Figma is a sketchpad now
I have been a product designer for twenty years. UI, UX, branding, everything in between. I have spent thousands of hours in Photoshop, Sketch, InVision, Figma. I have shipped a lot of interfaces. I love design. It is most of who I am professionally.
The way I work has completely changed in the last year, and I want to talk about it honestly, because I am seeing other designers and teams go through the same shift.
A few days ago I was on a call about a Figma file. The designs were thoughtful. They had color, type, a point of view. They also had no design system, no interaction states, no flows connecting one screen to the next. The team asked what I thought.
I told the team to treat Figma as wireframes. The actual product, how it feels, how it moves, how the pieces fit, would get built in code.
That was the easiest version of an argument I am about to have again this week, on a different project. Same pattern. A Figma file, full of screens, delivered as if it were the blueprint. It is not. It is a direction.
This is the shift nobody is talking about loudly enough. For years, design tools were the thing you shipped to engineering. You spent weeks (or paid someone thousands) to get every screen pixel-accurate, annotated, and frozen. Engineering translated it into HTML and CSS. A round of QA. A round of tweaks. More rounds. Ship.
I ran that loop for most of my career. I was good at it. And that loop is dead for a lot of the work I do now.
The new workflow is smaller and faster. Figma for style and vibe. A markdown document with the features, the flows, the edge cases. Claude Code building the actual interface on top of a real design system, in the browser, with real data, the same afternoon. Every change costs minutes instead of days. Every decision lands in something you can click.
The reason this works is that the slow part of building a product was never the code. It was the handoff. Designer to developer. Static file to functioning interface. Feedback loop that takes days to close. When you remove the handoff and the translation, you also remove the reason you needed those high-fidelity Figma frames in the first place.
What you still need is judgment. Somebody has to decide what a button does when you press it. Somebody has to decide whether a toast should slide in or fade in. Somebody has to decide when a form saves, when it warns, when it forgives. None of that lives in Figma. It lives in the code, in the browser, in the hands of whoever is making the calls. This is what I mean when I say taste is the new moat.
That judgment is exactly what twenty years of designing interfaces gave me. The difference now is that I get to apply it directly in the product, instead of in a file somebody else has to translate.
The builders who understand this are shipping complete interfaces in days. The teams still on the old loop are weeks behind before they even have something clickable.
I advise a few teams on this now. The part I keep explaining: you do not save money by paying for a full Figma prototype before building. You burn it. Every hour spent on pixel accuracy in Figma is an hour not spent on the thing that actually ships. And the Figma file ages the moment you start building, because real interfaces reveal decisions the static version never had to make.
I am not anti-Figma. I love Figma. I use it daily. But I use it as a sketchpad now. A place to land a direction, a type choice, a color. Not a deliverable.
The product gets built in the product.
That is the workflow. Figma for ideas. Markdown for features. AI for execution. Taste from the person running the whole thing. One person can do all of that now, and it is faster than a team doing it the old way.
If you are a founder about to pay for another round of Figma screens before any code exists, stop. Spend that money on someone who can take your idea and turn it into a live interface this week.
The prototype is the product now, and after twenty years of designing the old way, I would not go back.