For most of her career, Signe Hjortshøj Thomsen's job ended at the handoff. Today, Spaak's Design Lead fixes the details herself, in the codebase, and submits them as pull requests.

Signe joined Spaak in May 2025 as the company's first designer. She leads the design of the platform that public affairs teams around the world use every day. The job also changed what being a designer means to her.

The handoff years

Signe's route into design ran through IT from the start: She studied Digital Design and Interactive Technologies at ITU in Copenhagen. Like most product designers, her working life settled into a familiar shape. Running user research, building flows in Figma, testing the concept, polishing, annotating, walking the engineers through it, and then waiting.

"Weeks later a version of my design would appear in the product," she says. "Usually a good version. Never quite the one I drew."

Spacing drifted. Empty states were skipped. The small interactions that made a design feel considered were the first things cut when a sprint got tight. She understood why. The gap between the first working version in code and a finished one is real work, and it rarely made it onto a sprint – not because anyone disagreed with it, but because the list of genuinely important tasks never got shorter. They were her priorities, not the team's, and she had no way to build them herself.

One line of code

That changed at Spaak, and it started small. Using AI coding tools alongside Figma, Signe fixed the padding issue she had been nagging engineers about. One line of code, meaning that instead of asking an engineer to fix it, she asked one to review it.

That step is becoming common. Half the designers surveyed in the AI in Design Report 2026 report said they have shipped AI-generated code to production, and only a fifth of those identify as design engineers.

Today the loop is routine for that size of change. Figma moved closer to the product too, since the AI she designs with there is connected to the Spaak codebase and builds from the components that are actually shipped. An engineer reviews it like any other PR. She has one rule she won't break. "I refuse to submit anything I don't understand. That's what keeps the engineers trusting my PRs."

Designing with real data and in real interactions

Speed is the obvious win. The change Signe keeps coming back to is that seeing her designs in the running product made her a sharper judge of them.

A Figma file is built around a handful of examples. You design something that covers them well, and the mockup looks finished – but covering your examples isn't the same as covering everything at scale.

"When I was building the Legislation feature, handling files from across the EU bodies, I picked a few examples to design against, and they happened to have fairly short titles," she says. "In production I could see that file names can be extremely long. So we needed a way to handle that which didn't break the experience and didn't solve it by hiding information that actually matters."

Other design teams are reaching the same conclusion as Signe. The report from Designer Fund found prototypes becoming a more central design output, and on some teams replacing mockups altogether. 

The same pattern held across the platform. The Assistant needed streaming states, citation popovers, and an answer to what the screen shows while the model is thinking. Living inside a working product provides a level of insight that mockups simply cannot mirror. You experience the tangible rhythm of the interface: the slight delay as a panel unfolds, the intrusive snap of a hover state, or the way your focus shifts once a modal vanishes. A static frame hides the friction of a rapid scroll.

"Those nuances only reveal themselves when you actually have your hands on the tool" she says. "AI gives me unlimited iterations at that loop. It never gets impatient when I change my mind for the tenth time to get it right."

A different kind of designer

Figma is still where Signe does her thinking. Layout, hierarchy, and typography move faster there, and she says she would be a worse designer without it. But Figma is where the design starts now, and the product is where it gets finished by her or the engineers.

She is upfront about the trade. She has given up the comfortable distance of the handoff, and the excuse that came with it. "If an empty state is missing, that's on me now. What I've gained is that I can act on a judgment at 4pm and see it in the product the next morning." The bar for that judgment is not dropping. Among the design leaders in the same report, only 5% said they are placing less emphasis on execution quality, while half said they now weigh AI fluency when hiring.

Spaak builds the AI platform for public affairs, helping teams across the world monitor legislation, analyse impact, and draft briefings, so the interfaces Signe ships land in front of professionals whose reading load runs to hundreds of documents a week.

What comes next

Her advice to designers wondering whether to try the same shift is small on purpose: "Start with the padding issue that annoys you most. Fix that one thing and go from there."