Product Direction
One future for the Meraki Dashboard.
Cisco Meraki set out to picture its cloud dashboard two to three years ahead, and to bring its teams to one view of that future.
Cisco Meraki set out to picture its cloud dashboard two to three years ahead, and to bring its teams to one view of that future.
The Meraki Dashboard grew with the product, and the product grew fast.
Cloud-managed networking made Meraki a leader, and the dashboard was known for being simple to use. As engineering added capability, the interface took on redundancy, convoluted flows, and friction. Meraki wanted more than cleanup. It wanted a picture of the dashboard two to three years out, and a first release to start building toward it.
The goal was one future the whole organization could commit to.
DesignMap ran a visiontype, a research-grounded prototype of a product's future that gives an organization one concrete thing to align around. Grounded in interviews and in the daily work of network operators, the team built it in twice-weekly sessions with Meraki's product managers, designers, and engineers, and brought executives and subject matter experts into the same room. The result gave more than fifty people a single future to react to, refine, and commit to, before significant engineering time was spent.
The vision was a full story, not a single screen.
It carried across desktop and mobile and across the range of a network operator's work. Laid out end to end, the sequence gave Meraki a complete picture to weigh together, not a highlight to admire.
The vision came together as one next-generation dashboard.
It gave operators a cohesive home for the network across desktop and mobile, and it carried that story across every screen the future would need. Meraki's teams had a single, concrete thing to build toward.
The vision won broad support inside Meraki and started new work to rethink the dashboard's information architecture and hub pages. It also produced the first iteration of the component library and style guide that became Magnetic, the Meraki-born design system that went on to wider adoption across Cisco's products.
Most engagements on this page begin here: your leaders in a room, reaching a decision they will act on. Sometimes it is all you need.
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