Manali
Bapat
Product Designer, Mindtickle
Lightning
All Things Design
Beginner Designers
About The Speaker
Manali Bapat is a Product Designer who believes great design is as much about clarity and context as it is about pixels and prototypes. With 3+ years of experience in B2B SaaS, she currently designs at Mindtickle, where she’s led revamps of analytics dashboards and designed manager workflows.
An alum of IIT Hyderabad, Manali blends systems thinking with storytelling, always looking to improve not just the product, but the process behind it. She is a strong advocate for using the right tools at the right time, including exploring AI-assisted workflows to streamline prototyping and documentation.
She has spoken at conferences like Design Outlook 2024 in Melbourne, where she shared insights on mentorship and leadership for early-career designers.
Outside of work, you’ll find her reading, traveling or deep-diving into new tools. Her ideal weekend? A slow brunch, a neatly organized Notion board and a fresh idea to obsess over.
About The Talk/Workshop
The Case of Missing Design Documentation
Designers often inherit screens, flows and components without knowing the reasoning behind them. We ask, “Why was this done?” and the answers are scattered, if they exist at all. Critical design decisions vanish into Slack threads, Zoom calls or get buried in Figma history. It’s not that teams are careless, it’s that our current tools don’t support capturing context easily.
This talk explores the messy reality of design work today: fast-paced, collaborative and fragmented. It shines a light on the invisible cost of missing documentation – not just for new teammates but for everyone trying to improve, iterate or hand off work.
But it doesn’t stop there. The session introduces **Trace**, a concept solution that integrates with the tools teams already use, like Figma and Slack – to quietly capture and organize decisions as they happen. Without adding friction. Without demanding another tool to remember.
Whether you are a designer, PM or researcher, you’ll leave with a fresh perspective on design documentation and a glimpse into what a more thoughtful, aware workflow could look like.
Let’s stop pretending we’ll “document it later.” Let’s make remembering effortless.
Key Takeaways
You’ll start noticing the gaps.
After this session, you’ll see how often design decisions get lost and where. You’ll begin spotting those invisible moments where context slips through the cracks: a Slack reply, a Figma tweak, a quick meeting. Recognizing these gaps is the first step to improving them.
You’ll have a toolkit to start small.
You’ll leave with practical ideas to capture decisions as you work, without adding extra meetings or long docs. Whether it’s tagging rationale in Figma, summarizing feedback in Slack or simply writing down trade-offs before you forget - you’ll know how to build memory into your existing flow.
You’ll rethink your role in team memory.
You don’t need to wait for a big new tool. You can be the one who nudges your team toward better habits. Start logging that “why,” leave a breadcrumb for future-you or share a decision recap. Small, consistent actions make a big difference.