Cisco DNA Center
- Role
- Design Manager2017–2020
- Team
- Hands-on manager. Grew the design team from 3 to 10+ designers in San Jose and Bangalore, working with 9 PMs, 6 TMEs and 200+ engineers.
- Outcome
- Cut network setup from 3 months to 2 weeks: guided, intent-driven workflows replaced the command line, so admins could set up their own networks. Won Cisco’s You Amaze award twice in 2019, once for shipping SD-WAN while onboarding 4 designers.
Building the team
A team of 3, grown to 11
I built and ran Cisco’s SD-WAN design team, 10 designers and a user researcher across San Jose and Bangalore, and won Cisco’s You Amaze award twice in 2019.
Context
Cisco had bought Viptela for SD-WAN, and its management software needed fixing while a full 2.0 redesign was planned. We started with 3 product designers, including me, beside 9 PMs, 6 technical marketing engineers and 200+ engineers.
Decision
The first calls were about structure, not screens. One team for today’s product and one for the 2.0 redesign, with its own UI engineers, so fixing the current release never stalled the next one. Then I grew the team to 10+ in San Jose and Bangalore, adding a design thinker and a user researcher, and onboarded 4 designers in the middle of an SD-WAN release.
How I led
Wrote how we work. I wrote the team’s onboarding and design process, so a designer in Bangalore worked the way one in San Jose did.Gave every role an owner. A RACI for every step, from use case to demo, and a kickoff for each feature with a designer, a PM, a UI developer and a TME.Sized work to people. Every feature XL to S at kickoff, so the biggest was designed first and the smallest got a QA pass instead.Kept one rhythm across time zones. Twice-weekly stand-ups, a weekly sync with engineering and one UX tracker I owned.
What I’d do differently
Leave room after sign-off. Freezing a design until it shipped let engineering build without the ground moving, but some good ideas waited a whole release.
“Those who directly report to him will agree – he is inclusive, a good coach and knows how to get more from a team work.”
“He really cares about his team and ensures everyone is included, engaged, inspired and motivated.”
SD-WAN 2.0
83 days to 2 weeks
SD-WAN 2.0 became part of DNA Center: guided setup that starts from how you want to run your network, then finds, maps and secures it.
Context
vManage, the SD-WAN software Cisco got with Viptela, was hard to learn and hard to sell: customers and sales engineers logged 105 usability fixes, and its Network Design feature covered only 15–20% of real deployments. Admins set up their networks by hand, with scripts and as many as four outside tools, and setup took 83 days on average. At Cisco Live 2019, a Wells Fargo network admin put it plainly: “There are just too many manual processes for setup and designing of our WAN network.”
Decision
Start from intent, not configuration. 12 customers spent three days with us mapping how a network gets planned, designed, secured and deployed, and voted on where it hurts: no command line, everything driven by policy, far too many tools. So SD-WAN 2.0 became part of DNA Center as guided setup: it asks how you want to run your network, then discovers your devices, maps them and secures them, and you can leave mid-setup and come back to what to do next. We tested it with 14 customers. They wanted licensing in the flow, not after it, so discovery stops to say when it finds more devices than the contract covers.
Impact
- 83 days → 2 weeks
- to set up a network, on average
What I’d do differently
Put real customers in every sprint. A troubleshooting sprint with none in the room only confirmed what we already thought.
DNA Center is now Cisco Catalyst Center
The guided workflows and intent-first setup my team designed became the foundation of how admins run their networks. Cisco has since built on them with AI, which now helps admins connect, secure and automate their networks from one place.