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Build an AI Native
Design Team

How 25 designers learned to ship code, merged 200+ PRs, and redefined what it means to own your product.

Tracy Dai · Sr Product Designer, LinkedIn

Tracy Dai

Front-end bugs get deprioritized

Resource constraints mean copy errors, spacing issues, and alignment bugs pile up untouched. The product degrades slowly — and nobody owns the fix.

Every designer owns their product area

The Goal

25
Designers onboarded
5
PRs merged each

What stood in the way

5 Specialized Agents

👋
Welcome
Setup the environment
🔍
Investigator
Understand issue, build plan
🛠
Builder
Execute code changes
Reviewer
Check guidelines & best practices
🚀
PR Agent
Write & submit draft PR

Built by our principal designer · Backed by a design system the agents can reference

From pilot to full rollout

Pilot Program

A few designers stress-tested onboarding docs and identified improvement areas

Brown Bag Sessions

Two sessions to walk everyone through pre-work and training materials

Backlog Preparation

Every designer prepared bugs from their own product area on one Jira board

3-Day Builder Sprint

Dedicated heads-down time to fix bugs and test the new workflow together

The results spoke for themselves

200+
PRs submitted in 3 days
100%
Designers repeated workflow

Every designer was able to repeat the workflow and merge at least 5 PRs on their own.

Creating the right environment

Get the foundations right

Bring Partners

Cross-functional collaboration is essential — especially with engineering. They're your safety net and knowledge base.

Cover the Basics

  • GitHub basics (repo, branch, PR, merge)
  • IDE fundamentals
  • Front-end code essentials

Unrealistic prototypes lead to unreliable feedback

Static Figma prototypes can't cover every use case. Messy spaghetti flows confuse users. We needed something better.

Prototype with Cursor

🎨
Sketch in Figma
Base screens only
🔌
Figma MCP
Bridge to Cursor
Build & Refine
Iterate in Cursor

Embrace the builder mindset

Designers' roles are changing. Be the owner of your product area — from pixels to production.

Tools will always evolve — Sketch to Figma to Cursor to whatever comes next. But your core value remains.

The designer's superpowers

Human Context

The ability to understand messy human context and bring a user lens to any business problem in your org.

Critical Thinking

When code delivery becomes free, spend more time on research. Translate between business goals and user needs. Think beyond the next release.

Q&A

Tracy Dai · LinkedIn