Customer Journey Lab lead for Business Banking Help Finance my Growth

Role Purpose

The Customer Journey Lab Director will lead the strategic and operational delivery of Barclays’ lending technology estate within Business Banking. This role is accountable for the end-to-end technology leadership across lending journeys—from requirements development through engineering, testing, and production operations. The successful candidate will drive innovation, modernisation, and resilience across the lending platforms, ensuring alignment with the CIO’s transformation agenda and Barclays’ broader business goals.

Key Responsibilities

Technology Leadership

• Own the technology strategy for lending platforms, ensuring alignment with the BB CIO’s three-year roadmap and transformation objectives.
• Lead the simplification and modernisation of the lending technology estate, including reusable capability.
• Champion engineering excellence, including DevOps, agile delivery, and continuous integration practices.

End-to-End Delivery Oversight

• Oversee the full lifecycle of lending technology delivery: requirements, design, build, test, deploy, and run.
• Ensure production stability, scalability, and resilience across all lending journeys.
• Embed cyber, security, and automated testing into every stage of delivery.

Innovation & Transformation

• Drive innovation in digital lending, including simplified STP journeys and enhanced broker propositions.
• Foster a culture of experimentation, inclusion, and psychological safety within engineering teams.

Risk & Governance

• Lead backlog management of risk, control, and cyber resilience initiatives in partnership with the Chief Controls Office.
• Ensure regulatory compliance and proactive risk mitigation across the lending technology estate.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Act as a strategic communicator and engagement lead across the CIO organisation, ensuring clarity and alignment.
• Represent the CIO in strategic partner and vendor relationships, shaping commercial engagements and delivery outcomes.

Key Skills & Experience

• Proven experience in technology leadership roles within banking or fintech, ideally with a focus on lending platforms.
• Strong understanding of agile, DevOps, and product-centric delivery models.
• Demonstrated success in leading cross-functional teams across engineering, product, and operations.
• Deep technical acumen in API design, event-driven architecture, and cloud-native platforms.
• Experience managing strategic vendor relationships and technology partnerships.
• Strong background in financial governance, workforce planning, and organisational design.

Cultural Fit

• A leader who inspires and empowers teams, with a commitment to inclusion and high performance.
• Comfortable navigating complexity and ambiguity, with a bias for action and delivery.
• Able to balance strategic thinking with hands-on execution.

Purpose of the role

To manage change projects that help the organisation achieve its strategic objectives, while ensuring that projects are delivered on time, within budget, in control and in compliance with regulatory requirements and internal policies and procedures. 

Accountabilities

• Management of change projects within the organisation, ensuring that they are delivered on time, within scope, budget, and to the required quality standards.
• Development and management of project plans that outline the scope, objectives, timelines, and resource requirements for change projects.
• Communication with stakeholders, including senior management, project teams, and external partners, to ensure that they are informed about project progress and that their needs and expectations are being met.
• Management of project teams, ensuring that they are properly resourced and that they have the necessary skills and expertise to deliver on project objectives.
• Management of project budgets, ensuring that projects are delivered within the agreed budget.
• Creation of reports on project progress to ensure that proposed solutions are delivered on time and within budget.
• Management of project risks, ensuring that risk, assumptions, issues and dependencies are identified, assessed, and mitigated as necessary.
• Facilitation of change management activities, including training and communication, to ensure that change projects are successfully implemented and embedded in the organisation.

Director Expectations

• To manage a business function, providing significant input to function wide strategic initiatives. Contribute to and influence policy and procedures for the function and plan, manage and consult on multiple complex and critical strategic projects, which may be business wide..
• They manage the direction of a large team or sub-function, leading other people managers and embedding a performance culture aligned to the values of the business. Or for an individual contributor, they lead organisation wide projects and act as deep technical expert and thought leader, identifying new ways of working and collaborating cross functionally. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees to influence decisions made outside of own function, offering significant input to function wide strategic initiatives.
• Manage, coordinate and enable resourcing, budgeting and policy creation for a significant sub-function.
• Escalates breaches of policies / procedure appropriately.
• Foster and guide compliance, ensure regulations are observed that relevant processes in place to facilitate adherence.
• Focus on the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups to both monitor and influence on behalf of Barclays, when appropriate.
• Demonstrate extensive knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division / Group to achieve the overall business objectives.
• Maintain broad and comprehensive knowledge of industry theories and practices within own discipline alongside up-to-date relevant sector / functional knowledge, and insight into external market developments / initiatives.
• Use interpretative thinking and advanced analytical skills to solve problems and design solutions in often complex/ sensitive situations.
• Exercise management authority to make significant decisions and certain strategic decisions or recommendations within own area.
• Negotiate with and influence stakeholders at a senior level both internally and externally.
• Act as principal contact point for key clients and counterparts in other functions/ businesses divisions.
• Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division.

All Senior 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.

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.