I'm going to shill a little bit, at Kitemaker[0], we use Kitemaker to solve this problem ;). The typical workflow is that someone creates a work item to track

I'm going to shill a little bit, at Kitemaker[0], we use Kitemaker to solve this problem ;). The typical workflow is that someone creates a work item to track some improvement or new feature. There, the idea is explored before any design or code work is done so that everyone involved understands what the goal is. Then our designer will go and create some mockups and in figma (and link the figma in the work item). We'll then have discussions about the design, one nice thing is that the figma comments appear in the activity panel of the work item in kitemaker. So even if designer asks a question in figma, the rest of the team can see that in kitemaker (since programmers rarely live inside figma). Once we've addressed as much as we can at the pure design stage, we'll start implementing the feature in code in a branch (that's linked to the work item). If anything comes up in development that we didn't foresee, we'll discuss it in kitemaker/figma/slack (if it's slack, we make sure to mention the work item so that it's picked up by the integration and shows up in the kitemaker activity feed). As soon as something is even remotely "working", we create a w.i.p PR which spins up a test environment in Cohesive[1] (no affiliation, just a customer) and link to it in the work item. This lets the designer play around with the feature as it's developed and start giving feedback or adjusting the designs as early as possible. The key is really just communication as early as possible and throughout the entire process. To make this more tool agnostic: 1) Make sure everyone understands what problem they are trying to solve for the user. 2) Get designers to share the designs as early as possible so that engineers (and others) can provide feedback. 3) Have a way for engineers to share the w.i.p in a test environment as early as possible so that designers can adjust designs or give feedback to developers. 4) Have a way to keep references to all the discussions in one place and visible to the entire team. [0] https://kitemaker.co/ https://kitemaker.co/ [1] https://www.cohesive.so/ https://www.cohesive.so/