Jessica Pagán Sánchez

Showing up is how community gets built. The conversations, the people, the ideas that only happen when you're in the room. Every community needs a third place.

For design systems, Config is mine. Two years in, a third on the way. But the appetite for more of it, in more places, keeps growing. The design systems landscape looks different depending on where you're standing. I want to see more of it.

If you're building something interesting, putting something together, or just want to talk — find me.

Design systems are the work nobody sees. The component that just works. The token that holds through a brand refresh. The documentation that answers the question before someone files a ticket. For the last four years, that has been the work — building the infrastructure at Microsoft that product teams build on, not the products themselves.

Coming to this through computer science means understanding both sides of the handoff: how designers encode decisions, and what it costs when those decisions don't survive the translation to code. That gap is where the work lives. Making the system legible — to engineers, to designers, and increasingly to AI — is the problem that keeps coming back.