Project
Design Leadership at Cisco ThousandEyes
My Role
Head of Design
Category
Leadership
Year
2020-2023
Summary
Scaling Design through hypergrowth and a $1B Acquisition
Overview
When I joined ThousandEyes in early 2020, the design function was still nascent, just two generalist designers operating in a reactive, service-model capacity. There was no design system, no user research discipline, and no strategic voice for design in product decisions.
Following Cisco’s acquisition, the company was scaling rapidly. I saw an opportunity to redefine design’s role, not just as a craft function, but as a strategic lever for growth, product excellence, and integration at scale.
TL;DR
Phase 1: Building Foundations of a Scalable Design Team
I built the design org from 2 to 12 people across specialized functions, hiring leaders in product design, design systems, and platform UX. Beyond headcount, I focused on establishing clarity of roles, team rituals, and cross-functional integration.
- Product Design for core workflows and new product lines
- UX Research to drive discovery and usability studies
- Design Systems to ensure UI consistency and efficiency
- Platform Design focused on dashboards, alerts, onboarding, and PLG
We shifted from a generalist, reactive model to an embedded model, where designers were fully integrated into scrum teams. I also hired our first Design System Lead and formed a dedicated Design System squad in collaboration with engineering.
To support the scale, I established clear frameworks:
- Led the creation of structured hiring rubrics, interview processes, and candidate experience touchpoints
- Introduced a 30-60-90 onboarding model to ramp new hires efficiently within product domains.
- Shifted the team from a reactive support model to an embedded design partnership within cross-functional squads.
This shift unlocked faster delivery, stronger design/eng/product alignment, and early influence in product roadmapping.
Phase 2: UX Strategy, Design System, and Research Practices
Once the foundational team was in place, I focused on maturing the design practice across three key dimensions: system consistency, user research, and strategic product influence. The aim was to create scalable frameworks that would improve UX quality, reduce inefficiencies, and give design a stronger voice in product decisions.
Building a Scalable Design System
At the time, ThousandEyes had no formal design system. Engineering teams reused ad-hoc components, which resulted in inconsistent visuals, redundant development effort, and a fragmented user experience. Standardizing this was critical, not just for UX, but for engineering velocity and design/development collaboration.
I led the creation of our first formal design system:
- Defined tokens, themes, typography, layouts, and reusable components
- Collaborated with engineering to form a dedicated design system squad with shared ownership and governance
- Aligned the system with Cisco’s broader product ecosystem to ensure cross-platform consistency
- Documented everything publicly for internal use and trained teams on how to adopt and contribute
The system drastically reduced UI inconsistencies, enabled faster prototyping, and created a shared language between design and engineering, especially critical as our product portfolio and team scaled.
Establishing a User Research Practice
Prior to my joining, there was no formal UX research practice. Product decisions were largely intuition-based, with little user input before feature launch. I saw an opportunity to institutionalize research as a core pillar of our process.
I built a scalable, lightweight research function by:
- Training designers on moderated and unmoderated research methods
- Formalizing research planning, usability testing, and synthesis practices
- Creating customer personas, journey maps, and mental models that were adopted across PM and GTM teams
- Launching monthly customer research labs where product/design teams could test early concepts and get fast feedback
This created a more user-informed culture, where product strategy was increasingly shaped by real user behaviors, needs, and friction points. Over time, research insights became core inputs to roadmap planning and design critiques.
Phase 3: Product-Led Growth & UX Simplification
As we expanded post-acquisition, it became clear that our UX couldn’t scale with user demand. Onboarding was complex, and PLG motions were hindered by over-reliance on solution architects.
I led a redesign of our onboarding experience to support self-serve adoption:
- Introduced goal-based user flows tailored to key personas.
- Simplified high-friction journeys to reduce activation barriers.
- Instrumented UX metrics to track engagement, drop-off, and onboarding completion.
These changes improved product adoption, reduced support load, and helped us operationalize PLG across the org.
ThousandEyes’ greatest differentiator was its ability to surface deep network insights, but our visualizations didn’t always support that value. They were inconsistent, hard to interpret, and lacked standard patterns, leading to confusion and underutilization.
To address this, I led a focused effort to standardize and elevate our data visualization system:
- Introduced a library of consistent visualization patterns, covering color usage, metadata clarity, interactivity rules, and layout behavior—fully integrated into our design system.
- Designed and launched new visualizations, including Sankey diagrams, to clearly illustrate user flows and path complexity (see: Application Insights)
- Improved the actionability of visual insights by embedding contextual guidance and simplified labeling, resulting in better comprehension and faster decision-making
Phase 4: Institutionalizing Design Ops & Team Culture
As the design team scaled rapidly across locations and disciplines, I introduced a set of DesignOps best practices to ensure we remained aligned, efficient, and collaborative.
My focus was on building repeatable systems that supported growth without sacrificing quality:
- Introduced monthly design planning rituals mapped to product OKRs to maintain alignment with business goals
- Created tighter integration between design and engineering using Jira-based tracking and sprint reviews
- Formalized team-wide rituals like weekly critiques, monthly retros, and cross-pod design jams to foster continuous feedback and peer learning
- Built and maintained a centralized team wiki to document our principles, patterns, and design decisions—scaling onboarding and knowledge continuity
As our team became increasingly distributed across the U.S., I prioritized team culture to maintain a shared sense of purpose and connection. We created rituals like virtual meetups, collaborative Spotify playlists, and offsite-style planning sessions to foster community even during periods of high operational demand.
This culture-first approach helped the team stay motivated, cohesive, and resilient despite the challenges of remote growth and high-scale delivery.
Phase 5: Cisco Integration & Strategic Influence
Following Cisco’s acquisition of ThousandEyes, my focus shifted from building an internal design function to positioning it as a strategic driver within Cisco’s broader product ecosystem. This required both cross-org collaboration and deep design alignment ensuring that ThousandEyes was not just a standalone product, but a foundational pillar of Cisco’s vision for Full-Stack Observability (FSO).
Unifying Design Language Across Cisco
Following Cisco’s acquisition of ThousandEyes, my focus shifted from building an internal design function to positioning it as a strategic driver within Cisco’s broader product ecosystem. This required both cross-org collaboration and deep design alignment ensuring that ThousandEyes was not just a standalone product, but a foundational pillar of Cisco’s vision for Full-Stack Observability (FSO).
As part of Cisco’s design leadership forums, I represented ThousandEyes and actively contributed to unifying design languages, systems, and visual frameworks. This involved:
- Aligning our design system with Cisco’s broader visual language, ensuring consistency while preserving the unique brand and UX principles of ThousandEyes
- Partnering with system leads from AppD and Meraki to standardize interaction patterns, tokens, and UI behaviors for shared components
- Sharing our internal UX research tools, persona frameworks, and decision logs to accelerate collaboration and reduce duplicative work across product teams
This helped establish ThousandEyes not just as a network visibility solution, but as a design forward contributor to Cisco’s evolving design maturity.
Launching WAN Insights: Cisco’s First Predictive Network Product
One of the most impactful initiatives I led was the UX Design and integration of WAN Insights, a predictive analytics product that originated as a research prototype within Cisco. The goal was to transform this cutting-edge technology designed to forecast network degradation into a fully integrated, user-facing product within the ThousandEyes platform.
My contributions included:
- Staffing a dedicated design team and embedding them within the product pod
- Harmonizing the UI and workflow patterns with the existing ThousandEyes platform via our design system
- Translating complex, predictive algorithms into intuitive, explainable visualizations and decision-support tools
- Partnering closely with the VP of Product to shape beta scope, user testing plans, and GA release strategy
The product launched in 2023 to General Availability and was recognized with the Cloud Computing Product of the Year Award by TMC’s Cloud Computing Magazine, marking Cisco’s first fully operational predictive network solution.
Driving Full-Stack Observability with AppD and Meraki
Other initiatves included partnering with design and engineering leaders across Cisco to help realize their vision of full-stack observability (FSO) by integrating ThousandEyes data with:
Beyond WAN Insights, I worked with leaders across Cisco’s FSO initiative to ensure ThousandEyes data and UX patterns were integrated into other cornerstone platforms:
- AppDynamics: I led design efforts to embed ThousandEyes data directly into APM dashboards, helping application teams understand how network behavior impacts app performance.
- Meraki:Integrated ThousandEyes Internt Insights into Meraki dashboard. My team collaborated with Meraki designers to unify navigation, alerts, and network topology views
These integrations were not just technical, they required deep UX alignment, thoughtful data visualization, and seamless interaction patterns across platforms, all grounded in our design system standards. This work helped position ThousandEyes not just as a standalone product, but as a strategic pillar of Cisco’s full-stack observability vision.
Learnings & Takeaways
Here are some takeaways I would take forward in my journey as a design leader:
- Focus all efforts on hiring the best, then watch the magic happen. Never lower the bar, even when scaling fast.
- Give the team real ownership, play to their strengths, and trust them to lead.
- Keep design tightly aligned with product, eng, and GTM functions to ensure strategic involment and holistic product development
- Invest in systems and a robust architecture, not just short term deliverables
