Why We Pair Designers With Engineers From Day One

On most teams, a designer finishes a set of screens, hands them to engineering, and moves on to the next project. By the time the engineer hits a constraint the design never accounted for, the designer is three projects removed from the context.

We stopped doing that. Every engagement at Anders & Voss pairs one designer and one engineer for the full length of the project, not just the kickoff.

What actually changes

Constraints surface in the room, not after the handoff. A layout that can't ship without a slow query gets caught in the same conversation it was proposed in - not three weeks later in a bug report.