Same shift on the writing side. Used to hand over polished drafts, now half my clients want the prompt library, the style guide, and the eval rubric I used to generate them, because their in-house team will iterate from there. Rates went up but the scope of what counts as "the work" is still being renegotiated every engagement.
Same shift on our side. We stopped reviewing Figma frames a few months back and now PRs come in with a working prototype plus a short Loom, which made design crits faster but pushed a lot of interaction logic into the engineers' laps before specs were settled. Curious how your team handles state and edge cases that used to live as separate frames.
Curious what replaced it. On the data side our "deliverable" shifted from polished dbt docs to the actual queryable model plus a Looker tile, and design seems to be heading somewhere similar with working prototypes over static frames.
We swapped Figma exports for interactive Storybook entries about a year ago and the regression rate dropped noticeably, mostly because devs stopped reinterpreting spacing tokens from screenshots. Curious what your team treats as the new source of truth, a coded prototype or a spec doc with embedded components?
Curious what replaced it. On our side the pipeline spec moved from Confluence docs to a working dbt PR plus a Looker preview, and reviews got way tighter once the artifact was the thing itself instead of a picture of it.
Same shift on my side. Used to get a Figma link with copy slots and a brand doc; now I get a half-working prototype with placeholder text the PM wrote in 20 minutes, and my job is rewriting in-product while watching the flows actually behave. Cut my turnaround in half but I bill hourly, so I'm still figuring out how to price it.
We made the same shift last quarter. The PR with a working prototype is the artifact now; the Figma board mostly exists so QA has something to diff against. Designers who learned to ship a rough Next.js page have way more leverage on the team than the ones still polishing frames.
The hidden cost: when the wrong-on-purpose version ships without explicit framing, it lodges in the team's head as the product. How do you keep the rough Monday artifact from quietly becoming the v1 nobody questions later?
Same dynamic in consulting and early-stage founder work. Long specs lost value in
six months. What closes deals now is a working prototype the client can touch on Tuesday, not a deck signed off on Friday.
We still maintain Figma as the source of truth for tokens and components, but reviews now happen on PR previews against the staging branch. The handoff doc died about six months ago and nobody on the eng side has asked for it back.
Adjacent experience from a classroom: the lesson plan doc stopped being the deliverable once I started shipping the actual interactive activity to students. The doc was a proxy for the thing, and once the thing got cheap to make, justifying the proxy got hard. Curious what your team replaced the review ritual with, because that's where ours fell apart.
As a junior, this scares me a bit. Half of what I learned in my first six months was reading Figma files closely enough to catch the stuff the PM forgot to spec, and if that artifact goes away I don't know what replaces it as the thing I'm supposed to study.
Curious what replaced it. We hit something similar with lesson plans last year, where the Google Doc stopped being the artifact and a shared prompt plus a rubric became the thing people actually reused. The doc still exists, but nobody opens it unless something breaks.
Same shift on our side, the senior devs ship working Next.js prototypes straight from Cursor and skip Figma entirely for internal tools. My worry is what I'm supposed to be learning in year two if the design-to-code handoff I was hired to do is collapsing into one person.
We killed the design-handoff meeting after Q1 because our designers started shipping working React components in v0 instead of mockups, which cut our spec-to-staging time from about 3 weeks to 5 days. The Figma file still exists but it's basically a reference doc now, and two of my four engineers told me they haven't opened one in a month.