Scaling the BBC Design System: Tooling, Community, Governance and Gardening

Do you have experience managing or contributing to a Design System that has to support multiple teams, disciplines’ priorities and competing product requirements? Wondering how to meet the long-term goals of the system without getting in the way of your stakeholders’ needs?

The BBC Web Design System serves 10 distinct brands, and 25 actively contributing agile software engineering teams who are continuously building, maintaining and evolving over 150 components to solve a varied breadth of audience-facing solutions. As a founder of this Design System team, I’ll talk through our approach.

Operating at such gigantic scale, technical decisions are the foundation of a successful Design System, but for long-lived maintainability those initial technical decisions must be built upon. As we discuss real world, live production BBC examples, you can expect key takeaways to include: how to introduce tooling, build strong community collaboration, and implement governance and documentation for the benefit of your system and your users. With a little bit of gardening, you too can mitigate Design System scaling challenges.