Maya Chen

Tokens are the easy part. I work on the contracts between design and code — naming, versioning, and the migration work nobody puts on a roadmap.

1. Staff Design Systems Engineer

   2020 — Present

   Stripe

   Owns the component API layer used by 40 product teams. Led the theming migration with zero visual regressions.

2. Senior Frontend Engineer

   2016 — 2020

   Asana

   Built the first accessible component library and the docs that made people use it.

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  Design5 min read · 4d

  Design systems don't fail because of tokens

  They fail at the boundary between the people who name things and the people who ship them.