Converge 2025: Delightfully Human: Design systems leadership - Natalya Shelburne

About the talks

Design system teams, so beautifully at the intersection of design and engineering, are perfectly positioned to lead in times of rapid change. This is because creativity and technology have been deeply intertwined for most of human history, and creative makers have always played the key role of being the ones to embrace new technology and shape the way it is integrated into daily life.

It's not a question of if AI integrating itself into our lives, but how. How amazing that according to historical precedent, it's actually up to us, the designers and engineers and all creators in-between, to shape how new technologies will impact us and our work! We're the ones who get to shape how new tools will affect our skills, how we collaborate, what skills we value, how we hire, how we run teams, and imagine a future we never even dreamed of when we pushed our first pixel or wrote our first hello world.

As creatives in tech, we are equally well positioned to shape the future as we are vulnerable to it. Fortunately, your creativity and humanity are the superpowers. Part group therapy and part practical tips and takeaways, this talk threads together history, psychology, and hard earned lessons about leading teams of incredibly talented people through major changes.

I’m not here to squeeze productivity out of you, introduce any clever AI hacks, or promise that I have all of the answers. But, if you've ever felt the high stakes pressure of people counting on you to lead the way through the ambiguity of incredible change, this talk is for you. Design systems were never about buttons anyway.

About the speaker

Natalya (she/her) is a designer, developer, artist, author, educator, and doer of good deeds. She recently joined Datadog to lead the designers working on the DRUIDS design system. Previously, she worked at GitHub leading the Primer design system team. Before that, it was the New York Times, as well as teaching at Harvard Extension. She loves to write, publishing the Design Engineering Handbook and articles for various online publications. Natalya holds bachelor’s degrees in Studio Art and Psychology, and a master's in Creativity and Talent Development. Crossing disciplines and building bridges between design and engineering is at the foundation of much of her work, and building teams, growing community, and investing in human creativity at scale is the next big adventure.