As new users of Figma our team is excited to start using branches in our workflow. However, from what I am seeing they’re not really ready for a production workflow. I see two features that seem critical for large organizations using branches that don’t exist:
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The ability to search across files for related branches. For instance, if I have one ticket # associated with 3 different product areas (Figma files), to keep everyone organized and make life easy I would expect to name the branches in each file after the ticket number. The problem is that once you do that there is no way to easily pull up those 3 branches to gain visibility into the workstream (shared ticket number) as a whole.
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The ability to associate branches from different files with each other. For anyone used to working with source control in other contexts it seems like a no brainer. In the above example File 1, File 2 and File 3 should be 3 “artifacts” associated to one “branch”. Granted that is a big change, but even a soft link between associated branches would go a long way toward making branches feel production ready.
You can also imagine the obvious use cases for Design Systems: Let’s say you have 4 files in your design system - Assets, Core, Components and Patterns. Design System v1.2 may involve updates to 3 of those files. Being able to link/group the associated branches and provide top-level visibility into all of those changes is critical for change management and team understanding.
I’m not the first person to wonder about this (see below). So is Figma planning to mature Branches to make them viable for a production workflow?