The traditional, linear handoff from product (PRDs) to design to dev is too slow for AI's rapid iteration cycles. Leading companies merge these roles into smaller, senior teams where design and product deliver functional prototypes directly to engineering, collapsing the feedback loop and accelerating development.

The traditional design-to-engineering handoff is plagued by tedious pixel-pushing. As AI coding tools empower designers to make visual code changes themselves, they will reject this inefficient back-and-forth, fundamentally changing team workflows.

At Perplexity, the design system lives in the codebase, not Figma. Designers contribute directly to the frontend, creating a single source of truth that eliminates drift between design files and production code, forcing a highly practical and collaborative process.

Prototyping directly in the production environment makes high-quality interactions achievable without extensive resources. This dissolves the traditional design dilemma of sacrificing quality for speed, allowing teams to build better products faster.

AI's productivity gains mean that on a lean, early-stage team, there is little room for purely specialized roles. According to founder Drew Wilson, every team member, including designers, must be able to contribute directly to the codebase. The traditional "design artifact" workflow is too slow.

AI tooling is creating a 'fluid model' where any employee, regardless of role, can potentially ship code. This dramatically expands the design system team's responsibility, which must now create tooling and guardrails to support a much broader and less technical user base across the entire organization.

At OpenAI, the development cycle is accelerated by a practice called "vibe coding." Designers and PMs build functional prototypes directly with AI tools like Codex. This visual, interactive method is often faster and more effective for communicating ideas than writing traditional product specifications.

To maximize speed, V0 operates with a "no handoffs" philosophy. Everyone, including designers and product managers, is expected to contribute code and submit their own pull requests. This "full-stack PM" model minimizes the coordination costs and wasted cycles of explaining changes.

AI co-pilots have accelerated engineering velocity to the point where traditional design-led workflows are now the slowest part of product development. In response, some agile teams are flipping the process, having engineers build a functional prototype first and then creating formal Figma designs and UI polish later.