For years, we’ve been managing projects as if development is the slowest part of the process. Simplified: PMs handoff to Design handoff to Development. Been that way for years in my career basically since Figma took over. But now the Development could be much faster than the Design step. And as often as I’ve been bottlenecked waiting on Design to finalize their work, why not just let the AI+dev come up with the first version of the UI and then replace it when/if an “official” design arrives?
This is the Waterfall process (the bad one Royce said not to do, and the one the DOD went and codified). Don't do this. Use an iterative model and don't use hard barriers between "phases" of development.
In order to see this as an actual concern you have to think about it only in terms of outside parties operating via contract. Do not think about this in terms of internal only at the megacorp because the financials are wrong almost every time.
A lot of people think that coding is hard, but that's because they start to code too soon. And then the really hard activities get mixed in and it becomes a whole mess. Also it's quite easy to code, which is why inexperienced people usually rush to do it. Take someone like that and do proper software engineering, and for the first two activities, all you will get from them is a lot of "I don't know".
The slowest part is going to be the parts involving humans communicating things to each other and iterating on the requirements and designs and the waiting times in between. The technical coding or generation of assets does not take that much time in the overall process.
codingdave•1d ago
So if you have experienced design being a roadblock for years, and you are waiting on Figma for every feature... something is wonky.
breckenedge•1d ago
I've worked with a whole lot of PMs who think that we can’t start work on stuff until Design signs off on it because of this misconception that dev is slow.