admin/Owner permissions. We’ll pass this along to the team for future consideration.

Thank you @dvaliao ! I understand what you’re saying, and I believe you understand my point and frustration, thank you.


To emphasize my point tho, please pass along I now understand the current behavior and process AFTER looking up documentation, but in my opinion, it is wrong and an anti-pattern to expected behavior as it is currently today


Please also pass along this was a shock to experience! Figma is built on a promise for collaboration, but this is SUCH a fail.


Other collab tools flow and cascade higher user permissions downstream automatically. Take Google Docs for example. If I’m made an admin to a Shared Drive, the owner doesn’t have to manually go into each sub-folder to also make me an editor, THEN promote me to admin. That’s an anti-pattern and waste of time. The admin privilege automatically cascades downstream.


Thanks for hearing me, and replying, I appreciate it! Please direct my frustration to your product team to prioritize changing the feature to the expected result. Thank you!

I hear you, @jpostdesign. I’ll do my best to continue to advocate, because most Admins and Team Owners do assume that they will immediate get access to sub projects.


We’ve already put this on the team’s radar, so from here out, we’ll be able to use the Votes on this topic to get a more accurate gauge of how this is affecting the community. Thanks again for flagging this to our attention!

I would love to get the full reasoning behind the organisation admin privileges (or lack thereof) from Figma. Someone must have limited this specifically. To me, it makes ZERO sense. As an org admin, I need to be able to manage all teams, projects and files. If I have the “privilege” of approving invoices, how can I NOT have the privilege of managing all of our work?

Thanks for chiming in Andrew! Please upvote if you haven’t and ask others to upvote as well. I didn’t realize until this latest handoff that Admin and Owner doesn’t cascade as I’d expect. It explains why in the past changing and handing off projects to me was such a pain.

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