🤿 driveway docs

This week's episode is with Andy Zhang who was the lead design engineer at Windsurf (and is a part of the group heading to Google to work on DeepMind).

So we're going to shine a light on all of the ways you can make an impact as a design engineer at a hyper growth startup including:

• Owning more of the frontend polish

• Thinking through design patterns and packaging features

• Saying “no” to features to preserve the simplicity of the system

He also shares some great stories and advice including:

• What it was like working as an intern at Figma with <10 people

• How designers can start to get more comfortable with code

• How he taps into his experience as a PM at Uber while selecting the right design process

• + a lot more

Listen on Youtube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

🤝 WITH RAYCAST

Raycast is my portal to AI.

It's a quick keyboard shortcut away, which means it's always at my fingertips.

I can add attachments, build presets to streamline certain workflows, and they even support over 30 models from OpenAI to Claude to Perplexity.

So your chats aren't bound to a single model, and the best part is you can try their AI in all of their extensions for free.

No subscription, no account needed. Raycast has pretty quickly become the cornerstone of how I use my computer.

So if you haven't tried it yet, do yourself a favor and click the link to enter your own portal to AI 👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

Let’s try this again lol

Somehow I broke the Figma file link for Mike Smith’s “Usable Google Fonts” on Wednesday so I’m sharing it again.

A few months ago I asked for his opinion on the Inflight brand and he shared a Figma file that’s pretty incredible.

And now it’s available for anybody to use (for real this time) 👇

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS

Choose your design process wisely

My biggest takeaway from this week’s episode is this: there are now more ways to attack the “design process” than ever before.

Gone are the days of predictable starting points and steadily increasing fidelity.

A few years ago my design process started the same way almost every time…

Spatial writing like this quickly became my favorite way to think.

But now when I’m faced with a meaty problem I often start by going for a walk with Voice Mode in ChatGPT. I dump context, have it ask clarifying questions, and by the time I’m back down my driveway it’s already writing a document I can send to the team to explain my thinking or pitch an idea 🤯

Or sometimes the output is turning that conversation into a PRD to try to one-shot a proof of concept in Lovable or Cursor.

Or sometimes it’s giving AI a generic prototype prompt just to see where it takes it.

Yesterday I did exactly that for a success state in Inflight.

The prompt had plenty of wiggle room, and the result was totally different than what I imagined but… it sparked an idea that unlocked the flow 💡

And yes, the UI was hilariously jank (the only polished bit was a screenshot behind a panel that I used as a starting point).

But who cares 🤷‍♂️

I’m not trying to create a pixel perfect prototype at this step. I’m just trying to navigate ambiguity early in the design process.

For every project, give yourself a blank slate for how the design process could work.

Get creative! Try something you haven’t experimented with before!

Everyone’s making it up as they go right now, and that’s the best way to gain footing in this new world.

That’s why I loved hearing Andy’s perspective because he approaches design with an engineering mindset and the background of a PM at Uber 👇

Meet the Dive partners 

I made a list of my favorite products and asked them to come on as sponsors of the newsletter/podcast. They said yes 🥹

The #1 way to support Dive Club is to check them out👇

Framer​ → How I build my websites

Genway → How I do research

Granola → How I take notes during CRIT

Jitter​ → How I animate my designs

Lovable → How I build my ideas in code

Mobbin → How I find design inspiration

Paper → How I design like a creative

Raycast ​ → How I stay in flow while I work

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