Hot Potato process

"That´s not technically posible" or the problem with traditional handoffs

A linear approach creates a gap between design and development, because they are treated as separate phases.

Traditional approach:

Designer creates concepts → Designer finalizes everything → Designer hands off to developer → Developer discovers problems → Everyone scrambles to fix things

In his book Design that scales, Dan Mall show us there is no hand off, and the entire process is driven by contiuous collaboration from day one.

How the Hot Potato process works

Like passing a hot potato, designer and developer collaborate continuously, passing ideas back and forth until it’s done.

The key insight? Both roles become problem-solvers working toward the same goal, rather than specialists working in isolation.

Where the Hot Potato Process Earns Its Keep

Dan Mall shaped this way of working alongside Brad Frost on design systems, an environment where handoffs are frequent and the cost of misalignment compounds fast. Passing work back and forth between design and development in small, rapid tosses turns out to help well beyond that original context:

Design system components. A button or modal built once gets consumed by dozens of teams. Both disciplines need a hand on it from the first sketch, or you ship a component that looks right in Figma and fights the codebase everywhere it lands.

Complex iterations. Motion, state transitions, and gesture behavior don't survive a static mockup. Tossing an early build back to design lets everyone feel the thing, which is the only reliable way to avoid the "but this seemed simple in the prototype" conversation.

Compressed timelines. Rework is the expensive part, not the initial build. Moving collaboration to the front of the process surfaces the hard problems while they're still cheap to solve, instead of a week before launch.

Cross-platform projects. Shipping web and native together means platform constraints are design inputs, not implementation details. Discovering them mid-sprint forces compromises. Discovering them in the first toss shapes better decisions from the start.