Routing that fits a shift
A placeholder study, written to the length a real one would run, so the section dock below has something honest to track.
Discovery
Every project starts the same way: a week of asking the questions nobody has had time to ask. Who is this actually for, what do they do the other twenty-three hours of the day, and which of the problems on the list is the one that pays for the rest.
The output is not a document. It is a shortlist of decisions the team can now make quickly, and a shared sense of which ones are not worth arguing about.
Strategy
With the ground mapped, the work becomes about sequencing. What ships first, what it has to prove, and what we are willing to leave rough so the first version can be in front of someone real inside a quarter.
This is also where the shape of the thing gets named — the two or three ideas the whole product hangs off, written plainly enough that an engineer and a salesperson describe it the same way.
Design
Type scale, grey ramp, spacing, the handful of components that carry ninety per cent of the screens. The system comes before the screens because the screens are cheaper to redraw than to reconcile.
Then the hard surfaces: the dense table, the empty state, the error nobody wanted to design. Those are where a design system either holds or quietly stops being used.
Development
Tokens move out of Figma and into the codebase as the single source they were always meant to be. Design review happens in the browser, at real widths, with real data — a mockup cannot tell you that the third column wraps.
Motion goes in last and gets its own pass. It is the part most likely to be added because it can be, and most likely to be the reason something feels slow.
Launch
A launch is a handover as much as a release: the system documented where the people using it will actually look, and the decisions recorded next to the code they constrain.
Then the part that matters most and gets planned least — watching it in use for a few weeks and fixing the three things that were obvious the moment somebody else touched it.