Design Standard Lead

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.

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.

• 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.
• 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.

• 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.

• Strong strategic thinking with the ability to connect technical standards to business value.
• Excellent communication, facilitation and stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to influence across functions, divisions and professional disciplines without relying only on formal authority.
• Strong understanding of product development, engineering processes, platform thinking, modularization and portfolio complexity.
• Ability to balance standardization and flexibility in a pragmatic way.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Structured, persistent and capable of driving progress in a global matrix organization.
• Comfortable working with both technical detail and executive-level direction.
• Strong sense of customer value, usability, operational impact and lifecycle thinking.
• Collaborative mindset with the ability to create trust, shared ownership and an active community around design standards.

• A relevant university degree, preferably at Master's level, within engineering, industrial engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, product development, innovation management or a related field.
• Minimum five years of experience in product development, engineering, design standards, platform development, product architecture,…