Celebrate Your Team

Upon finding myself in the unexpected space of 'open for work' I've been overwhelmed with the amount of support my employed collegues have shared. Support is typically in the form of reposting and forwarding jobs from ex-collegues at other companies. It's a weird feeling to be sure.....

And so I'd like to suggest, to all of us that have that verde banner across their profile, that we celebrate the amazing work our teams achomplished in our tenure. Our legacy is on the shoulders of their output. Make no mistake of that.

First, Kim Dziedzic-Chesta led the impossible task of migrating our design system documentation from a 3rd party to Adobe Experience Cloud, using our own design system and less than 30 days. She did this while continuing to manage our page templates and patterns for the transformation of Cisco.com, the #1 B2B brand in the world!

Katie Chase who was fairly new to the team, and just returning from maternity leave - which we all know is never done - took on one of the most challenging jobs of building an entirely new content strategy for SaaS and direct commerce experiences while the product strategy was still evloving. A thankless task that too many marketers face, and she did it with grace.

Andrew Pollen used his experience on our B2B commerce to evolve marketing experiences and innovations in our cross-portfolio solutions - something that had no central strategy, and led a complete revamp of our customer stories.

Kyle Reed , a veteren of the team not only continued to be our stakeholders shepard by hosting design office hours, but also took the site architecture transformation reigns and defined a user-led approach to how we organized our content. Make no mistake, this is a highly political, thankless in so many ways, job that few can or should ever do.

Melissa Yanes-Pagan is another super-woman who returned from maternity leave to take on some of the most challenging innovations of the group. Melissa transformed our contact page using data and analytics into a optimized, high performing resource for global audiences. Melissa also led the UX of our newly AI powered, chatbot's voice experience. She used her UX experience in an entirely new domain, showing us all how transferrable UX truely is.

Laura Burton is the reason the Cisco.com homepage is what you see today. She took a decentralized content strategy and turned it into the aligned, timely, enterprise experience. One that is ahead of surprises instead of catching up.

Cira Louise Brown mastered the art of content models and stakeholder consultation. Cira demonstrated that design and technology together create seamless, understandable processes and efficiencies that departments alone cannot match. For all the challenges we threw at Cira, she showed us solutions.

Valérie Marliac , Tracy Southall , Kim Hughes managers unlike no other. Valérie's global knowledge, Tracy's cross-portfolio expertise, and Kim's deep product knowledge (Kim moved from our team years ago, but left an indelable mark) brought alignment to our work. Without these amazing leaders we would have been ships in the night. There is no way to express how much impact they all have on Cisco's user experience.

Arun Sapireddy & Sandip Amlani (my team from another team). Arun taught me Adobe analytics. His passion for a challenging question made me young again, like when I started doing this digital stuff for Pixar in the 90s. There are no words for the fountain of youth that Arun brings. Sandip on the other hand is sage wisdom. He's an experienced and highly educated conversion-rate optimizer who taught us all the difference between vanity and quality metrics.

Note: I was lucky to have 75% of my team woman led. Not by design, but by talent. I don't pretend to be anything but a middle-aged, white man...which comes with a whole lot of entitlement. Work that I didn't have to do. I'm grateful to have been in the presence of such brilliant people who made me a better person.

Good leaders hire, not to dicate what to do, but to be told what they should do. While its bittersweet to not continue the journey with them, I'm thankful that my team taught me more than I ever could have taught them.

思科 Rune Olslund Todd Shimizu Carrie Palin Kelly Jones Francine Katsoudas