500+ PRs merged by designers!

Saurabh Soni, head of design at the Indian payments company Razorpay, reports that its product designers have merged more than 500 pull requests and now own the interface in production.

Saurabh Soni is head of design at Razorpay, an Indian company that handles online payments for businesses. Six months before his post on X, the company decided to stop handing designs over to engineers. Its product designers have merged more than 500 pull requests, about 70% of them core product and feature work.

• Engineers now build the systems that let others ship, including in-house tools for AI-assisted coding, automated pull request review and automated deployment.
• Razorpay created two roles: Design Builders, who own the production interface in code, and Design AI Engineers, who build the systems that let designers ship.
• Soni says designers did not have to learn to code; they learnt the foundations of engineering in learning sessions and on the job.
• Some of the designers come from engineering backgrounds and many do not, according to Soni.

This is a short post by the company's head of design and gives no detail on how designers' changes are reviewed. Naming who answers for bugs and quality before designers start merging code is an inference and is not the author's claim.

Derived by Working Surface from the article; more in the Playbook. Source line: Product designers don't just own mocks, they own the actual experience in production, designing, building and maintaining it.

17 October 2026: AI output that looks finished at first glance still needs a named person who checks it against something real, and teams now plan their work around that check.