Blurring the Lines: How Designers and Engineers Build Together with AI

Kevin Wong’s path into design was roundabout. He interviewed for a design role at Artifact, a Seattle studio in the mold of Frog or IDEO, and was offered a research role instead, which gave him early exposure to many kinds of design problems and customers. He moved to San Francisco to get closer to users and building software, worked at a few startups, then at Airbnb and Meta, and joined Webflow, where he has spent four and a half years. He started by leading design for the core products, the Designer and the CMS, and now leads product design, brand design and research across the whole customer journey, from buying to using the software.

Webflow began as a tool for building websites and has grown with the marketing teams that use their sites to build awareness, drive leads and convert visitors. Its newest release, Campaigns, uses AI to help marketers quickly generate on-brand landing pages and ads, drawing on their own design system and standards like DESIGN.md, so people who aren’t engineers get the same power. Kevin’s view is that AI has raised both the floor and the creative ceiling, but teams need more than a first draft. They need workflows for collaborating, contributing to a shared system, and getting access that fits their role. Inside his own team, with roles blurring, the first step was a shared idea of quality. They made their design system machine-readable, so anyone building pulls from the same components and patterns and gets 80 to 90 percent of the way there. PMs and engineers increasingly bring prototypes to designers early, giving everyone a shared material to shape together. The harder problem is volume: so much more work gets made that tracking what’s happening, and cutting the noise, is still unsolved.

He’s clear that research matters as much as ever. His team built a library of AI skills mapped to the research life cycle, from setting goals and recruiting participants to avoiding bias, synthesizing and reporting, and connected it to Marvin, their insights repository, so PMs and designers can run evaluative research themselves. But the mechanics matter less than the culture: when things are easy to create, the real question is what’s worth creating, and that takes deep empathy for what users actually worry about. His advice for new designers: a moment of intense change is a chance to reinvent yourself, and beginners have an advantage. Use the growing set of free design resources to build your design grammar, pick a product you know and redesign it to get your reps in, and build a portfolio that shows the thinking behind the work, not just the polish.