Cisco Systems

Over two years embedded in Cisco’s Design System team, I contributed to the maintenance, enhancement, and quality of the enterprise component library used across thousands of product pages and by design teams globally. My work covered visual design, accessibility compliance, and the creation of presentation templates that changed how the team communicated research findings to stakeholders.

Working in an enterprise design system means every enhancement must survive contact with dozens of product teams. A single component change — even a pixel — can break existing implementations. Every decision required balancing improvement against backward compatibility, WCAG AA compliance, and sign-off from global stakeholders across time zones.

01 Issue Definition & Acceptance Criteria Concise meetings with stakeholders to define the problem, scope, and success criteria before any design work began. 02 Research & Analysis Benchmarking against industry standards: Apple HIG, IBM Carbon, Atlassian Design System, Adobe Spectrum. Accessibility requirements mapped per WCAG AA. 03 Strategy: Exploration & Approaches Multiple visual and interaction approaches explored. State mapping for all interactive states: unselected, hover, selected, active, disabled. 04 Internal Review & Stakeholder Presentation Curated presentations to the full team, then to global stakeholders. Feedback documented, iterated, re-presented. 05 Enhancement Approval → Design System Meticulous integration into the live library — ensuring no disruption to existing implementations.

Selectable Card enhancement — redesigned interaction model with full state coverage and WCAG AA compliance. Cisco DNA Center components — contributed interface components for the network management platform. Presentation templates for Hero Center and LG — reusable templates that prioritized storytelling over data dumping. These templates became the standard way the team communicated research to leadership.

Component enhancements published to the global Cisco design system library — used by design teams across multiple product lines. Presentation templates adopted as the standard for stakeholder communication. Accessibility compliance maintained across all contributed components.

Working at enterprise scale taught me that the most important design skill isn’t making components — it’s making decisions that survive every team that will use them. Documentation is the real product. A beautifully designed component without clear usage guidelines and state coverage is half-finished work. The documentation is what enables adoption.

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