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Introduction

The Carbon Design System is IBM’s open-source design system for digital products and experiences. Rooted in the foundations of the IBM Design Language, Carbon provides working code, platform assets, design kits, patterns, guidelines, and tooling—all sustained by an active community of contributors.

 

Carbon exists to help internal product teams move faster, reduce rework, and build consistent, accessible, and elegant user experiences. By delivering universal, reusable assets, Carbon frees teams from reinventing foundational elements and allows them to focus on their product’s highest-value user needs.

Your role and responsibilities

Carbon Design System is seeking a Product Manager to lead our Core library — the shared, common infrastructure that powers IBM’s ecosystem of components, patterns, and tooling. This role requires a platform-oriented product mindset, strong systems thinking, and the ability to synthesize needs across many teams with competing priorities.

 

As a PM in this space, you will:

  • Own the backlog for the core primitives, libraries, styles, and cross-cutting capabilities that nearly every Carbon asset depends on

  • Balance multiple streams of work, context-switching between design, engineering, accessibility, governance, adoption support, and stakeholder requests

  • Evaluate input from many product teams with diverse use cases, and distill requirements into universal capabilities that scale

  • Make decisions that optimize for long-term ecosystem health—prioritizing reusability, maintainability, performance, and design integrity over one-off solutions

 

This is a highly collaborative role that interfaces with designers, engineers, maintainers, adoption partners, platform architecture, and product teams building on Carbon. Success requires listening deeply, navigating ambiguity, and guiding trade-offs that preserve the system’s coherence while unblocking teams at scale.

Key Responsibilities

  • Lead backlog prioritization, story development, and sizing for Carbon’s Core Libraries and foundational capabilities

  • Run agile ceremonies in partnership with engineering, including grooming, sizing sessions, and iteration planning

  • Work across multiple concurrent initiatives while context-switching fluidly between stakeholders, disciplines, and levels of abstraction

  • Engage with product teams to understand patterns in needs, extract reusable requirements, and steward contributions back into the system

  • Collaborate closely with design and engineering to ensure components and patterns meet accessibility, performance, and UX standards

  • Define and measure success criteria for core libraries, including adoption, usage telemetry, and quality metrics

  • Advocate for consistency, design language fidelity, accessibility, and long-term lifecycle health of Carbon’s assets

  • Communicate clearly and confidently to technical and non-technical audiences, ensuring shared understanding of priorities and roadmap

Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Bachelor's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise

  • 3–5 years as a product manager owning delivery of a product, platform, or application

  • Experience managing roadmaps, prioritization frameworks, KPIs, and business justification for product decisions

  • Hands-on experience operating within agile and scrum processes:

    • Backlog refinement

    • Grooming and sizing

    • Iteration planning

    • Continuous delivery and feedback loops

  • Demonstrated ability to operate in multi-stakeholder environments with shifting priorities

  • Proven systems thinking with an ability to reason about interdependencies, lifecycle impacts, and ecosystem-level design

  • Strong written and verbal communication skills with comfort presenting to executives, engineers, and designers

Preferred technical and professional experience

  • Experience with design systems, platform products, or shared libraries

  • Experience participating in release cycles that impact large user bases, ideally at enterprise scale

  • Ability to anticipate downstream impact of design system decisions on designers, developers, adopters, and integrators

  • Background developing standards, frameworks, or platform capabilities adopted across multiple products

  • Skilled at communicating migration paths, version shifts, deprecations, and breaking changes to large, multi-disciplinary audiences

  • Experience building business cases or evaluating competitive systems

  • Familiarity with open-source principles or contributor ecosystems

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence—from machine learning to generative AI—to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM’s AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM’s hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments—a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

 

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

 

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

ABOUT IBM

IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

 

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business. 

 

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

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