How do you ensure that the dev team understands the design?

I just read this  article, “How do you ensure that the dev team understands the design?”, on Medium from Frank Rapacciuolo.  Great reading.

This posting really bring to life the constant struggle we have as designers, where we’re force to calculate the constrains of any architecture or platform we might be designing for. Furthermore, we as designers must have a very solid understanding of technology, trends, new CSS framework, and the list goes on.

While, I don’t necessary agree with the statement Frank makes and I quote “don’t be too visionary with your designs, to not piss off developers”, I do agree with this principal that we must work developers as a team. This of course is challenging, if you work on an organization that is water-fall, where all the ideation and discovery happens first, then you pass all the designs, specs, documentation to a product manager, who will then find a developer to work on the product.  I think it’s imperative to bring developers early on in the design process and work as team to solve whatever it is we’re solving. Jeff Gothelf talks a lot about this on his book, LEAN UX, where he encourages organizations to work on an agile environment where designers, product mangers and developers are working together from ideation to execution.

For one thing. We, designers are not developers, it’s great to know and understand any technical constrain of the infrastructure we’re working on, the code, etc. But we not must constrain the user needs, base on limitations that can be solved, if we all work as a team. In the other hands, developers are not designers, but we both (designers and developers) will benefit from working together in the early stages. Together, we might find a better way to solve a problem, that we might not have seen on our own.

In regards to building rapid prototypes, I’ve been using invision, which is great, specially because it’s easy for stake holders and co-workers to comment on the work and it easy integration with tools like slack and dropbox. But I will be checking you Principle.