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ABOUT RACHAEL

Hi there,
nice to meet ya

I’m Rachael, a product designer and builder leading AI and Agentic Apps UX at Cisco—from research and strategy to production code.

Rachael’s illustration of herself holding a coffee cup, surrounded by colorful flowers
RÉSUMÉ & IMPACT

Product Design Lead · AI & Enterprise Platforms

Download my résumé (PDF)

30%

Shorter calls at one customer after the CX AI routing work I led.

CX AI routing ↗

200M

Active users across the Cisco Collaboration products I’ve designed for.

~2 hours

Saved per analytics plan with my Figma plugin in a small designer group.

Figma plugin ↗

4 governance patterns

Defined permissions, approvals, audit, and recovery for AI admin workflows.

AI strategy ↗

0 → 1

Co-founded, designed, and built Plan Zinnia’s production marketplace.

Plan Zinnia ↗

Experience

Cisco Systems · AI in Admin UX LeadSeptember 2025–present
  • Lead AI and Agentic Apps UX across Developer Portal, App Hub, and Control Hub, connecting developer registration and app discovery with enterprise configuration and governance.
  • 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 UX design for CX AI routing. Customer-reported results included a 30% reduction in call duration at one customer and an average reduction of 27 seconds per AI-routed call across 2,198 calls at another.
  • 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 · Product Design Manager, Partner HubMay 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’s published partner revenue context

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, CallingMay 2017–May 2019
  • Designed enterprise admin tools for large-scale, multi-tenant calling platforms.
Plan Zinnia · Co-Founder and Chief Product OfficerJanuary 2023–present
  • Designed and developed vendor onboarding, availability, booking, and payments.
  • Sole designer and developer of the production platform, collaborating with Min on product.

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

rachael.marr@gmail.com

Fun facts

Fluent in Japanese

My first BA was in Japanese language, literatures, and cultures. こんにちは!

Piano in progress

Learning piano has been hard, humbling, and a lot of fun.

Explore my talks and workshops