On Theme: Design Systems in Depth
Exploring how successful design systems get built, maintained, and deliver impact. Design systems is having a major reinvention moment, and I want to share what's working from design system practitioners out there forging the way. Expect aha moments, actionable insights, thoughtful discussions, and spicy takes from accomplished design system practitioners. Hosted by Elyse Holladay.
On Theme: Design Systems in Depth
S2E1 2025 Predictions Recap with Noelle Lansford
My very first minisode of the entire podcast was some 2025 predictions, and a lot has changed. (Honestly, what was I thinking trying to make predictions in the era of AI? fml) Noelle Lansford joined me for Season Two's official first episode to recap my 2025 predictions with me and look back on the trends and themes we saw in design-systems-land last year.
Stay tuned for part two where we dive in to our 2026 predictions!
I can't say that design systems as organizational leverage point for AI was really on my 2025 bingo card, but I actually think that that happened last year. I was saying, oh, I think the future for design systems is bright, but I didn't actually think that we would be full on– like, at the beginning of this year, my CTO talked about the design system as one of the critical ways that we are going to hit our goals for the year.
Noelle Lansford:Yep.
Elyse:I, I am pretty sure that for the last 10 plus years in the entire design system industry, one of our major complaints has been, you know, our execs don't know about us. They don't know what we do, they don't know what the value is. And to see that change so fast last year... was absolutely wild.
Noelle Lansford:Coming off of the layoffs in the years prior, the feeling I got was, we don't value design systems because they're redundant, because they're not adding value, that's the really harsh version of all the negatives that I was hearing from executive teams. Now, like, let me ask myself a question. Who in my organization is trying to scale my UI to be faster and more consistent? That team. There's still a lot of fallout there from the up and down of like, no investment, over investment, no investment, over investment. But people were fast to jump back into design systems which was really exciting to see.
Elyse:Well, I think it's because us design system truthers knew all along that the value of design systems was there and real, and that maintenance, that sustainability, that reusability was actually really incredibly valuable. The wrong take here is, design systems didn't matter, or design systems weren't a good idea. We just were not telling the right story that whole time. As we start to think about 2026, what is the new story we need to be telling? What is the narrative that is going to position design systems the way that we want them to be positioned in our organizations? This is On Theme, Design Systems in Depth, and I'm Elyse Holladay. Together, we'll be exploring how successful design systems get built, maintained, and deliver impact. Design systems is due for a major reinvention moment, and I want to share what's working from design system practitioners out there forging the way. Let's dive into the show. Welcome back to On Theme. I have Noelle joining me and we're gonna talk about 2025 prediction recap, and see how that went, and then what we see for the future of design systems in 2026. I really wanted to have Noelle join me because I think Noelle has a really good and also very, very different perspective than mine. Noelle, thanks for coming back on the podcast to chat about the future.
Noelle Lansford:It is been too long since we've just hung out, so this is gonna be a lot of fun.
Elyse:I think it's been almost a year since we recorded our early episode for On Theme with you about layoffs and the job market. A lot has changed for you. You have started to grow your own design system consultancy business, which is amazing. Give us the TLDR about your business, the kind of customers you work for, and what y'all are doing.
Noelle Lansford:I appreciate that. It's been a lot of fun. I started a design system consultancy almost two years ago now called Shep. Our services are really tailored for enterprise customers that are dealing with complex organizational shifts, amidst technology changing; that is what I think our bread and butter is, and helping people actually meet their goals for their design system amidst all of those kinds of different complicated hurdles.
Elyse:Yeah, I love that we have such a different focus. I still work at Color, we are quite small but mighty. But I feel like the era of, you know, oh, you don't have a real design system unless you are of a certain size or you have a certain set of artifacts, I feel like that is so dead, and the way that we build UI is built on design systems of all shapes and sizes. Everybody in the tech industry generally understands that some level of design system or component library is how we build UI now. So I think it's gonna be really fun, Noelle, to have our two different angles, maybe, on the same predictions.
Noelle Lansford:Totally.
Elyse:So, about 2025, a lot... It's been a year. 2026, it's February, it's been a year. And so was last year. Obviously, want to acknowledge for a moment the, the churn in the tech industry, the layoffs, the economic churn, are we in a recession? Are we not in a recession? And hiring, the industry has been really, really topsy-turvy. Politically, no matter what you believe, things have been really divisive. I know that it has not been a tolerable year for people. We are gonna talk a lot about AI and how AI is changing our work, and I have to acknowledge the impact of that on people. I want to say upfront, I'm not ignoring that that's a reality, even though that's not what this podcast or this episode in particular is really about. You know, I think that we can hold two, two different angles at the same time in our minds, right? Like, I can be very excited about the future of work and the future of design systems and even what LLMs can do in positive ways for us. And also be afraid and concerned and morally opposed to a lot of the things that are also happening in the industry. Maybe it's a little cringe to put a disclaimer out there, but I just wanna say, it is tough out there, and if you are job hunting, if you are trying to figure out what the future of your career looks like, if you are afraid or just uncertain, I also feel those things, and my heart goes out to you. Noelle, anything to add to that?
Noelle Lansford:No, I mean, my heart just goes out to anybody job searching. We had a lengthy conversation about that, but I think the landscape of layoffs has just changed so much, even since I was going through it. AI was right on the edge of like, are we actually gonna...? And now it feels like some of the things that we were afraid of are finally here.
Elyse:Yeah. Well, let's get into it.
Noelle Lansford:Do it.
Elyse:So, my very first podcast minisode for 2025 was some predictions. And my 2025 predictions were: One, that AI is changing how quickly we generate artifacts, but not what gets generated. That generating code from designs is not the way. Then third, that you already have a design system, and that more non-tech companies will get into building design systems. And that we would be focusing on patterns over foundations. And then lastly, that your success metrics for design systems are stories and not numbers. So let's, I wanna just go through each one and kind of see, a year later, like how,
Noelle Lansford:I'm so ready for this list.
Elyse:Yeah, like, did, how did I do? You can judge me. So, okay. First AI is changing how quickly we generate artifacts, but not what gets generated. I, you know, I thought at the time that AI was gonna change the way we work with our design systems, you know, how we find information, how we generate components, generate mocks, but I didn't think the AI tools were at a place where it's making meaningful new stuff. I think that's very much in line with what I saw over the course of last year. Um, I'm a little willing to change my tune on that going forward, but at least for last year, I thought that was actually true. Noelle, what do you think?
Noelle Lansford:I feel like the first half of 2025, absolutely. A lot of people were kind of giving up on it then. Not to dump on Figma Make, but that was around the time that that was happening, people were like, man, I can't use this the way that I thought I'd be able to use this. But the second half of the year, I started to see a change there, where people were actually doing a lot more meaningful contributions with the tooling. But it's definitely bled over into early this year. So it feels like a newer thing that this would start to be the case.
Elyse:Totally agree. Over the fall of 2025, the, what's the word I'm looking for? sophistication of the output was improving. I'm still not seeing, and I don't expect to, for most companies, that the LLMs can generate the product ideas, the business decisions, the patterns that make your system and your product feel like you. I don't think those are really coming from the LLMs yet, right? The sophistication of the writing or the code has improved, but humans are still the source of the idea generation. And I see that especially with design. I think that LLMs are just not very good at design yet. And maybe they won't ever be, and I think that's okay.
Noelle Lansford:No, I think you're right on that. We're talking about trends, right? There's always outliers, and I sometimes get tripped up on those, because I'm like, man, but that one thing was really cool at one time. Always an exception to the rule. But in general, I think if every company went and started generating all their designs, they would still be sorely disappointed with the output.
Elyse:Yeah. I hundred percent agree. I saw a really incredible new UI feature from Operate CRM. It was a create a new deal dropdown in their CRM. And it had like these multi-level add dropdowns, so like you're in a dropdown and then you can add the user, and then if it was a new user, when you typed it, would have like another dropdown inside it where you could also add their email and then save them. And it was,... just the level of polish was chef's kiss. It was so good. And they were talking about, the number of rounds of feedback that they were in Figma, they were in Dessn, they were in code, they were using LLMs, they were doing it themselves. It wasn't just, oh, I said to the LLM, I need these features and these behaviors, and it came up with a good design. It was using the tools available to make something that was incredibly polished. And I think that those tools are expanding, oh my god, cheesy, expanding our toolkit, right? Like we have new ways to finesse, new ways to try things, new ways to iterate. You can do that in Figma. You can think about, you know, the real specific pixels, the size of the icon. Sometimes I think that that's still easier in Figma's precision editor. You can also use an LLM, a code generator to build a real rendered version, and see it work, and type in it, and see the animation, and see if it makes sense. I don't think the LLM is gonna do that idea for you.
Noelle Lansford:When I hear like, oh, this was AI generated, I'm like, well, you're probably gonna have to polish it up a little bit.
Elyse:Yeah, yeah, and to your point, the designs that LLMs are generating right now are easily recognizable as LLM generated. They are a watered down lossy copy of the really creative and good UX and good UI that designers are generating. Because those human designers are thinking about, what is the real experience of using this single dropdown. Rather than just like it's a dropdown.
Noelle Lansford:Yeah.
Elyse:That will probably remain true because I think the, the real decision making, the real business ideas, the real product ideas, the real things that make your brand or your product or your UI make sense for your needs, is just not available to LLMs. Purely in a like context way, like there's just so much that goes into those decisions that I think for most humans we can't even articulate. All the things that we know, all of our experiences, all of the pattern matching that we can do from past jobs, past things we've built, things we've tried, what we know about our business, what we know about our customer. Like, I don't think you could even put all of that into the machine. All right, number two. I have so many things to say about this. Generating code from designs is not the way. Uh, that was a winner. I am seeing this firsthand. I'm hearing a lot of chatter about this. I think making pictures of UIs is out and designing with code is in. I think there will be a really long tail of companies adopting this paradigm shift. But I think if you are working really hard, trying to make Figma generate good code for you, I don't even know what mean thing I was gonna say. Like that, that ain't it. That just ain't it.
Noelle Lansford:I was so ready for it. Well, this debate came up again last year, should designers know how to code? Because designers are looking at these vibe coding tools and having to contend with like, can I use this? Clearly the other way around was not as efficient, not as satisfactory. So I saw a lot of designers take the leap and learn code, because that's where the tooling's at.
Elyse:But you know, we have the code we can design with the code. Those tools are early, but they are happening and I'm hearing a lot of chatter about it. In the first half of 2025, I saw, like, I'm gonna use Figma Make, and then really in September, October, it started to be like, I started to output this thing from Claude with my actual code. Or like, I'm using Subframe, or I'm using Dessn. I was seeing reposted LinkedIn posts from people that I don't know going well what if we could actually just like, use our code components? I think this is the trajectory of how we design for for the web. I can't speak about iOS or Android, but certainly for the web, that this is the way of the future. This is gonna be a really long tail one. I think we're gonna still see a lot from Figma, a lot of use of Figma, a lot of making pictures of UIs. I feel really strongly about this. This is still on my prediction list for 2026, so more on that in 2026 predictions. But this one, Noelle, I really want your take on. So my third prediction was, you already have a design system, it's all the stuff that's already in your product, right? And, and using that as the foundation of your design system, and part two of that was that more non-tech industry companies will get into building design systems. Instead of it just being software as a service companies, it's, you know, e-comm or, food or, these other industries getting on board with having a design system as part of how they deliver their product. Because, I mean, we can all joke like, oh, Domino's isn't a pizza company, it's a tech company. But Chick-fil-A has an app. I know somebody at Aritzia, a fashion company based in Canada, they have a design system, they have an app. Abercrombie and Fitch has an app, right? These are e-commerce fashion companies, but they have such a important technical element that I think they're going to start understanding, like we were talking about earlier, that the way that you build UI is by having some kind of system. Noelle, I really want your take here, because I feel like you are probably seeing through your consultancy work and through the kind of companies that you work for, seeing that in action. Is that something that you saw last year?
Noelle Lansford:Yeah, so, I, I'm torn on this one, because I wanna say yes, but I also wanna say that a lot of these companies already had one. And last year was a year of like, modernizing it. That was the word that I was hearing a lot. Can we utilize the design system effort in a modernization direction?
Elyse:Is modernization, like how do we get AI capable?
Noelle Lansford:I wouldn't say that all the companies were there yet, but it could just mean updating your tech stack. Our design system, they're gonna lead the way and show how we're gonna update our stuff. Like it could be as simple as that, all the way to, hey, we wanna start thinking about AI in our products. I feel like e-commerce really does have a lot of design systems in it. They're usually not as public, but some of them are. Everybody always talks about Gap,'cause they have a really cool multi-brand design system.
Elyse:I didn't know that.
Noelle Lansford:Yeah, this is a fun one. You know, they have Banana Republic, Old Navy, and of course, Gap, and they all kind of fit under the Gap umbrella, and then they have those sub-brands like Gap kids. And so, from what I hear from my friends there, they have a really cool design system that allows them to manage their UI a really huge level. So there's the companies that have been there, and then there's the ones that have seen these companies scale these things for a couple years, and are now getting on board with it being like, okay, yeah, we should do that. Our competitors are doing this, they're able to scale a lot faster than we are. Cool, we wanna spin these up. And so I think there have been more design systems in those not as technical focused companies. So I would say overall yes, but it's also hard to say because a lot of them have had them in the past as well.
Elyse:Yeah, I'll give myself a, a C on this one. I haven't really seen any noise about this, right? I haven't seen news articles about non-tech companies getting on board with design systems. But to your point, it's maybe quietly true.
Noelle Lansford:Yeah. I think last year there was a big investment in it though, is what I will say. I got to work with a lot of companies that are in that space that you're talking about, and they were all, the ones that I worked with were talking a lot about the investment of the design system, and like the importance of it. And there was kind of a resurgence of, hey, this thing that we haven't been taking as seriously, we should take it seriously this year. And so whether or not it means spinning up a new design system, there was definitely an emphasis on, like companies are moving faster now, how do we move faster? Can we scale our UI faster? that was definitely a hot topic for those companies.
Elyse:Yeah, FOMO around speed, I think is a 2026 prediction.
Noelle Lansford:Hey, I didn't say it.
Elyse:No, it's real. Okay. Number four, I predicted that we would be focusing on patterns over foundations, and I think this one was just wrong. I don't actually know if this happened.
Noelle Lansford:Say more. I'm curious about your take on this.
Elyse:Well, what I, what I was thinking early 2025, is that, the conversation was all around taste. Like, oh, if LLMs generate all this slop, like it's humans having taste that's gonna, you know, make the difference. And I think one of the ways that you tactically ship your taste to your organization, is patterns rather than foundational composable components. But I, I don't know if I don't believe that. I think that might still actually be part of the future. But looking at last year, I don't think I saw anybody focused here. I wasn't focused here. I didn't do this last year at my company.
Noelle Lansford:Mm-hmm.
Elyse:When you're using LLMs to generate new code, new designs off your existing codebase, the patterns that exist in your codebase get replicated and managing that will be critical. But I didn't see any chatter about this last year.
Noelle Lansford:Yeah. To give you some credit, I saw a little chatter about this. I think you're right, that overall, like people weren't focused here because they were so focused on generating stuff that they weren't considering to be patterns, but they were just focused on generating, and there was bigger splashes happening because of that. But I did hear this concept talked about a bit last year. I had a conversation with Chris Strahl at Knapsack, and he was talking about this idea of, if you really want to infuse this creativity, if you wanna explore, start with the pattern. And there was definitely some philosophy around that. I feel like people were so swamped last year that there wasn't that much exploration in that way. But I don't think it's to say that people didn't want to do it. I just think they didn't.
Elyse:Yeah. I'm not gonna do it justice, but Cameron Moll had a really, really great slide in one of his talks in late 2024 where he was showing this loop, this cycle of, when you can generate more output, more of it is slop, for lack of a better term, and there's less engagement with your work. That leads to a return to craft, a return to polish, to finesse, but you can do less. When you spend more time on those details, you actually are gonna produce less total stuff. And then that goes back into the cycle of generating more things. And when I say generate, I don't necessarily even mean LLMs. Take LLMs entirely out of the picture. When you ask anyone to make more stuff, faster, in a compressed time period, there's less time for finesse and polish and editing and details. And I think that there's some real important balance. One of my personal goals for the year is less editing, more shipping, because I think it's very easy to get, you know, to be a perfectionist, to edit to the point where you're starting to second guess whether or not what you're saying makes any sense. Should I even put this out there? How are people gonna judge me? You can over edit, right? Like you can over polish, you can over design, but then you also can just like generate garbage, like just go look at LinkedIn posts. So I think there's some sort of balance here that we're gonna see from product teams, designers, engineers, et cetera, in general that we're gonna see in design systems where maybe we're off on the generate a bunch of stuff really fast, we have speed FOMO, we need to, do more, ship more, go faster. But like that UI dropdown that I was just talking about from Operate, that was so good, when everybody's shipping stuff and every company has all of the features and has all of the things, design is a differentiator. And to have design that makes you differentiated, it has to be good. And for it to be good, you have to have some craft and effort that goes into it.
Noelle Lansford:Totally. I, I love that. I don't wanna jump ahead to your next one, but I also kind of do, because it is where my brain's going. Your prediction last year was that your best success metrics are stories, not numbers, and I feel like this fits into that so well. I've been having this conversation a lot with people that I work with too, hey, like, let's wake up today and be a world class design team. You know, like, let's care about it.
Elyse:I want that in a demotivational poster.
Noelle Lansford:Right? I want a cat poster that says that.
Elyse:We can make that happen. Yeah, that was my fifth prediction last year. I think this was a like 10 outta 10. I can't say design systems as organizational leverage point for AI was really on my 2025 bingo card, but I actually think that that happened last year. I can't even tell you how many LinkedIn posts I see about this, like design systems, it's how LLMs are gonna work for your organization, it's the input to the system. I was saying, oh, I think the future for design systems is bright, but I didn't actually think that we would be full on, like, at the beginning of this year, my CTO talked about the design system as one of the critical ways that we are going to hit our goals for the year.
Noelle Lansford:Yep.
Elyse:I, I am pretty sure that for the last 10 plus years in the entire design system industry, one of our major complaints has been, you know, our execs don't know about us. They don't know what we do, they don't know what the value is. And to see that change so fast last year... was absolutely wild.
Noelle Lansford:Yeah, I mean I saw this everywhere too. I got excited in 2025, because coming off of the layoffs in the years prior, the feeling I got was, we don't value design systems because they're redundant, because they're not adding value, they're not following up on stuff that they promised us. Like that's the like really harsh, rigid version of all the negatives that I was hearing from executive teams. And now to see it totally 180, like, let me ask myself a question. Who in my organization is trying to scale my UI to be faster and more consistent? That team. Suddenly I really care about that team. But I think there's still a lot of fallout there from just the up and down of like, no investment, over investment, no investment, over investment. And so there's still a lot of messiness there. But I think you're totally right, people were fast to jump back into design systems into 2025, which was really exciting to see.
Elyse:Well, I think it's because us design system truthers knew all along that the value of design systems was there and real, and that maintenance, that sustainability, that reusability was actually really incredibly valuable. And, this ties exactly in with my prediction from last year, that we were trying so hard to be like dollar signs, ROI, adoption number, number of lines of code. And trying to show our system in this way that we could tie some sort of like efficiency or reusability metric to like a literal dollar value. Which I don't know, 10 years of trying that and nobody actually figured out how to do it very well, which maybe is a sign that that is not the way that you talk about maintenance and sustainability and efficiency and reusability. Stories, the narrative here, is so important for design systems. So much more important than metrics. Systems show value over time, and we need to be talking about what that value is from a narrative way. Our execs are humans, like they are people, they care about certain things, and connecting what we're doing to the things that they care about, is how you get your leadership to be bought into the things that you wanna do. And it is a coincidence that in the COVID pandemic, everything's going online, suddenly design and design systems really, really mattered, because we were really trying to like scale that. And then there was this economic fear, and pulling back, like, actually we can't have anything that isn't directly connected to the bottom line. That doesn't mean that the design systems weren't valuable, just that the things that execs cared about and the things, you know, like efficiency and reusability, like we weren't matching up anymore. And all of a sudden, again with AI, it's like, whoa, wait, now these things match up. But I think that the wrong take here is, design systems didn't matter, or design systems weren't a good idea, design systems were failing.
Noelle Lansford:Right.
Elyse:We just were not telling the right story that whole time. And look, I don't know what the right story would've been in that moment, where design system teams were getting laid off. I'm not trying to sit here and say that somehow, like I knew what you were supposed to be saying instead. But I will say as we start to think about 2026, what is the new story we need to be telling? What is the narrative that is going to position design systems the way that we want them to be positioned in our organizations? Because I don't think it's ROI dollar sign metrics anymore.
Noelle Lansford:To counter hot take, I don't disagree with that as the trend. I also think it has to do with the maturity of your design system. If your execs' already bought in on your design system, ROI is absolutely the wrong thing. Don't talk numbers. They get it. They know. Stop. If you are still pitching a design system internally though, it's less mature in the cycle of a design system and ROI might have a place there, but I think you are absolutely right, Elyse, like get out of that, as soon as possible because that's not where you want to stay.
Elyse:Yeah,
Noelle Lansford:But I do think every once in a while there's a moment where you may need to throw a number in there.
Elyse:Yeah. That's such a good point. And I'm not like anti numbers, but what I'm hearing—
Noelle Lansford:Elyse hates numbers.
Elyse:I, I am bad at math. This is actually true. No, I think what I'm hearing from you is that when you are in an organization that does not have the understanding of how maintenance and reusability can actually get you to the thing that you want, there's a lot of education that has to happen. And I think that organizations who don't understand that, they don't understand it with design, they don't understand it with engineering, they don't understand it with
Noelle Lansford:Yeah.
Elyse:updating your NPM packages, they don't understand it with security. You know, when you understand it with your engineering practice, it's pretty straightforward to understand it with your design practice. Because you design things into code and your maintenance of that is effectively the same thing as your, design reusability and your design practice. And so I think educating an organization on that can be thankless to impossible, right? Like, there are some organizations who just will not make that change for whatever reason. Culturally, they don't understand. And they're gonna say things like, well, you know, we want you to ship this really fast and have this design and have this one-off, and you know, then you get in this trap where you're like, well, we can't ship it fast because we have, you know, an absolute spaghetti tangle of legacy stuff that we have to deal with. And we do have to actually update that button in 80 different places because we have no reusable and scalable way of delivering ui. But then when you say, oh, we need a reusable, scalable, maintainable way of doing ui, they go, no, we're not gonna invest in that, we just want you to do new designs. That organization, I, if you are in that organization, your energy might be better spent somewhere else. Culturally, if the whole leadership team is in that mindset, you can beat your head against that wall and burn yourself out. And I don't know if you can change them. Some things are not worth trying.
Noelle Lansford:Yeah. fair. I love that. I mean, to me that's like the final cry, right? Like give'em sticker shock. If sticker shock doesn't get'em...
Elyse:and I do, I do think organizations can be changed, right? I absolutely do. I think that there are some who cannot, but there are definitely moments, when they're saying, well, I want both things at once, why, why can't we have all these designs and ship this fast? That's a moment to say, because, because we don't have a reusable thing. Because we don't have these foundations. That actually is a moment to change your organization's understanding. I think that's always worth a try.
Noelle Lansford:Yeah, totally.
Elyse:I would love to hear from you as we wrap up the recap. Anything from last year, themes from last year, especially from the enterprise side. I think that's the place that I feel like I have the least insight. I'm thinking about things that are possible for relatively smaller companies. What 2025 big trends were you seeing out of big enterprises, big multi-brands.
Noelle Lansford:The things that come to mind are similar to what we've been talking about. Do more with less in less time. That was kind kind of–
Elyse:Unfortunately,
Noelle Lansford:the vibe. People got really creative with that, I think, in large enterprises because there's so many layers to go through. The messaging at the top was very like, hey, we're gonna embrace AI this year, or we're going to embrace moving fast. Like everybody really wanted to move fast. And if you've worked in a large enterprise before, which I know you have Elyse—
Elyse:it's really hard to move fast.
Noelle Lansford:in a large enterprise. Yeah.
Elyse:I can understand how people, individuals, felt very caught between a rock and a hard place. You're like, you've put all this bureaucracy on top of me so that I cannot move fast. And now you're telling me I'm not moving fast enough. Like what do you want from me?
Noelle Lansford:Right. So there was definitely some of that, and also there was a lot of burnout happening because there's still layoffs happening and so there was no shortage of that. But on the positive side, I feel like I saw a lot of people innovate in ways that they weren't expecting to innovate themselves. And a lot of that was AI usage, a lot of it was trying the new tooling, finding ways to get the tools approved, it was just like, hey, you know what? You have this initiative for us to go really fast then we're gonna need these tools. And it was cool to see that be the thing that unlocked a lot of really neat technology for the enterprises.
Elyse:Leaving the, we have to move fast just because all of our competitors are moving fast, FOMO of speed, leaving aside that part, do you think that that pressure to deliver more or to do more with less, is that a driver of innovation in your opinion, at these big companies?
Noelle Lansford:I think so.
Elyse:Or just, or just like stressful.
Noelle Lansford:I think it's stressful. I think people do incredible things under stress, so I'm hesitant to embrace it and say like, yes, this makes innovation happen. But it also just does, you know. To make a silly analogy out of it, it's like, you make better art when you're sad. It's a little bit feels like that. Do I think it's sustainable long term?
Elyse:We love nuance on this podcast, and I think, any, too much pressure, trying to do too much leads to slop and burnout and, there are real downsides and negatives to working in that way. There's also, a lot of times we can do and deliver so much more than we think that we can. And being challenged and being pushed, pushes us out of our comfort zone, and it asks us to do things that we didn't think were possible. In big enterprises, being pushed to work in a new way, to deliver something faster, forces you at some point— like maybe the first 10%, you can just work harder, like more hours or delete five meetings off your calendar, and then you just have a little more heads down time— and then past, that there's just, you can't just do more. So it makes this pressure to change your process, your bureaucracy, the decision making layers, the red tape, the stuff that nobody likes. You know, you're like, well, I, I, I can do a thing, and then I have to make a slide deck and a doc and present it, and I can't get a presentation slot with the right people until, a week and a half from now, and then I'm gonna get a bunch of feedback, and then they have to take it to their next— like, yeah, shit doesn't get done when you design by committee and when you have to take a full month just to even get an approval for a really small change. And so I think the pressure of how can we, like, oh god, I know this is such like Silicon Valley, jargon, blah, blah, blah, like how can we flatten that? How can we actually allow people to have decision making autonomy. As designers you should have decision making autonomy over what the product is like. Same, same for for PMs. And so when you have all that decision making like it's like you're gunking up all of the process, like of course it takes a really long time. And so I do think that aspect of it can actually be quite positive, that things can be getting done.
Noelle Lansford:Totally. I worked with Alaska Airlines last year and they were doing a multi-brand project, and we had 10 months to do a multi-brand project from basically scratch, right? And it was non-negotiable. It's like the airport's gonna change in 10 months. You have to figure this out. And that is a lot of pressure. I watched the whole team go through a lot of pressure. And we were up late at night, some of our engineers, they were pulling the allnighters doing it, getting it done. So it's like, yeah, you can't ask people to pull all-nighters,
Elyse:All the time.
Noelle Lansford:Y'know, you can't look at that and say like, oh, this is our new metric for you know, how we get things out. But at the same time it's like, I'm really proud of that because we did, we did deliver it. People are using it now, and it didn't take us multiple years to do what it takes so often multiple years to do at a large company.
Elyse:But That brings me to something that I think actually takes us right into 2026 predictions, which is the idea of autonomy and of ownership. We can talk about whether or not it's fair to say, ship this in three months. But I think at the end of the day, nobody really likes working in a job where you don't actually ever get to do anything. You don't actually get to make decisions. You don't ever actually get to ship anything. The designers and the engineers that I talk to, when they get really, really burnt out, it's often less from like, I have too much work to do and not enough hours, although that's part of it. It's also, and I never get to ship anything and I don't get to make any decisions, and none of my work ever sees the light of day, and I'm getting jerked around. We like making things. That's why we have been drawn to these kinds of jobs. This idea of the designer as builder, the way that now you have the ability to actually create things, I think is really compelling to people. You can have opinions about whether or not it's a good thing that we're able to do that with AI But it feels good to put your stuff out into the world. That is a really human thing to be like, look, I did a thing, I was thinking about a thing and I turned it into reality.
Noelle Lansford:Isn't that why we all got into this anyway, like, right, isn't it? Because it's supposed to be fun and cool. I've been having this conversation a lot with people of just like, when burnout is high, let's remember why did we do this in the first place? And are we actually getting to do that? And if we're not getting to do that, why? So I think 2025 was a year of asking that question of like, why, why do we enjoy this? And I think AI stirred the pot with that a little bit of like, man, is it taking away the parts that I love to do? Or is it taking a, you know, the parts that I'm okay with not doing?.
Elyse:You know?
Noelle Lansford:You know, and everybody has a different, like, tolerance for that.
Elyse:Yes. And I, I feel like such an outlier with that question because, it just boggles my mind that, and this is not nice, and if this is you, I'm so sorry to make you listen to this, like, mean take that I'm about to have. It boggles my mind when people are like, AI is taking away the bits that I like, and I'm like, pushing pixels in Figma? like hand writing semicolons, fussing with syntax, like nitpick– I don't like any of that stuff. It's just stuff that you had to do to get the thing out into the world. What I like is having an idea, defining and shaping that idea, and fucking shipping it. Like, I like to get stuff done. I like making things. And so like—
Noelle Lansford:Put it on a cat poster.
Elyse:But like I, for me, like I actually love the way of working that I've been able to get into. You'll hear this as a complaint, you'll hear people be like, well, I don't wanna just be the manager of, of all these AI tools, while the AI tools do my job. But I'm just like, I ship so much. I can do so much. I can help so many teams. I can deliver so many things. When a designer or a team comes to me and they're like, I need this, I can make it happen way faster and because I am still involved, I can do the finesse, do the polish. Speed is not the only thing, but to me it's just so actually enjoyable to be like—
Noelle Lansford:Yeah.
Elyse:I have a thing that I want to see done in my system.
Noelle Lansford:Yeah.
Elyse:I will be able to ship that in the first half of this year and that might have taken me six months. And to me that is like so cool and so exciting. Anyway, I didn't mean to go off on this whole tangent about that, but that ownership is cool.
Noelle Lansford:I'm the right person to talk to because you wanna know how I got these carpal tunnel hands?
Elyse:Pixel pushing, baby.
Noelle Lansford:Pushing pixels in Figma. And I'm one of those people that like, I get into a mode of meditation when I'm making all my little button variants, you know? But even, even for me, like, do I really love doing that? Is that really the thing that gets me excited? I'm like, not really. I enjoy doing it because I can do it. But there's a whole world of things that I can do that's outside of this that I also enjoy doing. So, for people that tend to be more like me and like to stay in my little box of making buttons and fun little fiddly things in Figma, you know, just, are you having fun? That's what I've been asking. How do I have more fun?
Elyse:How do we have more fun? 2026, how do we have more fun and make cool stuff? I love that.
Noelle Lansford:Stop having carpal tunnel.
Elyse:All right, so I'm gonna give myself a B on last year's predictions. Like, my job is not to make predictions, don't feel like I'm actually very good at this.
Noelle Lansford:I think it's cool to have a time capsule though. You are very in the loop. You're very in the know on what people are talking about. So your predictions do encapsulate like what people were also predicting and what people were thinking and like what the ideas were last year. And I think it's amazing to see in 2026, like how much just changed in a year based on what people were really excited about last year.
Elyse:I love framing it as a encapsulation of everything that I was hearing last year, and what I'm hearing going forward. Noelle, thank you so much for helping grade me on my 2025 recap. I appreciate that. Let's get in to what we see on the horizon for 2026.
Noelle Lansford:Let's do it.
Elyse:Thanks for listening to On Theme. If you like what you're hearing, please subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform and at DesignSystemsOnTheme. com to stay in the loop. See you next episode!