Case study: How a design agency cut handoff time from 3 weeks to 3 days
Praxis Studio replaced their Figma-to-engineer handoff with Vibely's design mode. Here is how they restructured the team, the wins, and the surprising new role they had to hire.
Praxis Studio is a 14-person design agency in Lisbon that ships marketing sites and product UIs for early-stage startups. For years, their bottleneck was the handoff: a beautiful Figma file would land in front of a contracted engineer and emerge two to three weeks later as code that was somewhere between 70 and 95% faithful to the design.
The decision
In Q1 of 2026, Praxis ran an internal experiment: build the same five client projects two ways — traditional handoff, and Vibely design mode driven by their own designers — and compare.
The numbers
- Average handoff-to-staging time: 21 days → 3 days
- Pixel-fidelity score (internal QA rubric): 86% → 96%
- Designer time on review/QA: 9 hours/project → 2 hours/project
- Engineering spend: €11k/project → €1.6k/project (mostly final-mile review)
What changed in the team
Praxis did not fire engineers. They restructured. The two engineers on staff moved from "build the design" to "audit the build, harden it, ship it." The agency hired one new role: a design engineer — a senior designer comfortable steering Vibely's design mode and reading diffs.
"We thought we were buying a tool. We ended up buying a different operating model," said partner Inês Costa.
What worked
Tokens-first conversion
Praxis already maintained a strict token system in Figma (color, type, spacing, radii). Vibely's design mode picked these up cleanly, which is why pixel fidelity jumped instead of regressing.
One screen per turn
"Convert the whole flow" produced inconsistencies. "Convert this onboarding screen, then this dashboard screen" produced clean, reviewable diffs.
Designers reading code
Half the designers learned to read Tailwind well enough to spot issues. The other half stayed in the preview pane, comparing pixels. Both worked.
What did not work
Animations and complex interactions still required engineering attention. The team learned not to expect Vibely to read motion intent from a static Figma — they wrote those as separate prompts after the layout shipped.
The new shape of the agency
Praxis took on 30% more clients in Q1 2026 than Q4 2025, with the same headcount. Net margin per project went up 18 points. They are hiring two more design engineers in Q3.
What other agencies should learn from this
- Get your tokens right first. Without a real token system, any design-to-code tool will produce a mess.
- Promote a senior designer into a design-engineer role. Do not try to convert engineers into designers.
- Keep your engineers — change what they do. Final-mile audit and hardening is more valuable than first-pass build.
- Sell faster delivery, not lower price. Praxis kept its rate card and shipped 7x faster. Margins followed.
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