radhika sawhney.
building and scaling design teams
About Me
Design leader with experience in building, scaling, and nurturing high-impact product-design teams at Cisco, ThousandEyes (acq. Cisco), Quid & National Robotics Engineering Center (CMU).
I blend a user-centered, research-driven philosophy with deep expertise in data-visualization. Led design at ThousandEyes through its 2020 acquisition by Cisco, rapidly scaling the product though hypergrowth, unifying the design language across Cisco products while growing a nascent team into a strategic partner to product and engineering.
Since leaving ThousandEyes, I took a year-long parental sabbatical (2023-24). Over the last year, I have been exploring business ideas, building AI first products (HappyPath AI, Splice AI, Dolce.health) and advising early stage founders on design-team formation and agentic UX.
Case Studies
What I have been upto for the last 5 years
Scaling Design at ThousandEyes
Leading Design through hypergrowth and a $1B Acquisition
Past Projects
Showcasing some of my best projects and technical achievements
ThousandEyes App Insights
Launche a new product line to detect application outages.
Quid Apps
Launched a new 'lite version' of Quid based on highly repeatable use cases.
Quid Natural Language Search
Enabling users to search in natural language pre-GPT era.
Quid Faceted Search
Redesigning the Search experience for users users to find relevant documents.
Quid Persona Deep Dive
A deep dive into the marketing ecosystem to identify and understand the various facets of users.
Drawing with Data
A visualization of a week's worth of travel data to spot patterns.
Grocery Shopping Innovation
A system to simplify the grocery shopping experience and connect it with planning and cooking meals at home.
Design Thinking for K12
A handbook for teaching Human Centered Design and its application to creative problem solving in K-12 curriculum.
Nightowl: Preventing Date Rape
A mobile application that provides users with a safe and anonymous way to report potentially dangerous situations at social events.
Sustainable Water Purification
Industrial Design and Ethnographic Studies
Professional Journey
A timeline of my professional growth and key achievements
Founder
Exploring business ideas, incubating AI-first products across digital adoption (HappyPath AI), managed data stacks (Splice AI), and digital health (Dolce.Health). Ran 80 + discovery sessions, shipped multiple POCs, and secured early design-partner traction.
UX Advisor
Setting up first design practice for an early stage SRE agent startup based in SF. Defined hiring roadmap, lean UX processes, and v1 product flows. Coaching team on continuous research and usability testing.
Head of Design
Scaled design org from 2 to 12, formalized design function, and elevated UX to a strategic partner. Post-acquisition, introduced PLG motion that lifted trial-to-paid conversion, unified design system with Cisco portfolio. Previous positions: Senior Design Manager, Principal Product Designer
Head of Design
Led a team of 5 designers & researchers to articulate the product vision and ship data-vis heavy workflows for enterprise analytics. Built scalable design system, integrated new graph visualizations, and launched new product lines, along with structuring the design org. Previous positions: UX Designer, UX Design Manager.
Design Strategist
Applied Human-Centered Design to robotics projects: mapped stakeholder needs, ran ethnographic studies, and prototyped novel HRI interfaces adopted in two DARPA-funded projects. Previous positions: Design Intern