Abstract
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.
Interview
My work focuses around driving business-benefiting behaviours through systemisation, tooling and community, all while enabling the teams working with our space to create the brilliant features our users deserve.
In a public service context, where we must be efficient and effective with our time and effort, I believe that a well managed and resourced Design System has unlocked more sustainable scale. The BBC's incredible reach and breadth of supported services and brands is a unique and fascinating example of a Design System at such huge scale, and therein lies many lessons learned and successes that we can share with the wider front-end community.
Design System contributors, maintainers, and leadership who are looking to understand how best to support their systems when up against the challenges of scaling expectations.
Whether your system is brand new and you're looking to avoid future scaling issues, or your're managing a super mature system that is actively supporting multiple brands and teams, you should be able to walk away with ideas for at least one area of your Design System that you can make improvements in.
Topics
QCon London 2025 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
Part of the track
Emerging Trends in the Frontend and Mobile Hosted by Sareh Heidari Senior Software Engineer @F1 Arcade®From the same track
Wednesday 9 April
10:35 Windsor (5th Fl.) Session migration So You’ve Decided To Do a Technical Migration Sophie Koonin Web Engineering Lead @Monzo, Writer, Speaker and Web 1.0 Enthusiast It seems like there’s always a hot new library or framework promising great things. But people often forget about the pain and effort required to move from an old technology to a new one. How long will it take? If you finish, will it be worth it? 11:45 Windsor (5th Fl.) Session design systems Scaling the BBC Design System: Tooling, Community, Governance and Gardening Sophie Beaumont Software Engineering Manager @BBC 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? 13:35 Windsor (5th Fl.) Session architecture Mobile Server-Driven UI at Scale Rafael Ring Senior Staff Software Engineer, Mobile Platform Team @Nubank, 10+ Years Working Full Stack Delivering changes to mobile applications is always painful: dealing with store reviews, users that don't update their apps and multiple concurrent versions being used at the same time. 14:45 Windsor (5th Fl.) Session web performance Speed at Scale: Optimizing the Largest CX Platform Out There Matheus Albuquerque Staff Software Engineer @Medallia, Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies, Programme Committee @React Summit US, Mentor @TechLabs, International Speaker, Technical Reviewer In a world with a wide variety of network connections, any user can have a slow experience, and apps that delight users on fast connections can barely be usable on slow ones. 15:55 Mountbatten (6th Fl.) Session frontend The Ideal Micro-Frontends Platform Luca Mezzalira Director of 50 Cents Media | Former AWS & DAZN | QCon Cohorts Facilitator | O'Reilly Author | International Speaker | Architecture Storyteller Micro-frontends can help organizations scale frontend development, but without the right foundations, they often lead to unnecessary complexity and performance issues. How can you implement them effectively while avoiding common pitfalls?