HP’s design system, Veneer, is a unified framework that drives consistency and quality while enabling efficiency across HP’s digital ecosystem.

It delivers scalable foundations, including UI components, patterns, and guidelines, combined with community-driven and educational initiatives that help teams to build with confidence. Veneer empowers product teams to create experiences that embody HP's brand values while advancing usability, accessibility, and long-term sustainability.

The Veneer governance model has produced measurable outcomes, such as:

• Achieved a 50% speed improvement in UI development
• Realized $1M in cost savings across HP projects

How:

• By streamlining design and development workflows
• By reducing duplication of efforts
• By accelerating delivery

The system adapts to diverse business needs and promotes global team collaboration, while maintaining a strong focus on quality, accessibility, and innovation to ensure seamless, trustworthy experiences for millions of HP customers worldwide.

Veneer's governance model balances flexibility with control, ensuring that the system evolves in response to business needs while maintaining design integrity.

Veneer has established a multi-tiered model that includes:

• System owners oversee standards, accessibility, and brand alignment.
• Working groups address domain-specific needs like content, interaction, and engineering practices
• Community contributors participate via structured review processes

To balance flexibility with control, exception-handling processes are centered on evidence-based analysis and system impact assessment, enabling community contributions. Contributions are encouraged through structured review processes that ensure changes are:

• Documented
• Tested
• Vetted for quality before adoption

Transparent communication channels, including regular forums, workshops, and recurrent feedback systems, enable cross-functional teams to:

• Propose enhancements for continuous, iterative improvement
• Share best practices

Automation (issue templates, workflow triggers, automated filtering) prioritizes high-impact requests and reduces manual triage. Additionally, QA pipelines validate contributions for accessibility and brand compliance.

By embedding governance into daily workflows, Veneer empowers teams to innovate and collaborate while safeguarding cohesion and scalability. This inclusive model has fostered a thriving community of practitioners, making Veneer both a reliable system of record and a catalyst for continuous improvement.

Veneer has transformed HP’s traditional hardware-centric landscape into a thriving, consistent digital product ecosystem. The system has enabled faster onboarding for teams, shortened time-to-market for digital solutions, and significantly improved accessibility compliance across platforms.

At the center of this success lies Veneer’s governance model:

• Facilitating and aligning key decision-making processes
• Resolving cross-team misalignments through regular governance rituals
• Ensuring contributions meet rigorous quality standards

The result: a 50% design and development speed improvement and high user satisfaction.

By aligning experiences around shared standards and processes, Veneer has strengthened the HP brand in software experience by:

• Internally: fostering a culture of collaboration and knowledge-sharing, enabling hundreds of designers and developers worldwide to work more effectively.
• Externally: benefiting customers through intuitive, inclusive, and cohesive experiences.

Veneer's impact is both operational and strategic, positioning HP's design practice as a leader in scalable governance.

Veneer’s governance process is dynamic and ever-evolving. The team continuously evaluates and adapts governance processes based on lessons learned, such as overcoming initial resistance to standardization and addressing the challenges of scaling across diverse technical environments.