Building a Bridge Between Design and Engineering
When our team came up for air after a high-pressure UI release, the damage was clear. Upwards of 50 tickets raised. Rushed visual QA. Designs that had lived in Figma for weeks arriving to engineers looking like a foreign language at the worst possible moment.
The frustration wasn't anyone's fault. Engineers were in Figma — they just weren't reading it correctly. With dev mode access restricted company-wide, they were navigating view-only, unsure which values were fixed and which were flexible, manually checking colour hex codes on components that were fully locked down and never needed touching. Meanwhile, designers assumed the file spoke for itself.
It didn't. And the closer we got to release, the more that gap cost us.
I didn't wait to be asked. I proposed a recurring optional session — the Figma Drop-in — timed straight after existing rituals like retros and refinements to avoid unnecessary context switching for the engineering team.
The format was intentional. Rather than presenting at developers, I invited them to share the designs they were actively working on. That way I could see exactly how they were navigating Figma, what they were second-guessing, and where the mental model broke down. We covered component structure, token values versus raw hex, the logic of constants, and how auto layout maps to concepts they already understood from code — fixed, hug, fill.
The goal wasn't to turn engineers into designers. It was to make the file legible, and the relationship collaborative enough that no question felt too basic to ask.
A few weeks in, one of the engineers sent me a message:
But the more telling change was in the questions. The volume actually went up — but the nature of them shifted completely. Fewer "what's this hex code" and "should this be 16 or 18px." More "how does this flow feel for the user" and "what happens if someone does this instead." Engineers were no longer treating Figma as a spec sheet to decode. They were engaging with the design thinking behind it.
Before the Drop-in, the relationship between design and engineering was polite but distant. Developers often felt like a burden asking questions they thought they should already know. Afterwards, that layer was gone.
At the retro following our next UI release, several engineers named the Drop-in unprompted as a meaningful factor in how much smoother the process felt.
I'd front-load more structure around Figma's core layout — giving engineers a clearer foundation before moving into live file reviews. The sessions evolved well, but a sharper start would have got us to the good stuff faster.
Sometimes the most valuable design work isn't on the canvas. It's creating the conditions for better collaboration — and being willing to go first.
I saw the problem, felt it was worth solving, and did something about it. It paid off.