I sometimes get suspicious when a product keeps getting prettier but the actual workflow still feels wobbly. It starts to read less like craft and more like the team is buying time while they figure out what the thing is supposed to be.
Has anyone else seen that, or am I just being unfair to the design team?
Prettier UI + wobbly workflow is a real smell, yeah. I’ve seen teams get a super clean “skin” (design system, components) locked in early because it’s shippable, while the actual product decisions are still changing every week.
It’s not automatically the design team stalling though—sometimes they’re the only ones making progress while PM/eng are still arguing about what the workflow even is.