Low-rank matrix factorization problems such as non negative matrix factorization (NMF) can be categorized as a clustering or dimension reduction technique. The latter denotes techniques designed to find representations of some high dimensional dataset in a lower dimensional manifold without a significant loss of information. If such a representation exists, the features ought to contain the most relevant features of the dataset. Many linear dimensionality reduction techniques can be formulated as a matrix factorization. In this paper, we combine the conjugate gradient (CG) method with the Barzilai and Borwein (BB) gradient method, and propose a BB scaling CG method for NMF problems. The new method does not require to compute and store matrices associated with Hessian of the objective functions. Moreover, adopting a suitable BB step size along with a proper nonmonotone strategy which comes by the size convex parameter $\eta_k$, results in a new algorithm that can significantly improve the CPU time, efficiency, the number of function evaluation. Convergence result is established and numerical comparisons of methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed method is efficient in comparison with existing methods and demonstrate the superiority of our algorithms.