Some personal news: after four years of working on design systems at Stripe, I’m leaving to join Era as a design engineer.
This change is going to be pretty big for me in a few ways. I’ll be going from a large, enterprise company to a tiny, consumer startup. It will also be the first time in ~9 years that I won’t be focusing on design systems.
Why the change? One of the reasons is a desire to sharpen my hard skills. Running a design system involves lots of glue work, and while I really love that type of work, I could feel my core design and engineering skills atrophying.
Design systems work can also be very repetitive. I should feel as though I have 9 years of experience building and operating design systems, but instead I feel like I have 3 years of experience repeated 3 times.
Rather than jumping into another design systems role where I will ultimately repeat a lot of the work I’ve already done for other companies, I’ve decided to move to a role where I can practice my core skills daily on new and exciting problems, and ship software directly to end users.
And then there’s the burnout. Working on systems is hard, especially when you’re working in an organization doesn’t understand or value that kind of work.
Amy Hupe, one of my favorite systems thinkers, wrote an excellent piece on why design systems work is a catalyst for burnout. I’ll quote a bit of it here, but I really recommend you click through and read the whole thing.
The constant need to explain why what we’re doing is valuable is exhausting, and really feeds into that feeling of futility - that nothing we do is ever enough.
Robin Rendle has also touched on the subject:
What I didn’t understand then, but I’m painfully aware of now, is that a lot of folks in management don’t get this kind of work. They can’t sell the work to leadership because folks in management often don’t use the product they work on. And they can’t see progress made because they’re not building the same thing that you are. They’re not building software, they’re building a giant spreadsheet of numbers.
Our industry will have to reckon with the tension between building quality software at scale and failing to understand and value platform teams. But I will not sit around and wait for that reckoning to happen.
I wanted my next gig to be as far on the opposite end of the spectrum as possible, focusing directly on designing and building a product with a small team of passionate builders. That’s why I’m so excited to join Era, a startup focused on building a consumer finance app to help anyone and everyone make the most of their money.
Like so many others, I grew up in a middle class family with parents who worked hard just to make ends meet and provide for my future. Investing was a foreign concept to me until later in life when I became more financially literate.
There are so many folks out there who make good money but don’t know what to do with it or how to manage it. Era wants to put a financial assistant in their pockets, and I’m excited to help with that mission.
Will I work on design systems again in the future? Maybe, if it feels right. In the meantime I’m going to enjoy shipping some hand-crafted software.