From Figma to Frontend

For the last many years at Trackable our product designer had been using figma to design features, then handing those designs to engineering. That was standard practiced, and it worked, with the expected headaches. The dev cycle was brutal because you couldn’t test the actual product out until it was implemented, questions would come up during implementation, etc. If you’ve been in product or engineering in a software company, you know.

I’ve written about how we’ve shaken this up with agentic coding. Now, instead, he writes the UI. For the sake of security, I split our SSR app into front end and back end systems. I review backend pull requests VERY closely, my engineering team reviews front end PRs, and anyone in the company can PR to the front end.

Product designer guy has gone from using figma to coding the front end directly, inside the architecture that I set up. This has worked incredibly well. Now he designs and implements the front end, we talk about what he needs for backend work, and I implement that. We iterate like that very quickly. The feature we’re working on is HUGE. The UI is complicated, the backend is complicated, and it would have been brutal to do the old way, but our dev cycles are quick and painless as we turn stones over. It’s very very fun.