I stopped using Figma for 70% of my product design work…and my output doubled.

Elizabeth Alli -

Most design problems aren’t ‘design’ problems.→

They’re ‘Thinking’ problems.
They’re ‘Clarity’ problems.
They’re ‘Too-many-tabs-open’ problems.

More prototyping. More pixel-shifting. More polish in Figma alone isn’t going to help you with those.

For me, without clear thinking, Figma just results in more confusion, more mess, and more mockups than I can mentally manage.

The Problem: Figma wasn’t the bottleneck — my thinking was

Like most UX/UI designers, I used to jump straight into Figma the moment I had a product idea or a design task to complete. I’d tweak colors, mock up screens, build components, and then… get stuck.

Not because I didn’t know how to design, but because I didn’t know what I was designing — who it was for, how it solved the problem, and what the business actually needed from it.

I was designing aimlessly.
Which meant I was redesigning constantly.
Which meant I was wasting time.

This is what most of my design students come into my course doing too, and it’s why I teach problem-first thinking before they even open Figma.

Polished pixels ≠ finished product

I knew something had to change when I caught myself redesigning the same dashboard for the third time that week — still unsure if the core components even made sense.

So I asked myself:
“What if the problem isn’t the design tool, but the order I’m doing things in?”

“What if what designers are struggling with isn’t ‘what’ but why?

What if I could figure out the strategy, systems, and structure first — and then let Figma be the final step, not the first?

That’s when I started doing something that changed everything:

I built a repeatable process and a system that takes the guesswork out of product design

The Solution:

I started by asking:
What are all the things I do before pushing pixels that actually move the needle?

Things like:

  • Writing my problem statement, tagline, and persona
  • Laying out my business model with a Lean Canvas
  • Doing competitive analysis and a SWOT
  • Capturing inspiration, moodboards, colors, and typography
  • Organizing all my user research, interviews, and survey data (and having AI help me analyze it)
  • Writing a PRD (Product Requirements Document)
  • Writing UX copy without opening 20 Google Docs
  • Outlining my user flows and information architecture
  • Creating personas without needing to design a new deliverable every time
  • And even planning out my content marketing, assets, and roadmap

Then, I built out a single Notion Workspace and Figma System with templates to hold all of it and make the process easily repeatable.

Over the past 7 years, I’ve been sharing this with my product design students and teaching them the thinking behind these processes. I’ve refined it to be clean, templated and ridiculously efficient in helping me to:

⚡️ Build multiple 6-figure products and MVPs
⚡️ Save designers hundreds of hours and dozens of browser tabs
⚡️ Help my design students learn the modern product design and development process within my course.

Here’s what’s inside the Notion workspace I now use every day.

🧠 Product Dashboard

Start with clarity, not chaos.

When I begin a new project, I don’t open Figma. I go to the dashboard.

This is where I have all of my sections.

It sounds simple, but this is the anchor I return to every time I feel lost in a design decision.

It’s where I track product metrics as they evolve — business KPIs, user goals, or just a few numbers to ground my thinking.

Design without this is just decoration.

💡 Inspiration Board

Capture the spark before it fades.

Every project starts in that messy, beautiful phase of random ideas and rabbit holes.

So I built a place to hold those: images, videos, links, swatches, typography, and even embedded moodboards.

I drag them in as I go. It’s loose, raw, and incredibly important.
This section helps me stay connected to the soul of the product — even when things get technical.

💼 Business Requirements

Designing for visuals is easy. Designing for viability is what matters.

Most designers don’t learn this early: the business is your design constraint.

So I included tools like the Lean Canvas, Competitive Analysis, and a full Business Plan template right inside the workspace.

I ask:

  • What’s the market doing?
  • Who are our competitors?
  • What’s our unfair advantage?
  • What are the goals that design has to support?

This is where I connect strategy to screens. It’s how I make sure I’m designing a solution, not just a slick UI.

🔍 User Research

Research shouldn’t live in a thousand places.

This section changed everything for me.

🚫Before, I had tweets bookmarked, survey responses buried in forms, and interview notes scattered in Google Docs. Now it’s all in one place.

I built a connected database for online research, surveys, and interviews.

I even track where customer sentiments and responses from places like Twitter, Reddit, or a form response — and tag it by theme.

I can immediately spot patterns and insights before I ever move into wireframes and if you have Notion Teams you can use AI to help with this!

I created a plug-and-play user persona template that lets me add an image, user bio, favorite brands, motivations, and even a progress bar made of colored text to visualize personality traits.

It’s fast, lightweight, and easy to update. Most importantly, it’s not some dated old artifact — It’s something I can update easily and actually use and refer to regularly.

🗺️ User Journeys

Empathy needs motion, not just notes.

User journeys were one of the trickiest things to replicate in Notion — but I found a way.

I use the timeline view to show progression through the user’s experience — each phase mapped to an emotion. (Displeased. Neutral. Happy. Ecstatic.)

I have a connected database directly to the persona it belongs to, so when I revisit Jenna’s onboarding experience for example, I immediately see that she was neutral. That tells me: we have work to do there.

It’s simple, but it brings emotion into the product thinking early.

🧭 Information Architecture

No more missing pages or broken flows.

When I’m building out a product or auditing an existing site, I use this section to log every page: what it does, why it matters, and where it stands.

I’ve mapped user flows step-by-step with conditionals and even included a space for UX copy.

There’s also card sorting templates and mental model exercises I use to align the IA with how real users think.

This is where a product’s skeleton takes shape — before any UI skin is added.

🎨 UI & Style Guide

Systemize your aesthetics.

Once I do get into visual design, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel every time.

So I created a mini design system inside Notion:

  • Brand assets
  • Color palettes
  • Typography
  • Accessibility standards
  • Layout and spacing guides
  • Design patterns for common flows

Even if I’m working alone, I want to design like I’m working with a team.
This makes that possible — and handoffs so much easier when the team grows.

📢 Marketing Section

Design supports growth, not just delight.

If I’m creating content, product screenshots, or writing launch copy — I want it connected to the product.

This section houses all of it:

  • A content calendar
  • Social media assets
  • Screenshots
  • Promotional materials

It’s not just for marketers. It’s for designers who understand that getting your product seen is part of the job.

🛣 Product Roadmap

Know what’s next, for whom, and why.

This is the command center.

I can view all my tasks as a table, Kanban board, or timeline. I can filter by team, by status, or by role.


When I’m wearing multiple hats — designer, developer, founder — this is the only way I stay sane.

And because it’s built on relational databases, everything stays connected: from business objective → research → persona → feature → task → delivery → measurement.

👉🏽That’s how you scale your thinking, not just your to-dos.

Why this works

This is the system I wish I had when I was jumping between Figma, Google Docs, Sheets, and half a dozen other tools.

Now, I open Notion first.
I design better.
I design faster.
And I design with way less rework.

👉🏽 The real benefit I found was that I stopped second-guessing my design decisions because I wasn’t just designing for aesthetics — I was designing with context.

👉🏽 I wasn’t hoarding screenshots and moodboards in a thousand tabs — I had it all visually embedded in one clean dashboard.

👉🏽 I wasn’t getting lost in vague feedback from stakeholders — I was handing off clear documents that made sense to everyone.

This wasn’t just a workspace.
It was a way to design with clarity — before I ever opened Figma.

→ Want your copy of this exact workspace?


After many years, I’m making these Notion Templates available to the public.

It’s been launched to Product Hunt and has sold over 2,000 times and has gotten much love (thank yous! 😊)

Real Love from Real Designers

👉🏽 Grab the Notion Product Design Workspace here and try it yourself.

👉🏽 Want hands-on training with mentorship on how to use these tools to design great products?Consider Enrolling in my Product Design Course
(and get this Notion Workspace and my Figma System for free!)

🙋🏽‍♀️ I’m Liz btw! I’m all about teaching ways of designing more mindfully and with less stress. I teach product (UX/UI) design on YouTube and in my course where I show you all of the methods and techniques behind this type of work and how to become a more skillful product designer.