Lead, Design System

This role aligns to industry level titles such as Director of Design Systems.

Location: London - Hybrid

Role Summary

At M38, you are the group-level design leader accountable for Nebula, Pearson's enterprise Product Design System (PDS). Thoughtfully scalable design systems with beautifully-crafted componentry remain foundational — your role is to extend it beyond any single team, ensuring Pearson can consistently ship high-quality, accessible, brand-aligned, AI-accelerated product experiences at enterprise scale, by building once and reusing across business units.

You lead a specialized, cross-functional team of product, design, and engineering specialists that creates, governs, and evolves Nebula's reusable components, semantic tokens, standards, and adoption tooling. Higher Ed has proven the model with measurable reductions in build effort, embedded accessibility, and materially faster enterprise-wide updates. Your remit is to scale that capability into Pearson's enterprise UI operating layer.

You own:

• Enterprise Nebula strategy, vision, and multi-year platform direction
• Adoption, governance, and migration strategy across business units
• Executive alignment, investment narrative, and value measurement
• AI-enabled design and engineering acceleration workflows
• Leadership of the Nebula design and engineering team

You ensure the design system is not a downstream service — it is a systemized multiplier of speed, quality, accessibility, and brand consistency across Pearson.

Scope: What You Own (and What You Don't)

1) Enterprise Design System Vision & Platform Leadership

Drive the long-term direction of Nebula as shared enterprise infrastructure.

• Lead a Pearson-wide product audit in Q4 2026 to identify high-revenue, high-usage products and corporate functions and assess their compatibility and migration readiness (detailed in the audit program plan)
• Use the audit to outline the Nebula roadmap with individual product teams and corporate functions, so the team hits the ground running once fully hired in Q1 2027
• Set the multi-product Nebula roadmap in partnership with your Product Lead, spanning BU migrations, Platinum DS integration, and Content/AI readiness
• Own token, component, and theming architecture strategy built for flexibility and consistency, in partnership with your Principal Engineer
• Embed WCAG 2.2 accessibility and usability standards at the component level, reducing remediation exposure and improving procurement readiness
• Ensure the system supports Pearson's modernisation, rebrand, and AI-native product strategies

2) Adoption, Governance & Migration Strategy

Ensure Nebula is actually used — adoption is the benefit case.

• Own the enterprise governance model: consume-before-customize standards, change requests, exceptions, and release trains
• Drive roadmap-committed BU migrations with named products, dates, and accountable owners
• Prioritize high-frequency component migration first (buttons, inputs, cards, tables, modals, navigation, alerts, AI panels) to retire the most repeated bespoke UI work
• Direct the audit and adoption platform your team builds — surfacing adoption, reuse rates, avoided rebuilds, accessibility readiness, and rebrand propagation through common telemetry

3) AI-Enabled Acceleration Program Leadership

Define how AI accelerates design and engineering production safely and effectively.

• Set the strategy for AI agents, orchestration, and automation across the Nebula pipeline — codemods, token audits, automated accessibility checks, and LLM evaluation — delivered through your Infrastructure & AI Specialist
• Establish prompt frameworks, generation guardrails, QA models, and human-in-the-loop validation
• Ensure AI-native and content-rich experiences inherit governed interaction patterns, accessibility standards, and responsible-AI guardrails
• Partner with AI platform, data, and engineering leadership across Pearson

4) Executive Alignment & Value Narrative

Operate as the enterprise voice for Nebula's investment case.

• Own the executive narrative: translate system investments into product development efficiency, capacity released, and enterprise outcomes
• Report against the business case — payback, adoption, reuse rate, and benefits realisation — with credible, telemetry-backed evidence
• Align Product, Engineering, Accessibility, Learning, AI, and Brand leadership on shared standards and sequencing
• Influence BU roadmap prioritisation so adoption capacity is committed, not aspirational

5) Team Leadership & Cross-Functional Partnership

Build and lead a high-leverage, specialised team spanning design and engineering.

• Manage and coach the Nebula team across product, design, and engineering disciplines
• Ensure Design → Code → Content → AI pipeline alignment: Figma/code parity, Storybook as the single source of truth, and clean designer-to-developer handoff
• Upskill Brand, Product Design, Platform Engineering, and AI teams on scalable, systemised ways of working
• Balance central ownership with BU flexibility — the central team governs the platform; consuming teams deliver product-specific adoption