A few years ago at Block, Jack sent an email declaring the whole company “meeting bankrupt”. He asked everyone to wipe their calendars. No recurring 1:1s, no recurring status meetings, and whatever ended up necessary would find a way back on its own. I liked my weekly 1:1s with my team and wasn't thrilled about losing them, but I went along with it because everyone had to, and most of them never came back in the same shape as before.

I brought that perspective with me to Mercury, when I joined a few months ago. I don't run 1:1s with my direct reports on any fixed schedule, and I know it surprised some of my peers when they realized that's how I was structuring things. Instead I have open space on my calendar that my designers can grab whenever they need me, often the same day. No standing weekly slot that everyone is expected to show up to whether or not there's anything to talk about.

Weekly slot trains people to wait.

Something comes up on a Tuesday, the 1:1 isn't until Thursday, instead of dealing with it you sit on it. You don't want to be the person bothering your manager when they might be busy. By the time you finally bring it up in the meeting, it's not a fresh problem anymore… it's just an item on a list. I've been on the flip side of that too, where a designer shows up to a 1:1 with nothing prepared and feels obligated to fill the time anyway when canceling it felt wrong.

What I've noticed working this way at Mercury, where things move fast and a weekly cadence couldn’t even keep up with our pace, is that it builds a much more accountable team. One that isn't sitting back waiting for our recurring time together before they bring something to me. My designers end up with more agency over their own work because the responsibility for noticing when they're stuck and doing something about it sits with them, not with a recurring meeting that I scheduled.

The growth I see in the people who take to this style is strong, because they start treating their own work as something they're responsible for managing, not something they hand off to a recurring check-in.

I still hold career conversations, just not folded into our weekly grind. Those happen every quarter or so, sometimes every six weeks, when it makes sense to pause, reflect and talk about growth. Keeping that separate from the day-to-day means neither conversation gets rushed to fit the other.

You should try it too. Meeting bankruptcy is liberating.

Thats how I’m opening my Config 2026 talk. It’s also just true. I grew up in underground music scenes: basements, warehouses, garages, shitty PAs, old rugs as a stage. I ran an indie record label with my husband for ten years before spending a decade leading design systems at Dropbox, Block, and Expedia.

The through-line is the same in both: I’ve always been more interested in building the conditions for great work than policing who gets to make it.

Somewhere along the way, design systems work became compliance work. The team that was supposed to lower the barrier of entry and raise the ceiling started acting like a bouncer. We’re at a moment right now where that posture will break you. AI tools are to code what the xerox machine was to punk zines and flyers. When the means of production are this accessible, the scene grows. You can try to govern it. You can try to create stricter standards, more approval gates, more process. Or you can do what every healthy scene has always done and build a foundation worth using.

The talk is called design systems anarchy. Its about building a scene around your system. I mean it literally. Punk scenes figured out decades ago (before we had the language for it) how to build infrastructure that enables creative chaos instead of containing it. The music venues that lasted were the ones with the clearest values and the most genuine trust in the people they served.

There are three venues I walk through. Each one built something different. Each one got something right that most design systems teams haven’t. And the through-line across all of them is the same: conviction as a container, not a cage. Hold the principles. Let everything else move.

Your system was never supposed to be permanent. It was supposed to be alive. And right now, with everything changing around us, the teams that try to hold the line against that reality are going to be the ones who end up irrelevant. The teams that embrace it — that build scenes instead of systems, venues instead of vaults — those are the ones that will matter.

See ya at Config 2026.

Looking for a job comes with highs and lows. You try to picture yourself in a role at a company with very little information or you chase after a shiny startup because you know it would carry a certain amount of clout on your resume. You start conversations with people excited by what the role looks like on paper, only to be disappointed with the reality once conversations get deeper. We look at things like company and comp, weigh whatever information we can find, pick what feels best, and hope it works out.

And sometimes it does. When it doesn’t, the reasons are rarely about the work itself. It’s about how it feels to work there day in and day out. The way people communicate, the way decisions get made, the intangible stuff that’s impossible to evaluate from the outside.

Why I needed this

A year ago, I lacked a foundation to stand on, which meant that headwinds at work would burn me out. I felt unrooted in what was important to me.

A friend and mentor of mine, Ben Callahan, mentioned how his own values drive the work he takes on as a consultant and writer. While it was a brief conversation, it sent me on a mission to identify my own core values and figure out how to root myself in what’s important to me.

It required really listening to myself and blocking out all the other noise. I had to figure out what I genuinely valued when everything else was stripped away. Not what other people value or what they expect me to value.

Values > vibes

Making any decision about your future means making a decision with incomplete information. You’re reading between the lines in 1:1 conversations trying to figure out what they mean when they say “fast-paced” or “comfortable in ambiguity,” and doing your best to imagine whether you’ll be able to show up authentically every day. Most of us rely on gut feeling for this, but I found my gut feeling can often be a quiet voice in a room full of loud voices around me.

Having developed a list of personal core values last year, it helped give me that vocabulary. Values turned a fuzzy sense of “vibes off” into something I could actually point at and talk about.

If you can name it, you can do something about it.

My unscientific approach to figuring them out

Step 1, reference the long list

I started with Brené Brown’s list of core values, which is a long list of words like accountability, authenticity, balance, belonging, and so on. And the first time I read through it, my honest reaction was that all of them resonated. Of course I value courage. Of course I value connection. Anyone would look at that list and think, yeah, all these are important.

It takes a second or third read to start noticing which ones land differently. Which ones make you feel something in your body and resonate. For me, reading the list aloud helped me identify which values felt stronger than others.

Step 2, find the ones that jump out at you

After looking at the list and reading it through a few times, I took out my journal and wrote down every value that stood out to me. I wanted a range of values that spoke to me holistically. In some cases I listed two or three values on the same line since they all felt slightly related.

Then, each day for a week, I would revisit the list. I’d ask myself “am I moving toward my values or away from my values?” I considered if any of them showed up for me, in a positive way by energizing me or in a negative way by draining me. Each time a value showed up in my life, I’d mark it. Maybe I’d be in a conversation where I felt frustrated and I’d realize it was because things weren’t transparent. Or I’d land a presentation I was proud of because I had creative freedom the whole way through.

The daily tracking is what turned a mess of “yeah those things seem important” into a coherent lens of the things I believed in. Because the values that kept showing up over and over were the ones that mattered to me, the ones I was already living by and organizing my life around without really knowing it. Some required a bit of creative language nudging to make them work for me, which I’ll get to.

After two weeks, the list had naturally narrowed itself. I ended up with five:

• Clarity: honest and direct communication and a transparent exchange of ideas

• Joy: actually choosing play, lightness, and appreciation in small moments

• Self-respect: showing up for myself and not absorbing everyone’s emotional weather

• Creativity: having space to make things and solve problems with craft

• Autonomy: the freedom to figure things out on my own, the way that works for me

Step 3, live them

In order to make them stick, I peppered them across my life. I taped them above my monitor. I updated my lock screen. If I felt a high or low point in my day, I was able to connect it back to something.

They still feel pretty right after 8 months. I’ve refined them over time. Clarity was the most ambiguous to me, and that’s where the language nudging came in. It’s not that I always needed to see 100% transparency all the time, it’s that I valued intellectual honesty above false-kindness and closed-door disagreements. Once I figured that out, the word actually meant something to me. They’ve become something I come back to constantly, for work and for all kinds of decisions in my life.

Your list will look different. I’d aim for somewhere between four and seven. Enough to be meaningful, few enough that you can hold them all in your head.

Using your values to make better decisions

Once you have your values, they become a filter you can run every conversation and every interview through. They become a consistent way of paying attention to what’s actually happening and how it makes you feel.

In interviews, most questions are designed to help the company evaluate you, and your values let you do the same thing in the other direction. If autonomy matters to you, ask about how decisions get made on the team. If clarity is a value, ask how disagreements get handled or how feedback gets delivered. The answers people give to open questions tell you a lot about how a place actually works.

Job descriptions are worth reading carefully too. A role that emphasizes “collaboration” and “consensus-building” might be great if you value communication, and it could also mean nothing moves without five rounds of approval. A role that emphasizes “moving fast” might feel exciting if you value autonomy, and it might also mean they’re working a 996 schedule with little space in your life outside of work for joy. Your values help you figure out which questions to ask to tell the difference.

When I found myself debating between several opportunities, I would list them side by side and try to mark where each one landed with each value. I’d use a 1–5 scale and through the interviews and reflection, take a best guess at which companies aligned with my core values.

Values are for good times and hard times

Defining your values doesn’t guarantee you’ll pick the right job or that the right job will find you. Companies, teams, and priorities shift, and so do you and your life. No framework is going to eliminate that uncertainty.

The hardest part of all of this is listening to yourself above others. I’ve written before about people-pleasing and how it’s so easy to prioritize others before yourself. That is still hard for me. What I have now is a language I can hear myself with that cuts through the external noise.

Personal values don’t make you immune to the opinions of other people. They do help you figure out when to say yes and when to say no. They give you a way to understand what really matters to you and how you want to show up.

When you’re honest with yourself about those things, other people’s opinions tend to fade away. You’re able to identify when your ego might be driving versus when you’re making choices based on a holistic sense of self. In my case recently, this work helped me realize when things I was chasing were not rooted in what I actually value. They were rooted in other people’s expectations or external measures of success, money, clout, all of it. Making the decision to not pursue that path was difficult, especially after years of following other people’s expectations of me and not feeling confident enough to follow my own.

For designers especially, this work matters. We spend so much time thinking about product needs and organizational problems that we can forget to apply the same thoughtfulness to ourselves. I spent years making decisions based on the role, the product, the comp, and ignoring the quieter question of whether an environment would actually let me be the person I want to be. The values work didn’t make the decision for me. It made me so much better at knowing what I was looking at.

I signed an offer on a role I’m genuinely excited about. From the outside it checks all the boxes. From the inside, it felt right in a way I could connect back to what’s important. I had many conversations with other companies that had roles that sounded interesting, but just weren’t for me.

If you’re in a similar place and want to talk to someone about making decisions rooted in your core values, let’s talk.

Lauren LoPrete is a design leader who writes about craft and the messy human parts of building a creative career. She’s probably laying down right now.

“Do not live to satisfy the expectations of others”
― Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage to Be Disliked

I love my job. I’m operating in the most fulfilling role of my career. The work energizes me, and I am driven to keep wanting more.

I find systems work creatively motivating and intellectually satisfying in ways that surprise me. There's something deeply rewarding about solving pattern challenges that help hundreds of people build better products.

But I also recognize that design systems work is at odds with my nervous system. I regularly find myself over-indexed, emotionally spent, or oscillating between fight or flight.

This contradiction forced me to look deeper at what was really happening. Four years after speaking at Clarity on Design Systems Burnout I'm finding myself feeling exhausted again, but this time I'm realizing something more complicated about the relationship between people-pleasing and building systems that I hadn't understood before. This isn't an article about design systems leadership, it's not a cry for help, and it's definitely not a research-backed paper…it's a bit of a Venn diagram of all three.

People pleasers build high performing systems

Most of us seem to share this thing where we see connections others miss, notice when things don't fit together, and have this almost physical discomfort with pixel imperfection that drives us to fix things. Some of us learned early that managing other people's emotions is a skill. Maybe we had unpredictable parents or were the kid who could sense the mood of a room and adjust accordingly, developing this hypervigilance around others because survival meant keeping other people comfortable.

Those skills translate really nicely into systems work. I can translate emotions from the tone of a Slack message, know which engineer is about to push back before they open their mouth, sense when stakeholders are getting frustrated with component limitations and effortlessly pivot the conversation before it becomes a problem. I'm just figuring out what feels uncomfortable to admit: some of the strongest moments in my work history, when the system was at its most successful and widely adopted, brought out the worst in my people-pleasing “ability”.

I was constantly seeking approval before getting my own. I would try to interpret other people's feedback to gauge if the system was good enough, checking in with teams to see if our system met their needs, and it actually worked. The constant approval-seeking meant the system was always evolving, because it met people's immediate needs instead of assumptions about what they needed, and it never got stagnant because I was always listening, adjusting, and making sure everyone was happy with it. I was building a system that was designed by committee.

As an industry, we measure design systems success on their ability to please their customers. We put others needs ahead of the system needs by measuring adoption, satisfaction, and increased velocity. The job of leading a systems team requires being politically savvy while staying emotionally available to everyone's frustrations, and design systems work is fundamentally about anticipating other people's needs before they even ask.

My people-pleasing traits have made systems measurably better, but it came at the cost of filling everyone else's cup before my own and never really developing my own opinion about what the system should be. By meeting everyone's needs, I was not just absorbing organizational dysfunction, I was enabling it. Every time I smooth over a conflict or reshuffle priorities to meet the needs of someone else, I'm preventing the system from developing its own point of view and teaching everyone that their needs are negotiable based on who complains loudest.

I was measuring the wrong things, I was aligned to the wrong goal, and it was burning me out.

Standing for nothing

I read something this week that liberated me, The quiet thrill of not being for everyone. In it, Stepfanie Tyler explores the liberation found in embracing authenticity over likability, arguing that true belonging comes from refusing to perform for universal approval. It suggests that by accepting that you’re not for everyone, we reclaim creative and psychological freedom to truly be ourselves. I can't bend over for every person in my life and try to please the masses. When I do that, I leave nothing for myself, and I lose focus on my own vision.

Things suffer when they try to be everything to everyone, and I was making this worse by hiding the hard work and making my job look easy. I didn't want to burden anyone with the complexity of what the team was actually doing to keep a high performing system afloat. Because of this, people came to expect effortless results and expected the system to just work without understanding the maintenance required, so the more effective I was at my job, the more invisible and undervalued it became.

“Over time, likability becomes resentment in disguise. Because, if you’re always understood, you’re probably not saying much. And the more you perform agreeableness, the more you resent the audience demanding the performance.”

– , The quiet thrill of not being for everyone

When systems try to meet everyone's needs, they don't stand for anything unique. Without a strong opinion, you can have an infinitely flexible but ultimately forgettable set of rules and constraints. Building an opinionated design system that has a strong visual language requires saying no and protecting your peace, which goes against every people-pleasing instinct I have. It requires fighting my approval-seeking mode and instead of asking everyone else what they think, it requires developing our own point of view. It requires trusting your instincts and building conviction around it.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer for how you measure taste or visual craft. It’s more ambiguous than the ways we measure systems today. As an industry I think we’re all trying to make a data point to measure some visual aesthetic quality bar.

But having been a systems leader for nearly a decade, I have to trust my visual sensibilities and technical craft. I have to recognize my own gaps and hire people who can deliver on them day to day. I have to lead and articulate the value over any other measurable goal.

Threading the needle

I'm starting to learn that there's a difference between being confident enough to say "this is my opinion" and being humble enough to listen when that opinion needs to evolve. The hardest part is knowing the difference between the two and helping my team see the nuance. The goal isn't to stop caring about what people think that responsive quality is what made the systems I’ve built successful in the first place. The goal is to care, articulate, and build systems that aren't for every use case but have a clear point of view and serve it well.

Adoption metrics are the wrong goal, but we like it because it’s measurable. In the era of AI development, tech debt matters less and less. If someone ships a custom pattern because it meets their needs better, then who really cares. The company’s tech debt is not my own debt, and if the company doesn’t seem to care, then why should I be burdened by it? I choose to be focused on when those patterns, foundations, and brand expression represent a vision worth protecting, and the work is about knowing which battles are worth fighting and which ones are just ego.

“Each time you choose authenticity over accommodation, you’re rewiring your stress responses. The nervous system learns that social disapproval isn’t existential threat.”

– , The quiet thrill of not being for everyone

Maybe the real system I need to focus on is my own nervous system’s regulation. We can keep the adaptive qualities that make systems evolve successfully while protecting the vision that makes them worth building. We can find the wisdom to know the difference.

Everything else is just noise.

Thank you to all of those who helped me write this: Ben Callahan, Taylor Cashdan, and the larger Redwoods community.