Davy with friend of the program, Chela Giraldo talk about their recent experiences looking for a new design systems, and the struggles with developing the "design system portfolio" that can tell our unique stories.

Chela has a recent post about it, which you should check out on Design System Collective.

Davy and PJ discuss the challenges and strategies for design system training, especially when it comes to Figma. We explore the line between providing direct tool training and focusing on how the design system integrates with those tools.

Davy talks about what he's seen with the popularity around (local) product systems and how you can may want to adoption via providing just some design system team support. PJ ends the convo with the lighter weight approach of supporting templates in code and design.

Another takeaway from our cross-functional discussions, how do design system team members handle disagreements with consumers, or even our own teammates?

Davy and PJ talk dive into designers building helpers and plugins to support more specialized design system maintainer workflows, and the beauty of unblocking ourselves.

Davy and PJ talk about how to plan to best support inbound product design work, in addition to the differences between product-led work vs design system team-led initiatives.

Because it was PJ's first Config, we decided to record a live, IRL episode, recap our first thoughts about the new product releases and a thread that we started about who Figma is designing for, dating back from last year's event.

We're back with an episode an episode about component and design system flexibility. How opinionated should your design system be, vs a large set of reusable pieces that can be put in any which way together. Davy and PJ weigh in on both methods and where you may want to dive into a framework that allows you to build starting from anywhere.

Our friend Guy Segal, Director of Design Systems at Thomson Reuters comes and talks with us about consistency in operations and how to scale out systems thinking.

We learn about PJ's start in design systems, dating back to 2011, and Davy's first introduction to it in 2015. They discuss while tech has evolved, aspects such as theming still remain a struggle to figure out. Also discussed is how we evolved our roles, and what might be suitable traits and tactics used by design system people in 2025.