Design Systems Burned Me Out

I didn’t expect it to be exhausting. At first, it felt like the perfect kind of project: high impact, highly visible, and a chance to solve problems at scale. The kind of work that looks great on a portfolio. The kind that finally justifies all those messy Figma files, rogue buttons, and weirdly named text styles.

But somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like design.

I was spending more time in meetings than in Figma. More time managing opinions than managing components. What started as a clear goal—unify the UI, improve consistency, reduce rework—turned into a blurry mess of priorities. One team wanted velocity, another wanted control, and leadership just wanted to know when they could “see it.” And underneath all of it, I was quietly drowning in Slack threads, documentation debt, and the creeping feeling that I’d become more of a design system therapist than a designer.

The hardest part wasn’t the technical stuff. It was the in-between stuff: the vague asks, the unclear ownership, the endless negotiation. I was constantly translating between teams, trying to get buy-in without overpromising, trying to document standards no one had actually agreed on yet.

And then there was the emotional weight. When you build a system, you’re not just creating components—you’re shaping how other designers work. And when they push back or ignore it or just… go around it, it feels weirdly personal. I knew it wasn’t about me, but still. When you’ve spent weeks building something meant to help, and it’s treated like a blocker? That stings.

I didn’t realize how burned out I was until I caught myself fantasizing about working on a landing page. Just one page. With a clear goal. Something I could actually finish.

That’s when I started to rethink my approach. Not to design systems in general, but to how I work on them. I stopped saying yes to every request. I stopped trying to solve everything at once. I started treating the system like a product of its own—with roadmaps, focus, and real prioritization. I asked better questions. What’s the actual pain here? Who is this for? What’s the tradeoff of doing nothing?

And I stopped trying to get everyone on board. Not everything needs to scale. Not every team needs the same thing. Some variation is healthy. Alignment doesn’t mean uniformity.

I still believe in design systems. I just don’t romanticize them anymore. They’re messy, political, deeply human things. And the best ones aren’t just well-documented—they’re well-lived. Built by people who care enough to ask hard questions, and patient enough to not answer them all at once.