Before I came up with the interactive placeholder, I was just using a normal one. I liked the simplicity of using a placeholder as a label. It actually made a pretty crappy interaction for the user though. A user would type and the text disappeared.
Entire teams use Circle — the person who enters a value first isn’t always the same person who sees it later. To solve this problem I tried making the placeholder persist through the typing.
This worked well and made handling pre-filled data that much easier. When the <input> gets pre-filled, it behaves as it would if the user entered it themselves. Now teammates who view this in the future will know what this input is meant for right away.