Designers as Final Checkpoint
Maintaining authority through validation
I’ve come to think of design review as validation work, not approval work.
There’s a critical moment in every product cycle when something moves from concept to implementation. That moment is where design either maintains authority — or loses it.
When designers act as the final checkpoint before release, they’re not nitpicking pixels. They’re checking whether the implemented experience still matches the intended one — whether flows that worked in a prototype still work in code, whether edge cases that were designed for actually got built.
Design approval is confirmation that the experience works as designed — not that it looks right.