The Product Design Assembly Line

For years, we pretended this was normal: the business talks to the product manager, who translates to the designer, who churns out static mockups, which the developer translates back into code. An endless cascade of translations, and a mountain of hidden costs everyone has learned to ignore.

AI is reshuffling the deck, but not where you’d expect. The real point isn’t to spit out throwaway prototypes that end up in the trash. It’s to design in an isolated environment that’s genuinely wired into the production codebase. No more mockups that lie: time for iteration that speaks the same language as the final code.

And from there, everything shifts. The bottleneck has moved: producing has become fast, it’s deciding that slows things down. Business teams and PMs test their ideas live, designers stop pushing pixels and reclaim their role as captains of the user experience, and developers finally get something concrete instead of specs to interpret. Roles are being redrawn. So is the organization.

What’s left are the real questions, the ones we rarely ask in time: what do we keep under our control, what do we hand off to the machine, and on what, or whom, are we willing to become dependent to get there?