Published: Aug 1, 2024
I’ve asked this more times than I can count.
At many large companies, designers and engineers are not only different job descriptions, they’re often physically separated from one another.
In 2012 when everyone learned that Apple would launch its own maps product on iOS, I was lucky to find the team within Google that would be responsible for launching the first version of a dedicated Google Maps for iOS app.
When I joined the team, the engineers had a pod in one part of the building and the designers had a separate pod, ~200 yards away and out of sight. This created a dynamic where engineers would be handed design specs and tasked with implementing them, factory line work style. If you work on a design systems or product team, this might sound familiar.
We were under immense pressure to launch. With Apple’s new Maps app having been released in September, every day that passed was another day that Google Maps didn’t exist on iOS. First impressions matter, and this created a tangible sense of accountability within the team.
And yet, I couldn’t shake this feeling that the separation of design and engineering was creating a quality bottleneck. Every day, I’d run over to the design pod with the latest prototype, ask tons of questions, and then run back to my desk to tune the design. It was super inefficient, and I was one of the only engineers doing this near-daily ritual.
So a few months out from launch, I took over a conference room, ordered pizza, brought in a sound system, and convinced one of the designers (Viktor Persson) to sit with me in the room as we fine-tuned every single interaction in the app.
Every day we’d bounce ideas, play with concepts, and fine tune micro interactions. From the bottom sheet gesture physics, to the app navigation, from localization (“hipster ipsum” mode was critical here), to the way the “swap directions” button animates when you tap it, we meticulously walked through every pixel of the application to make sure it reflected a degree of craftsmanship that we felt was critical for this v1.
And the results showed. The v1 launch was one of the most stable, well-received product launches of that iOS era.
I’ve seen this story play out many times over the past decade, both of my own volition and through enabling it with members of my team, and the same central ingredients have held true every single time: when you afford space for an engineer/designer pair to have full agency to own product quality together, this combo can move mountains.
Ladders and job roles incentivize specialization, so it’s up to leaders to create environments that encourage high-efficiency cross-pollination of talent, and to avoid the tendency for product design groups to default to the assembly line (i.e. “hand-off”) model of work.
Get your key designers and engineers together. Not just for a sprint, but for the greater goal of building something incredible together 🚀