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Ep #18: Gabriella Hachem (CEO, Dessn): Design should be done in Production

Jonny ·
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Tom and Jonny sit down with Gabriella Hachem, co-founder of Dessn and the podcast’s first design tool founder. They dig into why Dessn runs your codebase in the cloud so you can design on production, unpack the read-only decision that shaped the product, and go behind the scenes of building a design tool while the models caught up.

Key takeaways

  1. Dessn runs your codebase in the cloud so you can design on top of the real thing. No local setup and no coding, and the page you pull onto the canvas is your production homepage rather than a representation of it. Gabriella has waited her whole career to open the real homepage and work on it.
  2. Read-only access to the repo was a focus decision before it was a security one. The first version of Dessn opened pull requests. They dropped it, because opening a PR isn’t the hard part anymore and it was never how they were going to win. Handoff now runs through MCP straight into Cursor or Claude Code.
  3. Leaving the engineering gate where it is smooths adoption. Workflows are already changing, and change is heavy even when it’s powerful. Keeping one familiar checkpoint untouched means a design team only has to renegotiate the part that actually matters.
  4. Dessn’s ideal customer profile turned out to be a culture, which is a very hard thing to qualify for. Every usual deterministic signal failed: vertical, size, stage. The proxy Gabriella watches for is whether a design engineer role already exists on the team.
  5. An excited user counts for nothing if leadership isn’t bought in. Gabriella has watched a deal die at that gate with the user still cheering for it. Nim is the one who says no, and she’s learning to, because you only have so much time and where you spend it matters.
  6. The handoff only ever existed because designers couldn’t reach the code. Remove the skill barrier and you remove the reason for the relay. Fewer people between the decision-maker and the executor gets you higher quality output and more speed.
  7. Roles were built on skills, and skills are the part that’s collapsing. You knew Figma so you were a designer, you knew how to code so you were a dev. Gabriella never became a Figma expert and still considers herself a good designer, because the thinking layer was always the job.
  8. Dessn’s learning curve is a curve of power. It’s mostly prompt-based, so there’s no tool to master, but there is a blank canvas problem: what can I even do in here? Ask it for a dropdown of every state a user could be in and it pulls them straight from your code.
  9. The models caught up to the vision, and that’s what conviction buys you. It didn’t work, it didn’t work, it didn’t work, and then it worked. Dessn never rode the hype wave, because the product couldn’t deliver on the promises yet, and now it can.
  10. The industry has gone from FOMO to fatigue after a slew of broken promises. Gabriella wants the headline to be exactly that: no broken promises. She’s blunt about competitors who answer the source-of-truth problem by creating another source of truth.
  11. The designer’s job is heading towards curation, and that was always the high-leverage part. Deciding this is the right thing to do was always the leverage. Her worry, one year out, is how much Dessn builds for the requests arriving today versus the version of design work she thinks is coming.
  12. “When did a feature become synonymous with a role?” An investor asked Gabriella where the visual editor was, given she builds for designers. Direct manipulation comes up constantly, and she thinks the industry should reopen that question rather than assume the answer.

Chapters

  • 0:04 — Our first design tool founder: Gabriella Hachem and Dessn
  • 1:18 — Montreal, first jobs, and never fitting the boxed roles
  • 2:22 — She didn’t quit to build a design tool. She quit to solve a problem
  • 3:34 — Design and prototype in your codebase, no local setup, no coding
  • 6:42 — Jonny built a Temu version of Dessn for a hackathon
  • 8:38 — Read access or write access to the repo, and why Dessn went read-only
  • 11:04 — Opening a PR isn’t hard anymore, so that was never how they win
  • 13:28 — Collapsing the talent stack: fewer people between decision and execution
  • 14:51 — Roles were built on skills. She thinks they should be built on thinking
  • 16:57 — Novelty budget, and a learning curve of power
  • 19:36 — Pulling real production pages onto the canvas
  • 20:48 — Every state defined in your code, and an automated Storybook
  • 22:54 — When your ideal customer profile turns out to be culture
  • 23:55 — Leadership is the real gate, and Nim is better at saying no
  • 25:16 — Two years of founding: hard, fun, and a whole other level of hats
  • 28:53 — How to know it’s your turn to take the risk
  • 30:51 — Montreal to New York to London, and why not San Francisco
  • 32:14 — Valio Con, a panel of design tool founders, and a week in SF
  • 33:11 — Frenemies, and the one thing nobody else does
  • 35:06 — Form an opinion about how you want to work, then go work that way
  • 40:03 — Creating another source of truth makes the problem worse
  • 41:57 — From FOMO to fatigue, and the models catching up to the vision
  • 43:30 — Speed, latency, and 120 frames per second
  • 46:17 — Proactive agents, direct manipulation, and the designer as curator
  • 49:33 — “When did a feature become synonymous with a role?”
  • 50:38 — Personalised workflows, plugins, and Dessn as infrastructure
  • 52:57 — React Native now, iOS Native and a Mac Mini next
  • 54:23 — Quick fire: a wine bar, a spatula, deleting X, and watching your mum use ChatGPT
  • 59:19 — Where to find Gabriella, and the infinite canvas beta

Mentioned in the episode

Gabriella and Dessn

Companies and past roles

People

Tools and products discussed

Events

  • Valio Con, Drew Wilson’s conference in Oceanside, California, 16–18 September — https://valiocon.com

About the pod

Got thoughts, a guest suggestion, or a disagreement? Email us at hello@nearfuture.works.

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