Why I chose to join Knapsack

On the limits of design system expertise - and what comes after

As the calendar moves us into 2026, I’m approaching a year in my role as Head of Product at Knapsack. It feels like it’s a good moment to step back and reflect. Not on outcomes and metrics, but on my intent - why I made this move in the first place, and what I believe needed to change.

For more than a decade, I’ve worked on design systems at scale.

Large organizations, building global products. Leading systems that supported thousands of contributors and potentially millions of users. And systems that - by most external measures - would be considered very successful.

Despite this, at a certain point, I hit a ceiling.

Not because there wasn’t anything left to learn. Design systems are always evolving and always interesting. But there’s a quiet glass ceiling in this space - one that’s rarely acknowledged.

Design systems are critical infrastructure. But the people who build and run them can often get stuck in a professional limbo: deeply technical, strategic, and yet not seen as design or product leaders in the traditional sense. If you don’t come from a formal design background, and maybe even if you do, there’s a limit to how far “design system expertise” alone will carry you - no matter the scale or impact of your work.

It’s not a talent ceiling. It’s about how organizations understand design systems.

Enterprises still treat design systems as design artifacts: component libraries, documentation sites, visual standards. All important - but really those are just the supporting actors. When a system works well, it fades into the background. No drama. Fewer problems.

And that invisibility is both the point, and a trap.

In reality, design systems aren’t about components. They exist to facilitate production.

That means reducing decision fatigue. They encode our standards, and lower risk. They let organizations scale digital work without scaling chaos at the same rate! They sit at the intersection of design, engineering, governance, accessibility, brand, and business constraints.

Design systems are better thought of as production infrastructure. But that isn’t how we talk about them.

This perspective didn’t emerge in isolation.

While I was building a design system consultancy offering at IBM iX, we partnered with Knapsack on a client project. It was an opportunity to view - and stress-test - their thinking inside the realities of complex enterprise engagements. I spoke at their events. I appeared on the Design Systems Podcast. I’ve watched how the company has shown up - not just what it was shipping, but how it spoke about the work.

They had a clarity to their point of view: that design systems weren’t just a design concern, and that tooling along wasn’t a solution to underlying production problems. They understood that there was an organizational gravity at play, where systems broke down during the process.

And most importantly, I trusted their leadership.

Not because they were promising easy wins or tidy narratives. But because Chris Strahl, Evan Lovely, everyone in leadership at the company, were honest about the complexity of the problem - and committed to engaging with it.

My personal inflection point coincided with a broader inflection point for industry.

AI shouldn’t just make existing workflows faster. It destabilizes them. It undermines the idea of design-to-developer handoff, or that systems are consumed only by humans. If we can increasingly automate production, the question is broader: "what are we encoding into the machinery of production?”

If design systems remain static artifacts, they’re going to become irrelevant. If they evolve into a broader product context - structured, computable sources of truth - they can become exponentially more powerful.

Knapsack understands that. Not as a feature roadmap, but as a worldview.

They - and now it’s we - don’t see design systems as a destination. We see them as inputs. Raw material for production. Something that will directly power how products are built - whether by humans, machines, most likely by both together.

That distinction matters.

I could have stayed in senior design system leadership roles inside large organizations. Those paths were open. It would have been comfortable and understandable.

But I can see where that road ends.

I’m looking toward my second year at Knapsack, and this feels like a reaffirmation rather than a retrospective. Reminding myself - and trying to explain - why I chose leverage over comfort, and long-term change over incremental optimization.

I didn’t join Knapsack to leave the enterprise world behind. I’m taking what I learned there and applying it at a point of real leverage. It’s shaping the future of digital product delivery, not by accelerating yesterday’s workflows, but by challenging the assumptions behind them.

Joining Knapsack was the evolution of a relationship already built on trust, shared understanding, and a belief that design systems can and must evolve into something far more than they’ve been before.

I didn’t join Knapsack to make design systems better. I joined to redefine how digital products get made.