“The way we built software in a lot of recent years, the line happened to be just where people started coding. It didn't matter what was going on. Design went up to this point, and engineering started here. It meant there was a lot of translation that had to happen between design and coding, and a lot of things got lost. There was this feeling that engineering was extremely expensive, so we needed to get them completely ready.”
Rosenfeld Review Podcast · User Experience · November 2026
Context
Asked what context should pass between roles, David explains why the traditional handoff point between design and engineering was arbitrary, and why it's moving now that designers can build.
Transcript
…be collaborating with other people, but a lot of times it's a little bit easier to make some of those the context with the you know changes with like back-end engineers and then you're doing a lot of the front end work is a little bit smoother so I think that that's sort of how I break it down so
…expertise but I love your framing about passing context and you know obviously you can't always it may be too involved there's just you know we can only learn so many domains and so much context but is there do you have like guidelines to help think about what context is appropriate to pass if any
well so I think for years companies large companies are trying to emulate startups right and why are startups so so successful it's partially you've got this small group of people and they're aligned and they're you know they're like they're really highly motivated but part of it is oftentimes everybody in that startup understands why they're doing what they're doing what they're trying to achieve and they just even without even noticing or trying they're all just you know communicating and they have this great understanding and companies are trying to do that at larger scale so i do think ideally you want to be in a situation where mostly you don't have to pass context uh where you do you want it to be a place where it's uh where it's basically you know at the at the where it narrows and that uh it and the and the needs of what the other person is doing it's pretty easy to understand hey i just need to be able to support this and and and where the teams are and unfortunately i think what's happened the way we built software these days and in a lot of recent years Is the line happened to be just where people started coding? And it didn't matter what was going on. It was design went up to this point, and…
So you used a word a moment ago that like I had just thought of it and then you just like said it out loud. So it made me feel for a moment kind of smart. That's what I'm here for, Lou. Thank you. It's seams. And you said the seams used to be very much along the between roles or functions, very…
Well, it's definitely emerging. And it's not set industry-wide. It's often not set within companies. People are trying out different things. But generally, if you look at startups these days or AI native companies who are working a little bit of a different way, you tend to see the seam is a little…
So, all right, so kind of feature dependent, you mentioned front end versus back end as emergent seams. I mean, that's not, you know, those have been around for a while, but maybe even more important than in the past. Would you say in these kinds of environments where there's not only this…
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