Ch. 5 How Teams Can Get to Market 4x Faster with Automated Design-to- Development Transforming brilliant ideas and sketches into fully functional products can cause a lot of trouble, confusion, and hurdles down the road, especially when working on digital products that require both design and development. Converting design files to code is an early phase in the development lifecycle, and difficulties at this stage can make it hard for teams to get their products and features to market on time. The point at which a designer has finalized (not finished–more on this distinction below) an app’s UI design and is ready to hand it over to developers for further engineering and implementation is known as the “design-to-development handoff.” This concept can be illustrated as follows: This handoff is crucial because there is no such thing as a “finished” design. There is always more to add before the final release, with ongoing iterations based on requirements from stakeholders and clients. To avoid wasting time while exchanging specs between your design and development teams, it is vital to get all of your product teams on the same page. 32