Design systems
Design tokens that survive a year of product growth
Why we ship semantic-over-primitive tokens, the rules we don't break, and how Code Connect closes the design ↔ code loop.
Field notes
What we're learning, shipping in public.
Process posts, design-system breakdowns and short notes on running a senior product studio. New essays every other week.
Latest
Latest posts
Process
Shipping a real SaaS MVP in 30 days — the actual receipts
What a senior-only, AI-assisted product team can do in a month. Daily timeline, scope cuts, the hand-off rituals, and the mistakes we made on day 18.
Khalil Ben Yaala · Design lead
May 24, 2026
8 min read
Business
Why we built a pause-anytime subscription (instead of retainers)
What we learned testing flat-monthly pricing against retainers and project bids — and the surprising metric that flipped our model.
Process
Slack is the new project management — if you set it up right
The exact channel structure, rituals and bot setup we use to run 6 client projects in parallel without ever sending a status email.
Design
Stop designing in screens. Start designing in tokens.
The pixel-perfect Figma stage is a trap. Here's how senior teams ship faster by skipping straight to the token + component layer.
AI
AI workflows that actually save senior time (and the ones that don't)
The 4 AI loops we use daily, the 2 we threw out, and what to watch for when an LLM becomes your fastest junior engineer.
Scoping
The 1-hour brief that lets us scope a SaaS without a discovery sprint
9 questions, 60 minutes, a Loom video. Why discovery sprints are usually a tax on the client and what to do instead.