Designing for an old-school engineering company

Designing for an old-school engineering company

Product Design Manager, Cisco

Product Design Manager, Cisco

Product Design Manager, Cisco

Core responsibilities

  • Managing up to 5 direct reports, growing their skills and careers

  • Documentation, Figma library, and UI framework design

  • Development-design bridge

  • Managing up to 5 direct reports, growing their skills and careers

  • Documentation, Figma library, and UI framework design

  • Development-design bridge

Key accomplishments

  • $1.5+ million in time saved per year

  • Launching new documentation on zeroheight (SaaS + CMS)

  • Design system integration into the design process

  • Strategy execution workshops to inform IA

  • Placed in AI design hackathon

  • $1.5+ million in time saved per year

  • Launching new documentation on zeroheight (SaaS + CMS)

  • Design system integration into the design process

  • Strategy execution workshops to inform IA

  • Placed in AI design hackathon

Challenges & growth

  • Advocating for design, especially design systems, in an engineering-driven organization

  • Navigating a non-hierarchical decision tree to come together on critical design decisions

  • When to delegate how to enable others to lead

  • Advocating for design, especially design systems, in an engineering-driven organization

  • Navigating a non-hierarchical decision tree to come together on critical design decisions

  • When to delegate how to enable others to lead

Aligning 100+ designers and developers

My team made tremendous progress on our design system adoption through:

  • Aligning our Figma library with our UI framework

  • Establishing patterns and templates

  • Bringing in engineering early in the design process

  • Documentation that's extensive and constantly growing

High adoption, high usage

The products we support (CX Cloud, PX Cloud) have high adoption. Designers used our Figma library and developers preferred using common components.

Our constant challenge is how to balance the need for customization. We don't want to stifle designer creativity but also want to support engineering to lower the time to ship.

2 million +
Figma component instances

Designers are on average 25% faster

67
components maintained

We have high accuracy across design and development but still have gaps to fill

4,188
production instances

20%+ increased developer proficiency

100%
designers using the system

We have over 300 Figma pages that are using the library to some capacity

Documentation overhaul

We went on long procurement journey to launch our documentation on zeroheight. It's not easy bringing a new tool to Cisco.

  • 100% of components documented

  • Over 8k visitors over the last 6 months

  • Near 100% rating of helpfulness per page

Side quest: AI Hackathon

I lead a team of designers to generate a realistic use case to integrate AI into CX Cloud.

We used the concept of web scraping to help users auto-magically remediate security advisories. It would also train users on best security practices based on Cisco LLMs.

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© Brian Eckmann