The Evolution of Parallel Digital Product Workflows
How the pivot from linear handoffs to parallel work is saving product teams 40–50% of their cycle times
Note: Gratitude and full credit to Andrew Rohman for mapping out these workflows and turning dozens of real-world customer cases into useful insights for others to use. If this topic scratches an itch, there’s a lot more where this came from on the Knapsack blog and in our LinkedIn posts.
Digital production is shockingly inefficient. Century-old processes developed for printed creative are used today for a medium bordering on sci-fi. Embracing the opportunities presented by systematic workflows rooted in working with, and delivering code enables teams to ship high quality products in fewer, faster cycles.
Digital production has evolved and is previously unattainable efficiencies of 40%+ are now being realized. Composable components are finally delivering on the promise of reusable assets.
The Perfect Storm
There is a school of thought in evolutionary theory that suggests there are long periods of stability followed by rapid change. The theory, called Punctuated Equilibrium, suggests that after extended stasis, a shift in the environmental pressures will dramatically increase the speed at which evolution happens. That’s what’s happening in product development right now — a perfect storm of drivers shifting the environment.
By combining ZIRP (zero interest rate policy), with the declining growth-at-all-costs venture funding, and “do with more with less” cost strategies, with a healthy dose of rapid AI adoption, you have a prefect recipe for dramatic change. That change has led to significant tech stack consolidation, job cuts and pressure on teams to do more with less resources.
The Consequences of The Storm on Product Operations
Do more with less sounds suspiciously like asking teams to work harder without any increase in support. Product managers and their teams are now expected to get a lot more done by wearing lots of hats. PM are simultaneously expected to analyze the data, prioritize work, talk to customers, and make sure they are managing up to executives and laterally to peers and partners. It’s a lot.
Realistically, aligning stakeholders is a full time job but that’s an afterthought for many team leaders. It’s a lot for anyone, never mind the busy manager. We’re putting more emphasis on process but the process hasn’t evolved much in the past two decades. The product production consultants have provided some superficial label changes and some hand-waving roadmapping tool but if we’re honest we’re still doing waterfall-ish work and expecting magic to happen.
Current Workflow Constraints
The promise of product ops is to provide your product team the frameworks, processes, and a decision stack to operate with a healthy cadence. Done correctly, your product operations should be the safe and stable platform to dependably deliver value to your customers, but to most product teams, it doesn’t feel like that. Take a look at the workflow diagram below. I’ll admit that a classic digital production cycle will eventually ship something. The problem is that ‘eventually’ is hopelessly slow. And when you’re neck deep in it, it feels like it’s designed to slow things down, not increase value delivery. Multiple hand-offs, rework cycles, and linear decision making that makes engineers downstream feel no agency or control over the outcomes.
Adding Design System Efficiency
What design systems promise is a reduction in rework, alignment on components, and a tighter integration between design and code. The problem is when you add the amplifying qualities of a design system to a broken process, you can also make things worse. If design and engineering are fundamentally disconnected then the upstream choices will still result in poor outcomes. Below is an illustration of how a design system added to a classic product production lifecycle increases some design work, but ultimately doesn’t do away with the clunky handoffs, never-ending rework and the lack of control experienced by engineers.
However, due to the nature of the classic product build environment, teams either have elements that only exist in code across multiple frameworks, with no guidelines and no design file, or on the other end, no code but specs and Figma components with properties.
Starting Together, Staying Together
John Cutler coined this term and I find myself coming back to it whenever there’s a conversation about workflow. Start together, stay together. Without early and frequent alignment, there can never be a healthy and efficient workflow. This is where a new vision of product operations can literally bring everything in focus in a single viewport. Knapsack accelerates the workflows we see today, and enables immediate pathways for the workflows of tomorrow. At a high level, Knapsack is a product operations platform but for many it’ll simply be a place to regain some of their sanity.
By moving alignment upstream even Fortune 10 companies will see a huge improvement in efficiencies. One big box store we worked with has reported a 40% reduction in production time because of the change in workflow. If we explore the platform, we can look at a highly reused element like a button. We bring together documentation, including dynamically powered pieces from your production components and code, directly connected to design data from Figma via the REST API. We can see variants and the property data, the specs of how this component is designed. Connecting design and code tools, and providing a single location to view prototypes and production ready coded elements is the holy grail product leaders like me have been searching for over a decade.
Modern Product Production Workflows
New ML tools are going to absolutely change design. But we can even see the promise of automation in Knapsack’s platform workflow. Designers and engineers can spin up coded prototypes directly from the components in the design system. In our current release, product teams can already view design system generated prototypes with production-ready code.
The promise of design systems integrated into a ‘single source of truth’ platform like Knapsack is that reusable elements or components should theoretically increase speed of work. In reductionist terms, less rework means more velocity.
The way modern product teams are already working is to take advantage of the coded components in the design system. Moving design decisions closer to the finished product experience is the key to alignment between design, engineering and customers.
For instance, take a card component with some content and insert other components within the design system to see how they look together. The code adapts accordingly. This is the team’s engineering actual code, not new code generated by Knapsack, showing the implementation in your own world.
We can apply themes managed through the platform. This goes all the way up to prototyping, allowing teams to engage in a creative process rooted in code very early in the production workflow. Within seconds we’re looking at a fully built page using design system components that didn’t require custom design or wire-framing.
We see the new way of working providing several advantages:
- Reducing design scope creep by providing ready-to-use components
- Design begins with coded components so designers already know what will work in production
- Components, properties, and themes provide creative constraints for design and engineers to explore new ideas
- QA is greatly reduced due to the massive reduction in untested custom code being added to the workflow
Of course, new ways of working demand new behavior and sometime hard conversations about the best use of resources and people. As Greg Petroff, previously CDO at Cisco told me, “Transformational work is cultural work.” Special attention needs to be paid to the handoffs and rework that is the core theme of traditional waterfall or linear workflow.
The Fast-Approaching AI Workflow
In the next generation workflow, a UX designer will be able to create coded UI from the prompt window, using only natural language. A PRD (product requirement document) suddenly becomes a prompt, which quickly becomes a production ready coded design.
This is the vision we’re working towards at Knapsack. Requirements (or prompts) that pull directly from your design system components so you can create prototypes or ready-to-use designs and code in seconds. If enterprises can already save 40%+ in cycle time by prototyping in Knapsack, can you imagine how these AI amplifiers will further reduce cycle times?
In A Nutshell
Knapsack is infrastructure for product organizations, helping them connect design and code so cross-functional teams can operate efficiently at scale. We build comparison tools to understand whether our expectations align with how it looks in code (e.g. React), how it looks in your design tool (e.g. Figma), and via a data dashboard, how these specs align or do not.
Ultimately, Knapsack is a product production evolution that delivers on a decades old promise. We can move through fewer cycles faster as we try to ship features, but we can move faster if we make the building blocks reusable and visible. This approach helps everyone understand what they have, makes it easier to reuse at scale, and shifts production to be more about composing with what you have rather than designing and then translating. That’s the power of the modern product production cycle and the promise of Knapsack.
If you want to be a part of this forward looking group of design systems leaders, register to attend one of Knapsack’s upcoming Design System Leadership Summits. Find the information you need on locations, dates, and how to apply here. If you can’t make it to the in-person leadership events, then join us for our webinars.
