How We Got Engineering to Care About Design

I used to think the gap between design and engineering was mostly about process. Tools, timelines, handoff hygiene. And sure, those things matter. But this project taught me the real gap is cultural. And closing it takes more than checklists.

We were working on a fairly complex internal dashboard for account managers. Lots of logic, multiple edge cases, and a UI that touched four or five backend systems. The kind of tool where small design decisions had serious technical implications.

In the early phases, we ran the standard playbook. Design explored flows, presented them in reviews, then handed off specs. It was all “by the book,” but it felt flat. The engineers implemented things accurately, but without much collaboration. There was no energy behind it. No sense that we were solving something together.

At one point, an engineer rebuilt a component that already existed in our design system. When I asked why, he said, “I didn’t know that was part of the system. I thought you were experimenting.”

That was the moment it clicked. This wasn’t a tooling issue. It was a trust issue. We were working in parallel, not as a team.

So I changed how I showed up.

I started joining their standups and contributing directly instead of just listening. I moved our specs into the same repo where engineers tracked implementation notes. I used Loom to explain interaction details instead of relying on dense Figma comments. And I asked questions like, “How would you approach this?” instead of “Can you build this as designed?”

Most importantly, I started including engineering feedback early - before anything was finalized. Not because I needed sign-off, but because I wanted their perspective. That changed everything.

They started offering UX suggestions, pointing out ways to improve flow logic, and even helped us generalize components to solve broader design problems. It didn’t feel like extra effort on their part. It felt like pride in the product.

What I learned is simple: if you treat engineering like a delivery channel, you’ll get handoff. If you treat them like collaborators, you’ll get product thinking.

Engineers already care about design. They just need to know that you care about them too.