---
title: "Design Engineering is the New Product Design · HackerNoon · Jinson Johny"
description: "Summary of Jinson Johny's HackerNoon article arguing that design engineering is becoming central again as AI lowers the cost of building, and how his enterprise team moved designers into Storybook."
url: https://jinson.me/writing/design-engineering-new-product-design
markdown: https://jinson.me/writing/design-engineering-new-product-design.md
type: Article
author: Jinson Johny (https://jinson.me/#person)
updated: 2026-11-01
---

[Published in **HackerNoon** · Jun 4, 2026](https://hackernoon.com/design-engineering-is-the-new-product-design)

# Design Engineering is the New Product Design

By [Jinson Johny](https://jinson.me/about.md) · on HackerNoon

## In short

Jinson Johny argues that design engineering, the role between design and implementation, is becoming central again now that AI makes building cheap. Drawing on his own enterprise team, he describes moving from design handoffs to designers working inside Storybook as the source of truth, with small reusable AI skills automating steps such as mapping Figma tokens to code.

## Key takeaways

1. **Not a designer who codes** design engineering is a position between design and engineering that shortens the path from a design decision to shipped product.
2. **Generate-and-ship didn't hold up** in a large organisation with governance and accessibility needs, what worked was bringing designers into development, with Storybook as the source of truth.
3. **Skills, written once** small markdown instruction sets automate repeated workflow steps, such as Figma-to-Storybook token mapping, for the whole team.
4. **Judgement stays human.** AI produces interfaces quickly, but decisions about users, accessibility and long-term consistency remain the designer's job.

This is a summary. The full article lives on HackerNoon, where it was first published.

[Read the full article on HackerNoon](https://hackernoon.com/design-engineering-is-the-new-product-design)

## Related

[AI is changing how we ideate, design and build user interfaces · HackerNoon ](https://jinson.me/writing/ai-changing-ui-design.md)· [Deck: the plugin from the author bio](https://jinson.me/products/deck.md)

---

**About the author.** Jinson Johny is a Dubai-based Design Engineer and Senior Product Designer for Design Systems and Design Ops at IBM iX. He is the creator of Deck (deck.is), a Figma-to-PowerPoint plugin used by 160,000+ designers since 2017, and .gui (dotgui.org), an open file format for user interfaces. Open to design engineering, design systems, DesignOps, AI design and product design roles in the UK (London) and remote. Contact: hello@jinson.me · [Open to work](https://jinson.me/hire.md) · [All pages](https://jinson.me/llms.txt)