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.

For design systems, Config is mine. Three years in now. Config 2026 left me with a lot — most of it I wrote about.

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.