Design Standards Lead

Reports to: Innovation Excellence Director

Job Summary

The Design Standards Lead owns and evolves a unified design standards framework across JBT Marel, ensuring that our products, platforms, modules, and user experiences support the company's strategy as a full-line provider. The role creates alignment across product portfolios and functions, supports common platforms and reusable design principles, and helps ensure that design decisions are made with clear business intent. The objective is to create consistency where it adds value and allow distinctiveness where it better serves the customer, product, market, or technology.

Scope and Authority

The Design Standards Lead is responsible for setting direction, governance, and ways of working for design standards across JBT Marel. The role ensures that standards are not only technical documents but practical strategic tools that reduce complexity, improve scalability, strengthen customer experience, and support integrated solution offerings. A key responsibility is to drive cross-functional community and governance processes that foster shared ownership across divisions, Innovation, Product Management, Supply Chain, Service, Software, and other relevant functions. The scope covers design standards across hardware, mechanical design principles, electrical architecture, automation, software platforms, human-machine interfaces, user interfaces, and customer-facing product experience. The role supports alignment where it creates value for JBT Marel as a full-line provider, while also making it clear where differentiation is the right strategic choice.

You will report into the Innovation Excellence Director and work closely with central innovation teams, divisions, category management, product owners, engineering communities, and Supply Chain.

Primary Accountability

• Build and govern the direction for category management, where technical direction, preferred solutions, and design boundaries are set in collaboration with Innovation and Supply Chain.
• Alignment should be a conscious choice, not a default assumption.
• Act as a key collaborator across divisions to align design standards with broader innovation roadmaps, platform strategies, modularization principles, and integrated solution offerings.
• Champion design clarity as a strategic enabler by establishing transparent guidelines that help teams understand when to align for a cohesive cross-portfolio experience, and when differentiation serves the customer or product better.

Main Tasks

• Own, develop, and maintain the global design standards framework for JBT Marel.
• Define and facilitate the governance model for design standards, including roles, responsibilities, decision rights, review cadence, ownership, and approval processes.
• Drive alignment across divisions on common design principles, platforms, modules, interfaces, and technical direction.
• Establish clear guidelines for when standardization is required, when harmonization is beneficial, and when differentiation is justified.
• Collaborate closely with Innovation and Supply Chain to set direction and boundaries for category management, preferred components, and platform principles.
• Align design standards with product roadmaps, innovation priorities, modularization strategies, and full-line solution development.
• Facilitate cross-functional design standard forums, key user groups, expert communities, and regular alignment meetings throughout the year.
• Build and strengthen a global design standards community across Innovation and supply chain.
• Ensure relevant standards cover hardware, electrical architecture, automation, software platforms, user interfaces, hygienic design, safety, serviceability, manufacturability, sustainability, and compliance.
• Identify areas where lack of standardization creates unnecessary cost, risk, complexity, inefficiency, or inconsistent customer experience.
• Support the development of common design libraries, templates, guidelines, and decision tools.
• Create a clear process for maintaining, updating, communicating, and retiring design standards.
• Support integration between legacy JBT and legacy Marel ways of working by identifying best practices and scaling them where relevant.
• Provide recommendations to leadership on design standard priorities, risks, gaps, and opportunities.
• Track progress of design standards initiatives and secure momentum across functions and divisions.