Product design workflows were built for a time when writing code was the slow part. That has flipped, and according to designer Vitalii Khomenko, most teams have not updated how design work reaches engineering. Design has become the constraint, he argues, and the fix is to deliver final work in code rather than in Figma files.
Khomenko, principal designer at Orizon Design and founder of Fluente LLC, has worked both as an external specialist brought in to deliver and as an embedded designer connecting product, brand and execution. His clients range from early-stage startups finding their first visual language to established brands managing complex, multi-disciplinary design systems.
The old model made sense when engineering set the pace. Revision rounds, user testing and iteration fit into the time developers needed to catch up. That window has closed. “Founders are asking design teams to move at the same speed as an AI-assisted dev pipeline, and design doesn’t compress the same way code does,” Khomenko says.
He also warns against cutting polish to move faster. “Because development is cheap and fast now, there’s constant pressure to ship the next thing immediately,” he says. “But the products that actually retain users are still the ones where the details were considered carefully.”
Why Figma handoffs are now the bottleneck
Why are design handoffs slowing product teams?
In the common setup, a designer produces dev-ready screens in Figma and hands the file to engineering. Engineers then interpret the visual decisions and build them from scratch. AI tools have sped up the building, but the translation step has not changed. An engineer still reads spacing, extracts assets, makes calls about component structure and writes the implementation. That work takes as long as it always has.
“The manual workflow inside Figma simply isn’t keeping up with AI-boosted engineering,” Khomenko says. “The design handoff is quietly becoming the thing everyone is waiting on.”
Delivering in code instead
How can teams deliver design work in code?
Khomenko’s proposal splits the role Figma plays. Figma stays the place for exploration, where brand identity is set, layout logic is worked out and design direction is validated. The final deliverable would be code, specifically components built into prepared libraries that engineering can use directly. Because the decisions arrive already written in the language engineers build in, nothing has to be re-created from a visual reference.
“Figma is still the right place to explore what something should look and feel like,” Khomenko says. “But handing over a Figma file and asking engineering to implement it is now the slow path. Delivering in code is the fast path. That’s the shift.”
Carrying out this approach requires designers who can work in code. Khomenko describes the UI/UX designer becoming a Design Engineer as a matter of time, and says teams that treat it as a future concern are the ones most likely to get stuck at the handoff. He is equally clear that code is only part of the job. Branding applied to imagery, animation and marketing materials remain core creative tasks. “The designer of the near future isn’t just generating code,” he says. “They’re moving across the full cycle, brand, motion, marketing, product, with design engineering as an important and growing part of that stack, not a replacement for it.”
No standard playbook has emerged yet. Each team is building its own version as tools and handoff expectations shift. “Each team’s workflow is really custom at this stage,” Khomenko says. “But some general patterns of how this is going to look in the near future are already visible.” Those patterns, he says, include design judgment moving earlier, final delivery moving into code, and designers widening their technical range while staying broad in creative scope.
What founders should do now
What should founders do about design handoffs?
Khomenko offers several recommendations for founders and product leads. Teams should bring senior design thinking in earlier, so it shapes what gets built instead of polishing work already finished. They should treat visual exploration and final delivery as separate stages with separate expectations. And they should make code the expected end point of the design pipeline, whether by hiring for design engineering skills, developing them internally or restructuring handoffs. He calls the translation step “where time goes to die.”
He also urges teams to protect brand, motion and marketing work so design does not shrink into code generation, and to avoid rigid processes, since the workflow is still forming. “The Figma handoff made sense when engineering was the slow part,” Khomenko says. “Engineering isn’t the slow part anymore. Delivering in code isn’t the future of design workflow. For the teams paying attention, it’s already the present.”
Cet article a été rédigé avec l'assistance de l'IA.
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