Lessons (so far) from working at a tech company CISCO

Before embarking my design journey, I thought the good design means looks good. After I start my Industrial design and Interaction design journey, I thought the foundation is good design research. Now after I start working in design (in house), I realized that putting down your designer’s ego, and work collaboratively is more important than ever. The foundation of a good design of products, service, anything is a good team. How you build the team, what people believe in, ways of thinking are so important building a great product or service.

I am quite lucky to have this opportunity to work as one the few designers Cisco hires in Norway. Working on a problem I can relate and understand feel quite nice.

We work in sprints, every 2 weeks. Challenges are in a tech company, you can feel design can become diluted. Since I believe in the power of design so much, I am applying what I learnt at school here and see what happens. Usually the user testing is quite ‘standard’ here. I also call it external participants testing cause calling people users feel wrong to me. I challenge people and even the UX researchers here to use co-creation methods. Sometimes they challenge me and I challenge back, ( I challenge the status quo and ask too may whys, this can drive people a little mad sometimes, then people tend to come back and say I do see the values it added, not everyone, at least some, then I am happy.) I really do believe even we do have the designer job title, and know some design software to make interesting visuals, that does not mean my engineers and PMs do not have good ideas, sure we argue and take a stand for our ideas, but we all have the same goal, make people’s lives easier when they interact with our products.