jb

Over the past two months, my most impactful move as a design manager has been encouraging and supporting every designer to start building with Claude Code. Designers used to create a “source of truth” in Figma which was used for QA and accountability.. if anything was wrong, you’d point to the designs and say, “This is how it’s supposed to look.” The designers would take this artifact hand it off to engineers to build another “source of truth” on GitHub that would become the repo where other engineers can fork and build on top of. Now — the designer creates the source of truth on GitHub, and it’s closer to “the designs” because it is the designs. Less gets lost in translation, and everyone speaks in code. Figma remains useful for napkin sketches and quick visual experiments, but we are clearly moving beyond Figma as the primary document. The hardest part is getting set up—it’s daunting and scary leaving the things you love behind. People just need a little bit of emotional support to get started. But after taking the leap, everyone is feeling empowered and excited. They are all literally 10x’ing their productivity. The worst part is that engineers are a bit overwhelmed because they have way more PR’s to review.

Today’s Figma MCP update makes it one of the strongest integrations with Claude Code I’ve seen. You can now use Claude Code to design in Figma with the the full context of your design systems.

wait, who let Ditto on the dock?

the most underrated hire right now is a great product person. when i say product person i'm def not talking about a product manager. perhaps i think there has to be somewhat of a new role. i don't have a good name for it yet but maybe something like "product thinker".. someone with an intuitive grasp of the product as it exists, where it's soft, where it sings, & how to iterate it toward something even sharper. in some sense, this person has to cohesively hold in their head where this product should be 2 years from now & work backwards from that. i say this cuz when building was hard, engineering was the bottleneck & the status hierarchy often reflected that. building is no longer hard. which means the variance in outcomes has shifted almost entirely to judgment on what to build, how to sequence it, & how to talk about it. & the story matters as much as the thing. internally, it organizes the team around a shared model of why. externally, it shapes the interpretive frame users bring to their first experience. you can't retrofit narrative onto a product & expect it to land, it has to be load bearing from the start. the rarest version of this person sits at the intersection of culture & deep technology. someone genuinely bilingual. they know what's technically possible & they know which cultural currents are real vs. ephemeral. that combo is what separates products that feel inevitable from products that feel assembled. before ppl clap back with this person has always been valuable, i know.. i am just saying now they might be the most *important* person in the room. their value compounds like never before.

Me: I hope Apple makes an even bigger Pro Display XDR, I'd love more vertical pixels Apple: What if we made it... smaller?