Empowering designers to code
In a recent conversation with Stripe co-founder John Collison, Intercom’s Des Traynor opened up about how the company is rethinking the way it builds products. At the heart of that shift is an initiative called 2X, aimed at doubling R&D productivity.
“It’s about how we actually do R&D. The measurement we use is deployments to production involving code that has to execute regularly. It’s a hard thing to fake.”
Designers become builders
What’s driving those gains isn’t just engineers working harder, it’s a cultural change that now sees Intercom’s design team writing and shipping code. Des credited Emmet, the company’s head of design, for pushing this forward.
“Every designer by August 1, 2025 needs to be shipping code. This is the end of the discussion of should designers code. Designers should code.”
That move has already paid off. Designers now handle UI details that previously became engineering tickets, such as fixing buttons, adjusting spacing, or updating colors. The change has gone beyond small fixes, designers are also taking on complete UI redesigns and reworking entire flows without needing to hand everything over to engineering.
Engineers stay in the zone
For engineers, that shift means fewer distractions and more time to focus on bigger projects. Des described how staying “in the zone” has helped teams work faster and more effectively. “What we’re seeing is lots of little 1.2x wins,” he explained. “But then every so often you hit a 50x productivity boost.”
One example of the new approach was Intercom’s Slack integration. The team built a strong version for Slack first, documented all their principles, and then used that foundation to expand quickly into Microsoft Teams, Discord, and WhatsApp. Slack launched to production first, while the other platforms are already in public beta.
Most of the progress so far has been in product and engineering, but Intercom is also experimenting with faster ways to market. The company has trained a system on its marketing copy and visuals, which now generates assets like event invites and campaign materials.
For him, it all points to a bigger change in how Intercom approaches building.
“The product is being built in a new way. It’s not just design, or engineering, or marketing working in isolation, it’s all coming together to move faster.”
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