Closing the Designer-Implementation Gap: A Framework for Building Design Competency in the Age of AI

Most design teams I've worked with have the same problem, and almost none of them talk about it directly. Their designers produce polished screens in Figma. Their engineers build working products. And between those two steps, something breaks. I call this the Designer-Implementation Gap. It's the distance between what a designer intends and what actually ships. Every designer knows the feeling: opening a staging link and realising the thing you designed doesn't quite work the way you imagined. Spacing is off. States you never accounted for are showing up.