A mashup of labels I’ve been given since starting to make websites years ago. As our tools change and systems become more complex, the lines between what responsibilities fall on a designer or an engineer are blurred.

Some questions that come up on my team between designers and engineers as we continue to grow:

• How do we play together? How early and often are we getting together to brainstorm ideas and share ownership over what we are making?

• Can we talk? How are we communicating progress over time and reaching out to ask questions and get clarity when there’s ambiguity?

• What did we decide again? When we make decisions together or within our function, where are we writing that down to make sure others understand how we got to where we are?

Some wisdom from the community shines some light on some of these places:

New roles

Diana Mounter’s talk at Clarity: A design systems community conference this year walked through the benefits of design engineers and hybrid roles that allow specialists to focus on high-quality performant user interactions and how they might potentially be folded under design systems teams along with designers for unified leadership. I identified with her personal story of how she discovered a happy path to merging technical curiosity with design creativity.

Shared assets

Tokens have become the common language both teams understand and guidelines both can agree to. One place where many teams focus on building bridges is through syncing design tokens between Figma and code repositories. Samantha Gordashko and the team at Token Studios have several outstanding resources to help teams manage tokens across design files and codebases which I highly recommend.

Shared values

As we continue to build connections, our team has found that accessibility is a practice that both teams are drawn to for its impact and inclusiveness. We decided to invest time into centralizing resources such as guidelines and training to give each team the confidence to deliver on a shared process. Stéphanie Walter is an excellent resource for designers looking to dig deeper into supporting accessibility and how to collaborate with their engineering partners.

Takeaways

For teams looking to find places to bring their design and engineering teams together here are some takeaways that work at Exygy

• Research hybrid roles and identify if there are already team members who could facilitate deeper collaboration across your teams.

• Audit and organize your design tokens across both teams and see if there are opportunities to add consistency or streamline your process for sharing tokens.

• Find a common practice on your team that aligns with your shared values and principles like accessibility and invest in spaces to develop a shared approach.