Fluent in Japanese
My first BA was in Japanese language, literatures, and cultures. こんにちは！
ABOUT RACHAEL
Hi there,
nice to meet ya
I’m Rachael, I help teams navigate complex product challenges—from enterprise AI strategy and platform direction to shipping production experiences used by customers every day.
Fun facts
Pattern designer
I create surface patterns through Ermerr Studios.
Piano in progress
Learning piano has been hard, humbling, and a lot of fun.
02 / THE WAY I THINK
I start by understanding
what people need to do.
The best design starts before the first screen.
I work where product strategy, systems thinking, and human experience meet. At Cisco, I’ve spent more than nine years shaping collaboration products, with a focus on bringing clarity to enterprise complexity.
Today, that includes leading AI administration design. Outside Cisco, I’m building Plan Zinnia, taking the same curiosity and product thinking into the world of wedding vendors.
03 / RÉSUMÉ
Designing for people
working with AI.
Rachael Marr · AI in Admin UX Lead, Cisco
Designer with 11+ years across graphic and product design, including 9+ years in enterprise administration and platform UX. I lead AI administration strategy, build tools that help designers measure outcomes, and work directly in product code.
75% shorter onboarding
Led a Partner Hub onboarding revamp that reduced average onboarding time from 40 minutes to 10 minutes, based on end-to-end customer analytics.
Explore Partner Hub200M users · 121K admins
Design work across Cisco Collaboration products serving 200 million active users globally and 121,000 Control Hub admins.
Two hours saved
Built a Figma analytics plugin that saved an average of about two hours per analytics plan in a small group of designers, including me.
Explore the pluginTwo merged contributions
Implemented clearer AI sources and an earlier position for Agentic Apps in Control Hub. The Sources improvement has been released.
See the improvementsAI administration strategy
Defined how admin workflows span Control Hub and external AI tools, with permissions, approvals, audit, and recovery.
Explore the strategyFrom concept to production
Co-founded, designed, and helped build Plan Zinnia, connecting vendor discovery, messaging, booking, and payments.
Explore Plan ZinniaBUSINESS SCALE
Cisco’s Collaboration business reported $4.3 billion in product revenue in FY2026.
Business and product scale provide context for my work. Cisco FY2026 financial results
Experience
Cisco Systems · AI in Admin UX LeadSeptember 2025–present
- Lead AI strategy for admin workflows, defining how AI supports decisions while preserving human authority and accountability.
- Developed an AI maturity model and working frameworks to align design, product, and engineering on appropriate capabilities and control.
- Created an Agentic UX playbook covering embedded and extended experiences, use cases, audit, and reusable skills. Shared guidelines were authored by a colleague.
- Currently working with teams to adopt the strategy and with Yankun Wang to review audit logging as support for edit capabilities develops.
Cisco Systems · Lead UX Manager, Contact CenterJuly 2023–September 2025
- Led a team of two designers and advocated for their designs and product thinking.
- Created a dedicated CX AI area that brought AI settings together and included help content so customers could understand features before enabling them.
- Advocated for the unified AI area despite stakeholder doubts that consolidating settings would make a difference. Customers expressed enthusiasm when shown the experience; quantitative outcomes are still being gathered.
Cisco Systems · Partner Hub design leadershipMay 2020–July 2023
- Led a small design team working on Partner Hub, Cisco’s platform for partners.
- Led an onboarding revamp that reduced average completion time from 40 minutes to 10 minutes—a 75% reduction.
- Designed partner-platform workflows supporting Cisco’s partner ecosystem. Cisco reports that around 90% of its revenue flows through partners.
Cisco Systems · Senior Product Designer, Calling PlatformMay 2019–May 2020
- Led UX for calling administration, including PSTN integrations and provisioning workflows.
- Translated technical constraints into usable system interfaces.
BroadSoft, acquired by Cisco · Product Designer, CallingJune 2017–May 2019
- Designed enterprise admin tools for large-scale, multi-tenant calling platforms.
Plan Zinnia · Co-founder / Chief Creative OfficerMay 2022–present
- Owned UX across vendor onboarding, availability, booking, and payments.
- Helped build the production platform using Figma, Supabase, Stripe, and a React-based stack.
Earlier design experience
National Trust for Historic Preservation · Graphic Designer
2013–2015. Department designer for Preservation magazine.
Cortina Productions · UX internship
Summer 2016.
Education
- M.S., Human-Computer Interaction · University of Maryland, College Park · May 2017
- B.A., Graphic Design · Illinois Institute of Art, Chicago · June 2012
- B.A., Japanese Language · University of Maryland, College Park · December 2007
Skills and tools
Platform and systems UX · AI-human interaction · AI governance · Interaction design · Research and insight synthesis · Product strategy · Cross-functional leadership · Analytics planning · Implementation
Figma · Amplitude · Jira · Miro · GitHub · ChatGPT · Claude · Supabase · Stripe · React-based tooling
Languages: English and Japanese