There are only two kinds of substances: high efficiency and low efficiency; There are only two kinds of people: efficient people and inefficient people. – George Bernard shaw

In the process of product development, there are a variety of people involved, but the most important people are the product, design and development. The success of a product depends on how effectively they communicate and work together to maximize quality and efficiency. Efficient work can be done by shortening iteration cycles through parallel work, or effective collaboration through documentation. But either way, we face a real and complex problem — teamwork.

So how do you build effective team synergy between product, design, and developer? One way to achieve this is to learn how to use development tools for products and design. You don’t need to develop an App from start to finish, but at least you can communicate the design intention truthfully and quickly and communicate effectively. Or developers can learn to use design tools to understand product and design-related expertise. In this way, you can imagine the complexity.



Consistency between the design and the front-end interface is the most critical part of the collaboration between the front-end engineer and UI designer. Experienced products, designers, and developers know that inconsistency between design drawings and the implementation of the front end interface can occur. So often written front-end pages need to be modified, round and round. Especially for mobile Web, frequent page changes are not only annoying to the staff involved, but also a very, very waste of time and effort. After summarizing my own experience and sorting out the working process, I found that most of the working process can be divided into two situations.

A situation

(Lazy) UI designer: Only responsible for designing the UI interface, rendering PSD, AI and PSD renderings, no annotation.

Front end development: get the PSD file to measure the spacing inside, to cut the graph, to achieve the front end page.

The result: UI designers give directories directly, and some elements even have a “shape one” name. This leads to increased work for front-end engineers, inefficiency, and delayed product cycles. Each page element in the design draft needs to be manually annotated, but also find the corresponding layer to cut the image, after switching to achieve the front page. Imagine the workload. Also, after the page is implemented, it still doesn’t match the renderings.

Case 2

(diligent) UI designer: responsible for the design of UI interface, PSD renderings, annotation drawings, cutting drawings.

Front-end development: directly look at the effect diagram and annotation diagram, realize the front-end page.


The result: it looks significantly better than before, with less front-end engineering work. However, the problem is that the pixel units of the annotation map are not accurate, the font size is different, there are errors between the page elements, and the final effect of the page is still different from the UI renderings. Work efficiency has not been effectively improved.



Scenario 3

Product Manager: Responsible for making requests to designers or developers. Demand documents are various, Excel, Word, PPT.

The result: Product managers hand out a variety of requirements documents to designers or developers. It takes time and effort to find the document when it is needed. The document is accidentally deleted and the product manager reworks it. The problem of document management is also a pain point in team management. If the work can not be done properly, how can efficient coordination be discussed?

The above three situations will be familiar to all products, designers and developers. How to coordinate workflow with UI design? Can the front end engineer accurately reproduce the dimensions of the design draft? How can product managers manage requirements documents effectively? How to let the relevant people achieve teamwork? The question became a nightmare and I couldn’t sleep or eat. Isn’t there a final solution? !

In addition to learning from each other for designers and developers, another way is to find an efficient collaborative product tool that supports intelligent tagging, one-click cutting, and rapid creation of interactive documents! One item that has this one: ٩(one item < danjun) : p!

Fortunately, the copy guest team solved my troubles, no longer need to eat and sleep! It can be said that the perfect solution to the communication and team collaboration between the product, designers and developers.



During product development, the pain points of each team member are different. So as a simple and quick team collaboration product, what pain points can copycat solve for products, designers and developers?

The designer will tell you it’s delivery.

The product manager tells you it’s communication.

Development engineers will tell you it’s inefficient.

After using it, I found that copy is a life-saving artifact!

1. For designers — Easy delivery of work

  • One-click upload of design draft
  • Support Sketch, PS, XD design manuscript and design drawing
  • Annotation and cut map automatically generated, say no to manual operation
  • Design specifications can be automatically sampled and generated, and classified management, synchronous application and one-click export of design style guide are also available



In case one, the “conflict” between the designer and the developer is resolved. “Lazy” designers are no longer a nuisance, and developers are no longer complaining about manual measurement and cutting. More importantly, the product cycle is no longer delayed, and users do not have to suffer from various “skipping” problems.

2. Clear presentation of requirements to product manager

  • The full view panel shows the process, and a magnifying glass pops up to view the labels of small distances;
  • Page task completion is clear, support page completion status, easy to quickly view and master the global progress
  • A variety of annotation styles, more than 20 kinds of marking ICONS, better expression of ideas and opinions
  • Interactive demo is fast and easy, supporting 9 animation effects
  • Supports multiple prototypes (Axure, Justinmind, Mockplus) and various Office document previews, image file previews, PDF and text file previews. It also supports grouping for easy management.



For product managers, how to express requirements smoothly and without obstacles is also a headache. Each product manager will use a different prototyping or documentation tool depending on their usage habits. Copycat’s friendly support for multiple prototypes and documents solves the problem of collaborative communication between product managers, product managers and designers, as well as developers. One-click online preview is convenient and easy to release.

3. Easy programming and development for front-end engineers

  • Easy to view smart tags. You can also display percentages, select multiple layers at once and smartly label them
  • Automatic access to cut map, can download more than one or all cut map
  • Various platforms adapt to automatic presentation, different equipment units to do automatic conversion, more in line with the actual needs
  • One-click view of repeating elements on a page, such as text, color, margins, widths, and so on
  • The style code is automatically exported, and the color, text size (style, etc.) used in the page is automatically arranged as a design specification, which can be used immediately



Smart tagging, automatic export of style code, for scenario 2, the icing on the cake. Automated and standardized output, very friendly to front-end engineers. Intelligent tagging is to save a lot of time, do not worry about the pixel unit is not accurate, page elements error!

4. For the whole team — effectively collaborate

  • Say goodbye to messy documentation and instructions. From product to design to development, just one document is enough
  • Product manager, designer, front-end development work together
  • Teams and projects can be managed in groups, and different identities and permissions can be set

With the overall team collaboration function, products, designers, developers into the same project team, under the different division of output documents have unified management, the whole product line to form a closed-loop operation, seamless, smooth communication, project progress overall control, everyone is happy!



There are thousands of project products, but for the relevant personnel in product development, the needs and pain points are the same. Everyone is looking forward to an all-encompassing collaboration platform that addresses needs and pain points, reduces communication and repair costs, and eliminates the need to constantly describe requirements and check whether cutting diagrams and annotations are standard or not. Copycat may not be the cure-all you’d like it to be, but it does solve some of the most pressing teamwork problems right now.

Finally, I can now tell you that with a copycat, the UI designer is satisfied, the product manager is satisfied, the front end engineer is satisfied, and the entire team is satisfied. Naturally, the boss was satisfied.