We haven't had a UI/UX designer at Emoneeds for over a year now. But we just shipped some of our best designed products.

When I moved back and started building out our tech roadmap, I knew I wanted to hire a designer eventually. But the bar was high.

As someone who has worked deeply with designers and have a masters in design myself. I didn't just want someone who makes things look pretty.

I wanted someone who thinks in service design, experience design, someone who can shape how therapy feels before a single session begins.

So until we found that person, we still had products to ship - we had to figure it out.

I thought why not give AI tools a try. I tried Lovable. Tried Replit. Both solid tools, but not quite right for what we needed. They're great for building, not for designing. There's a difference.

Then I found Magic Patterns through Lenny's Product Pass, and something clicked.

For those who haven't heard of it: Magic Patterns is an AI prototyping tool that lets you go from idea to interactive design in minutes. You describe what you want, it generates a working UI. But what makes it different from the code-first AI tools is that it thinks like a designer. The output actually looks and feels like something you'd want to ship.

As a PM, I've spent countless hours sitting with designers. Sketching on paper, building flows in PPT, Miro, Figma. Magic Patterns gave me that same feeling of co-creation, except now I could do it with my engineering team directly.

And here's what I didn't expect.

The team started using it on their own. Engineers bringing design ideas to standups. Product discussions happening on top of actual prototypes instead of abstract descriptions. People optimizing their prompts to get better outputs. It became a silent part of our team.

The word I keep coming back to is empowered. It empowered our team to visualize our ideas and drive discussions forward.

We've also started showing working prototypes to partners, clients, and internal stakeholders before writing a single line of production code. That alone has saved us weeks of back and forth.

Do we still want to hire a real designer? Absolutely. We are on the lookout for someone who can orchestrate all of this, elevate our design language, and think about problems we haven't even identified yet.

But until that person joins us, Magic Patterns will do 😌