WordPress agency owners: what does your development workflow look like these days?

I've been running a small agency for about two years now, and I feel like we've backed ourselves into a bit of a corner with our WordPress development workflow.

When we started, Gutenberg + FSE seemed like the obvious direction. Our setup was basically a blank FSE theme with Greenshift (and later Greenlight) blocks. The idea was that either a designer or developer could build the site directly in the editor without having to touch much code.

For smaller projects, it actually works quite well - especially when there isn't a budget for a full design phase and the design is effectively created while building the website.

But we quickly ran into two problems.

First, e-commerce.

FSE was fine for simple brochure websites, but the WooCommerce development experience was pretty painful. Greenshift had some WooCommerce functionality, but anything beyond the basics became difficult to customise.

We eventually moved to Blocksy as our base theme. It's a more traditional theme setup, but it gives us a lot of useful functionality out of the box - mega menus or quick cart are good examples - while still working nicely with the block editor.

The bigger issue, though, is the workflow between designers and developers.

Greenshift is extremely customisable, but designers can fairly quickly reach the limits of what they're comfortable doing. At that point, the task needs to be handed over to a developer.

And most of the more traditional WordPress developers we've worked with don't particularly enjoy building things in the block editor.

So you end up with this awkward handoff between designer and developer, which slows things down and creates plenty of room for miscommunication.

There's also the hiring problem. Greenshift is still relatively niche, so finding good, reliable people who already know it is difficult.

And now, with AI-assisted development becoming a bigger part of our workflow, the whole visual-builder approach feels even more awkward. AI is great at generating and modifying code, but much less useful when the source of truth is a collection of settings inside a visual editor.

So I'm curious how other small WordPress agencies handle this, especially in environments where speed matters and budgets limit the ability to create a Figma design or wireframes up front.