Figma is designed to work for various workflows and teams. While some engineers are comfortable going into design files and interacting with the full Figma UI, others fear they are going to mess something up. Sometimes designers want to make sure their files are not changed. For these reasons, we wanted to make sure our view only mode worked for engineers. Our existing view only mode did not have any way to get information out of the file, which is what prompted the creation of our dev handoff features.
I don't think we are going back to "waterfall" development and the term "developer handoff" is not meant to imply a way of working. I agree with your assessment that the industry is moving away from siloed work patterns and towards more collaborative, inclusive cylces.
So in conclusion: agree with your assumptions. This is the next step for the Figma product because it solves a real problem that a lot of users have and I don't think the feature is in conflict with your assumptions.
Hey Mitch, thanks for the thoughtful question.
Figma is designed to work for various workflows and teams. While some engineers are comfortable going into design files and interacting with the full Figma UI, others fear they are going to mess something up. Sometimes designers want to make sure their files are not changed. For these reasons, we wanted to make sure our view only mode worked for engineers. Our existing view only mode did not have any way to get information out of the file, which is what prompted the creation of our dev handoff features.
I don't think we are going back to "waterfall" development and the term "developer handoff" is not meant to imply a way of working. I agree with your assessment that the industry is moving away from siloed work patterns and towards more collaborative, inclusive cylces.
So in conclusion: agree with your assumptions. This is the next step for the Figma product because it solves a real problem that a lot of users have and I don't think the feature is in conflict with your assumptions.