2027 speakers
jess dale
TALK
It’s time to quit (and get good at it)
Quit? In this economy? Yes. For real.
There is so much we can’t control right now: layoffs, reorgs, the tools, the market, the overlords. So we stay in our jobs, even though we know what it’s costing us.
We do it for the team, for the two-year mark on the résumé, for the peers with fancy titles we need to keep up with—and sometimes, for a version of ourselves we stopped being a while ago.
Jess has quit without the next thing lined up (more than once) and been laid off too. This talk is about learning how to quit, leaving as an act of agency, and working through the discomfort of endings.
ABOUT THIS SPEAKER
Jess Dale (she/they) is a product design leader who has spent nearly 20 years growing designers and design teams, most recently as director of product design at Gusto, and before that at Etsy, where she built the team that taught her how she wants to lead.
Years ago she detoured out of tech into restaurant kitchens and farm work. Now she’s back in a transitional portal, figuring out what comes next. In the meantime she’s writing a novella, training as a court-appointed advocate for kids, and supporting communities through US Digital Response projects. She lives in New York City, hails from the Midwest, and is very into closing rituals.