Hand off the API: a design & build workflow for components, with Jeff Pelletier

Wow, we made it to ten episodes! 🎉 

🎧 listen to Episode #10 with Jeff Pelletier on design system feature workflows and API handoff

Read on for a peek into the episode.

Design systems aren’t just about components—they’re about how teams work together to build better UI. Jeff Pelletier, a frontend engineer with a design background, joins the show to talk about feature workflows for design systems, how design and engineering can work in parallel, and why documentation should be part of the process, not an afterthought. Jeff and Elyse dive into how to create API-first component specs, the challenge of design-code parity, and the ~drama~ of having a formal process.

🎧 Hand off the API: a design & build workflow for components, with Jeff Pelletier — #10 (50min)

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Elyse:

So take us through the steps.

Jeff:

Sure. So the five most common are Discovery, Design, Build, Documentation, and then, some type of Publish or Release step. I've seen plenty of variations or permutations on that, but those are the five main categories.

I think one of the important things to highlight is that the steps don't necessarily have to start sequentially, like waterfall. You could start thinking about design, or even build, like how to even just set up the scaffolding for this thing, before even the discovery is done.But generally they will finish in sequence.

Elyse:

Yeah, and I think that's a really important note, because when you write out any kind of process and you formalize any kind of process, you're like, okay, first we do discovery, then we do design, then we build.

In reality, we've been talking about this in-between space between design and engineering, and especially for design system teams, whose whole mandate is to be between design and engineering, you cannot separate those steps in such a formal waterfall, one goes in front of the other way.

It's hard to write that down as like, “and then you do these two steps simultaneously,” but I think that part is particularly important to call out.

Jeff:

Dan Mall talks about it as the hot potato process where the designer and the engineer are just kind of passing things back and forth very rapidly.

I’ve found that it is incredibly valuable to have engineers in the room as early as discovery, because if you're going through that process and evaluating things, really, the end goal of discovery is scoping the feature.

So what is this thing? What is in, what is out? And engineers can be really helpful as part of that conversation, and part of that decision making, because there are things that, perhaps, won't work.

If you're scoping what is actually in from a feature perspective, that is part of that conversation.

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See you next episode!,

Elyse