We love designers. We've worked with some brilliant ones — art directors who see what a brand needs before the brand knows it, UX people who fight for users when everyone else is fighting for features.
This isn't about designers being the problem. It's about the tools we ask them to work in.
The Telephone Game
Product writes a brief. Design interprets it in Figma. Figma gets a click-through prototype. Stakeholders sign off on what looks like a product but is actually a picture of one. Then engineering fills the gaps with their best guesses.
You discover the interaction is wrong when it's expensive to fix.
"You discover the interaction is wrong when it's expensive to fix."
Where the Budget Goes
What percentage of your budget touches the end user?
Add up the hours on briefs, design iterations, Figma prototypes, handoff documentation, tickets describing tickets. Compare that to hours building the thing people actually use.
Designers are essential. But their tooling is wrong. Static comps made sense when code was slow and expensive. That's no longer true.
What We've Proved
With the right setup, we go from rough sketches and a solid brief to testing multiple experiments in an afternoon. Real interactions, not click-throughs. Feedback by end of day.
Then we hand engineering near production-ready components. Not sketches to interpret — working code that's most of the way there.
This wasn't possible six weeks ago. AI tooling has changed what "exploration" can deliver. The gap between prototype and production has collapsed.
Where We Come In
We work best when we're in early. Tissue sessions, not polished decks.
There's no point bringing us a complete Figma. The money's already spent. The assumptions are baked in.
But if you want exploration that compounds — where every hour of discovery reduces hours of delivery — that's where we live.
Every hour of discovery reduces hours of delivery.
— The compounding effect