Sprint 2: The Frontend Dev Demo’ed & The Designer Unmuted His Mic… Fight?
June 6, 2025
Sprint 4: We tried our own dog food. No one died.
June 30, 2025
In product development, you play Need for Speed. But unlike the game, you’re not racing cars. Your opponent is the timeline. And in this race, speed is everything.
This sprint, our cheat codes were Vibe Designing and Co-location.
With the rise of AI tools, communication and collaboration have never been faster or easier. Our designer leaned into a vibe designing approach for this sprint, and I loved it.
Vibe designing, like vibe coding, is a trendy workflow where designers use AI tools via prompts to generate design ideas, then fine-tune them to meet the exact specs. Instead of describing a vague idea from his head, the designer showed us UIs generated by AI to communicate functionality. That helped us visualize his thinking clearly without them having to hard-design everything from scratch. It saved time, sparked conversation, and moved the project forward faster. That’s a win in my book.
I realized speed is not just about tools. Sometimes it is about proximity.
Co-location Helps.
Sitting across the table from my devs is cutting it for me. Why? It helps me witness what’s being built and how and the time and efforts that go into it. I get first hand exposure to the challenges they face and a better sense of how to support or unblock them. Issues that could have taken days to reach me, I see in real time.
We get to talk about the product more, and that often brings clarity or reveals something we missed. A typical moment is when the engineers requested an additional functionality. To me, it felt like tampering with the user experience. But because we were face-to-face, we debated it openly. They explained the technical reasoning behind it, and we found common ground. That clarity would’ve taken way longer over discord or calls.
The human side of co-location.
It’s 7:54 PM. We had just wrapped up a virtual review. The stakeholder asked an engineer for thoughts on what was presented. Silence. Mic muted. We thought he was speaking on mute, so we waited… still nothing.
I checked on him. Turns out he had drifted off, laptop open, earphones still in. He had fallen asleep. 😂
Did I just snitch? Maybe. But nobody’s doing time or getting fired. It’s not that deep. I promised to bring you raw behind-the-scenes, so that is it.
The point is, moments like these show how vibe designing and co-location, hybrid or not, can help product teams move with speed.
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