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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