Tesco's Digital Design System (DDS) is a unified platform that enables consistency, speed, and quality across web, iOS, and Android products. Supporting more than 150 product teams, DDS bridges the gap between design and engineering by delivering reusable components and design tokens aligned to brand standards. In 2024, DDS saved over 70,000 days of design and engineering effort—the equivalent of 193 full-time roles. Unlike fragmented, niche systems, DDS is the only design system with dedicated organisational backing and a full product team driving its evolution. Its mission: to serve as the single source of truth—One Design System—for the entire organisation.

Governance is the cornerstone of Tesco's 'One Design System' strategy. Rather than acting as a barrier, governance has been designed as a catalyst for scale, inclusivity, and trust. The governance model uses three levels of components—domain, platform, and global—balancing autonomy with alignment to preserve flexibility while maintaining brand integrity.

Key elements include:

• Clear ownership: teams know what they can contribute, how, and where responsibilities lie.
• Inclusive contribution: all disciplines can propose, test, and evolve components.
• Embedded rituals: weekly governance reviews, structured onboarding, and maturity tracking ensure governance is part of everyday practice.
• Standardised documentation: components are documented by their creators in a consistent format, ensuring clarity and usability.

Tesco's team also consolidated 95 hidden product libraries into a single, centralised sandbox—boosting visibility, reducing duplication, and fostering collaboration. Governance now empowers teams to move quickly with confidence, while ensuring quality and brand standards remain non-negotiable.

Governance has transformed Tesco's Digital Design System from a bottleneck into a strategic enabler. Product teams now move faster, collaborate more openly, and actively contribute to the system. In 2024, governance improvements delivered 70,300 days of effort saved, with a 33% year-on-year increase already recorded in 2025. Designers and engineers report higher confidence, greater trust in the system, and stronger community engagement. Adoption is expanding across products, with measurable maturity gains in design, product, and engineering. Governance has not only improved efficiency but also shifted perception: DDS is now a living system, co-owned by its users, trusted to evolve, and central to delivering consistent customer experiences.