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Notes on UX engineering, design systems, and shipping the gap between Figma and production.
Notes on UX engineering, design systems, and shipping the gap between Figma and production.
UX Design · 8 min read
Close ✕Mar 2025
There's a joke in most product teams: the designer says "but the design says..." and the engineer says "but the spec says..." — and both are right, and somehow nothing matches production.
I've lived both sides of that conversation. And I've spent the past few years in a role that doesn't quite exist in either camp: UX Engineer.
The job description depends on who you ask. Some companies use it to mean "a designer who can write CSS." Others mean "a frontend engineer who runs user interviews." Neither is quite right.
For me, a UX Engineer is someone who can:
"The UX Engineer is the person who remembers what the user was trying to do while everyone else is debating how to implement it."
Hybrid roles always get questioned. Are you a real designer? Are you a real engineer? The answer is: yes, and that's uncomfortable for job ladders that were built for specialisation.
Design teams worry you'll advocate for shipping "good enough" UI. Engineering teams worry you'll slow down sprints with UX concerns. Both fears are valid, and both are wrong. The UX Engineer's job is to speed up the feedback loop between intent and implementation — not to slow anyone down.
Here's what nobody talks about: a UX Engineer who has shipped enough components understands constraints that most designers never encounter. They know that a 12px gap in Figma renders differently on Android. They know that a hover state is meaningless on a touch device. They know that "just animate it" sometimes means 200ms of jank on a mid-range phone.
That knowledge makes designs better — not by killing them, but by grounding them in what production actually feels like.
If you're a UX Engineer, get comfortable being the translator. In design reviews, speak engineering. In sprint planning, speak user. Your value is in reducing the distance between intention and delivery.
And if you manage a product team: hire a UX Engineer and then actually let them operate in both rooms. The return on investment is measured in fewer late-sprint redesigns and components that don't need to be rebuilt every quarter.
We're still early in defining what this role looks like. But the teams that figure it out first will ship better products, faster. That's not a hypothesis — it's what I've watched happen.