Design System Technical Product Owner

Join Barclays as a Design System Technical Product Owner and play a pivotal role in shaping and scaling a strategic design system that underpins both customer-facing and colleague digital experiences. In this hybrid Product Owner and Scrum Master position, you will drive the vision, value, and adoption of the design system across a multidisciplinary team of 30+ specialists spanning design, engineering, and platform capabilities, organised into squads focused on Design, Web (React, Angular, CSS), Native, and React Native technologies. You will define and communicate a clear product strategy, align stakeholders around shared goals, and own and prioritise the backlog to ensure delivery of high-impact, user-centric capabilities. Alongside this, you will lead agile delivery excellence through strong facilitation, continuous improvement, and effective team collaboration, enabling the creation of consistent, accessible, and scalable digital experiences across Barclays’ ecosystem.

To be successful in this role, you will need the following:

• Proven ability to influence diverse stakeholders and drive large-scale adoption initiatives.
• Strong ownership of Agile and Scrum practices, including backlog management, roadmap planning, and product strategy definition.
• Deep experience with enterprise design systems, including component-based architecture, design tokens, design-to-code workflows, and accessibility standards.
• Demonstrated expertise in release and versioning strategies, including semantic versioning and coordination of cross-platform releases to minimise downstream impact
• Effective cross-functional collaboration with design, engineering, and platform teams to deliver cohesive solutions.

Some other highly valued skills may include:

• Strong ability to leverage data and analytics to inform prioritisation, track adoption, and measure impact across reuse, efficiency, and consistency.
• Demonstrated capability to apply insights that support evidence-based decision-making, prioritisation, and investment planning.
• Expertise in defining and evolving governance models, contribution frameworks, and operating principles to ensure consistency at scale.
• Effective at driving adoption and cultural change, fostering a reuse-first mindset through clear communication, targeted training, and community engagement.

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen, strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills.

The successful candidate can be based in Manchester (Piccadilly Place), Knutsford (Radbroke Hall), or Northampton (Pavilion Drive).

Purpose of the role

To collaborate with product owners and other technical teams involved in the product development process and utilise their knowledge of the bank’s technologies to enact the vision defined in the product roadmap. 

Accountabilities

• Provision of subject matter expertise to support the collaboration between the product owner and the technical side of product development.
• Support the development and implementation of the product strategy and vision defined in the product roadmap and communicate them with the relevant stakeholders and the development team.
• Collaboration with internal stakeholders to gather and prioritise product requirements and features based on business value and feasibility that are well defined, measurable and secure.
• Development and implementation of assessments to ensure continuous testing and improvement of product quality and performance.
• Monitoring of product performance to identify opportunities for optimisation that meets the banks performance standards.
• Stay abreast of the latest industry technology trends and technologies, to evaluate and adopt new approaches to improve product development and delivery.

Assistant Vice President Expectations

• To advise and influence decision making, contribute to policy development and take responsibility for operational effectiveness. Collaborate closely with other functions/business divisions.
• Lead a team performing complex tasks, using well developed professional knowledge and skills to deliver on work that impacts the whole business function. Set objectives and coach employees in pursuit of those objectives, appraisal of performance relative to objectives and determination of reward outcomes.
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.
• OR for an individual contributor, they will lead collaborative assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will identify new directions for assignments and/or projects, identifying a combination of cross functional methodologies or practices to meet required outcomes.
• Consult on complex issues; providing advice to People Leaders to support the resolution of escalated issues.
• Identify ways to mitigate risk and developing new policies/procedures in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Take ownership for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work done.
• Perform work that is closely related to that of other areas, which requires understanding of how areas coordinate and contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the organisation sub-function.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategy.
• Engage in complex analysis of data from multiple sources of information, internal and external sources such as procedures and practises (in other areas, teams, companies, etc.) to solve problems creatively and effectively.
• Communicate complex information. 'Complex' information could include sensitive information or information that is difficult to communicate because of its content or its audience.
• Influence or convince stakeholders to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.