In this panel discussion, the participants explore how AI‑driven prototyping tools are reshaping product development workflows. Speaker A emphasizes the value of AI‑generated, interactive prototypes as a communication medium that conveys dynamic data and vision more effectively than static mock‑ups. Speaker B shares hands‑on experience with Figma Make, noting current limitations (e.g., multi‑theme selection) but highlighting the ability to pull real npm‑packaged UI components into prototypes, which accelerates idea exploration and enables rapid A/B testing with customers. Both speakers describe a shift from traditional waterfall hand‑offs—product → design → engineering—to a collaborative, “single‑river” process where product, design, and engineering co‑create a prototype that serves as a living PRD. Billy expands on this by pointing out that using the same components that live in Storybook allows designers to generate code directly from Figma, reducing translation friction and fostering trust between disciplines. He also raises practical concerns: designers need sufficient coding comfort, code‑review safeguards, and cultural alignment to avoid fear of breaking production code. Overall, the conversation paints a picture of AI‑augmented prototyping unlocking faster iteration, richer experimentation, and tighter cross‑functional collaboration, while also surfacing challenges around theme handling, component fidelity, and governance.
Chapters
I like leveraging those tools for prototyping and being able to come up with something that is super accurate to what is ultimately going to be developed. I know there's workflows where you can essentially go straight into development and publish, but even just using it as a communication tool to get buy-in, to help people get onboard with your vision instead of just kind of showing them some strung together JPEGs and hoping that they get it. Having them be able to interact with it in a meaningful way and see how data actually interacts instead of having that lorem ipsum where we have the same kind of card in every screen and, and hoping that they understand this is going to be live and dynamic and all the cool things that it can do. You're able as a designer to bring that to life and get people to understand like what the vision is. And it wasn't super readily available, or it would be a real time suck to not leverage those, those AI tools to do that.
One thing that I'm kind of excited for is like we've done a couple of prototypes in Figma Make, and if you got a multi-theme design system, sometimes it doesn't pick the right theme. So there's a little bit, sometimes there's some issues in there. Sometimes it, cause it's recreating all of those components that it's pulling in from the design system, but they now have it so you can actually pull in your own npm packages. So you're actually using the actual coded components, which is really nice. Cause I think that's just going to make things go faster. You're not going to have to like say, hey, no, please use the hover state that I originally had in there as it kind of inferred its own. Because we saw some real unlocks when we were on site with a client where we were sitting with product people and we were able to just explore a whole bunch of ideas really quickly by having a couple of Figma Make instances up and running. We're like, well, what if we did this? And what if we asked it to do this? And, and just try out all these different ideas. And, and at the end we were like, we could probably run these past customers, A/B test which one's the best one. Yeah, they don't look 100% right, but at least that'll give us a sentiment of where to go and then we can bring it back into design and be like, okay, now let's refine it. Let's make sure we have all the edge cases. And I think that's like a new workflow that really is like more collaborative for these larger enterprise customers where maybe it's a little less collaborative now where it's a little bit more waterfall. Product makes a PRD. Design gets to go do some design, maybe a research, then it gets handed off to dev, or now product and design can explore together and really create a PRD in the form of like a prototype that they actually validated and tested.
The tools are becoming more collaborative in the sense of the— I think previously in product design it was very much like each segment, so product design and development all had their own lane and you just kind of had to stay in your lane. Whereas now it's just like one river that everybody's swimming in together. And as a designer, you can take things in Figma and actually get code and then share it with the developer. And if all of that is backed by a product owner and you've collaborated on that as a group of those three disciplines, I think that really unlocks a lot because then you're going to skip the process of having to iterate of like, okay, product owner is going to give the brief to design and then design is going to iterate with product. And then once you reach a certain point, you're going to go over to engineering and then you're going to iterate more. But if you're able to use something like that in your package, you can iterate a lot faster, but then you can also bring something to engineering that feels like it has legs and they can really understand what it is. It's using the same components that they're using in Storybook. And it, again, Billy, to your point, it might not be perfect, but we're a lot closer than we were with our previous process. And I think that'll just allow for more experimentation, but there's, there's a lot of opportunity, I think, for really interesting experiences. Whereas I think now there is sort of like a, a tax of like, oh, we can only do so much with the current process. I think AI is going to unlock a lot, a lot of opportunity with, with experimenting that we may not have had access to previously.
Personally, I'm really eager for this sort of future where we're kind of building UI and we're actually using the real UI components, not like the simu— I don't know, I always call it the simulation. Right? We're building a simulation so someone else can build the real thing. And I've been really interested in, in Paper and how they're really, I don't, I still think it's a little bit of code on both sides, not necessarily using the actual bits and pieces from your system, but this is kind of doing what Figma is doing with Cloud Code now, where you're able to pull in your actual screens, customize within there, and then push those back out to code. But how eager or how excited or how non-excited are all you to dive into the actual code and work on the actual interface?
I think it is both exciting and nerve-wracking. As someone who used to write HTML and CSS for a lot of my day, I don't miss it. I'm going to be honest. I do really enjoy the creative aspect of product design. However, I think that having that experience, I think knowing some code is really powerful and it does unlock this level of empowerment within the designer. And it also allows you to have better communication with your engineers, which is really important, I think, for both disciplines to speak some of the language of the other side. And the thing I can equate it to from Just like design in pa— like in the past, I guess it's like this probably going back like 15 years, maybe more, is like Dreamweaver when you had like the WYSIWYG and you had the code up on one side, but then you had your actual design on the other side and you were kind of making changes in the code, but then you could see what was happening. And designing in that way is very interesting. I think Dreamweaver as a product was definitely an interesting space. I used it a ton. It wasn't the best, but it was a thing. And we all used it for, for emails and web pages and things like that. But if we could get like a better version of that, and I don't know, like having trust in, in the dev side as well for us to like actually get in there and make changes and branch things and like merge it back in if it, if it looks good and having like an auditing process for code reviews. For designers to merge things. And again, I think that unlocks a lot of speed and efficiency, but it's just like making sure that the right level of comfort is there for the designers to make the changes, but also for developers to be like, oh no, the designers are in our space. That type of a, like, level of fear. So, like, they're going to break everything. So I think there's, like, definitely a, like, communication and collaboration branch that has to happen for that to really work well. But it's definitely exciting.
Yeah, my hope is that it does make a developer's life easier and not harder. The frontend is really only half the story. There's a lot happening, a lot of data that has to get sorted and understood, and a lot of connections that have to be made in order to even display an image, for example, or to display the correct data point. So if we're able to make their lives a little bit easier by caring about the roundedness of the corners that we care about. I mean, I think that's exciting to see and exciting to like at least try. And it's the digital era. So if we don't like it, we can change it. We'll pivot, we'll find something new, we'll experiment. And I think that's what's exciting.
