I know my design process has changed a lot, and for the better, in the past 6 months. I work on two different web sites, with different user bases and different stakeholders. About a year ago, I started creating a Project Overview page in my Figma files where I lay out my understanding of the business and design requirements, technical requirements, and constraints, and links to various docs in our Google Workspace. This helps any other designer to be able to get a quick overview if they have to pick up the work, and it's a place where stakeholders and PMs can check and confirm any changes to requirements.

For one team, I started participating in the product meetings with our partner stakeholders. It's been invaluable in bringing in the UX perspective from the get go as the team discusses features, and I get an early heads up on potential user testing to plan for.

Also for this team's developers, I now start with user flows and screenflows. These are reviewed and discussed with the dev team and the content team to ensure I've captured what we're trying to accomplish and so the engineers can ask questions or tell me about potential technical constraints to account for.

It's only then that I start doing wireframes and UI design (though mostly it's just using components from the design system). Those then get another initial "kicking the tires" from the engineers.

Revising my process has really helped avoid switching horses in mid-stream for the developers, and getting their input before "hifi" design has really helped build better features, faster, with less hair pulling on either side.