Arista Networks
2021-2023
Arista Networks is an industry leader in client-to-cloud networking for large data centers, campus, and routing environments. Arista’s award-winning platforms deliver availability, agility, automation, analytics and security through an advanced network operating stack.
Size: ~3600 employees when I joined
Synopsis
Roles: Head of Design, Product Design Manager
Team size: 3-6 at varying times
I joined Arista through Awake Security as their Head of Design. Over the course of my tenure, I’ve helped scale the design team and multiply our capacity to deliver innovative designs. Through our team’s efforts, we enabled our sales teams to penetrate new markets resulting in Arista’s first billion-dollar quarter.
Product Impact
Conducted qualitative and quantitative research initiatives that influenced the direction of our security products
Hired and managed a globally distributed team of designers
Led Awake Security’s brand change to Arista NDR
Designed and led the holistic redesign of Awake Security’s product from the bottom up. This led to Arista being ranked the top XDR leader in the Forrester Wave Q2 2023 and GigaOM’s NDR Radar Report.
Managed the design strategy and incremental changes of DMF
Designed and led v0 security initiatives that I can’t really talk about yet 🤫🤐
Team & Operations Impact
Instilled a hiring pipeline that accounts for common bias, and attracted diverse talent to Arista
Hired and built a product design team for our security org, and scale adjacent teams from 6-20.
Coached junior talent and supported their growth into leadership roles
Set the vision for v0 projects and led discovery research with field and sales teams.
Formulated design career ladders to help designers track their professional development at Arista
Established design operations to ensure design quality across all Arista products
Led the creation of the first PureScript design system & design tokens
Communicated strategy and vision to teams of broader security initiatives and business goals
Partnered closely and built alliances with engineering, product management, sales engineering, and marketing
Multiplying design
My primary role at Arista is to act as a multiplying force for our design team. I accomplished this by streamlining operations, aligning work to our team’s strengths, attracting great talent, cultivating a culture of curiosity, and coaching designers through stretch assignments. This ensured we were delivering higher quality designs faster, and accomplishing more than we could individually. I’ve included some snippets from workshops I conducted to define our hiring process, career ladders, and design critique sessions.
Chris definitely has a lot of experience as a design director and I really appreciate having that type of expertise at Arista. His intuition helps guide conversations and bring the team together to work towards the same goal. He's great at organizing and keeping the team on their toes.
Breanna Glisson · Lead Product Designer
Leading network detection & response
I led (and personally designed) one of the largest releases in the history of Awake Security (Arista NDR). The jump from 4.2 to 5.0 entailed us restructuring the navigation to be more workflow-oriented, and completely rethinking the information architecture. This change was also coupled with a new visual language to increase usability and accessibility. By holistically changing the navigation as opposed to incrementally transitioning, we were able to provide our field sales engineers with a compelling value proposition over our competitors during bake-offs.
Establishing a design system
We were able to build and stand up a design system in 3 months with just two designers. This new visual language enabled our team to collaborate and scale more effectively with engineering and to have a single source of truth in the form of a Storybook and design tokens.
Arista takes the lead in market reports
The seamless navigation across our product during the demo was a direct result of our 5.0 release. Our team enabled our threat researchers and marketing team to highlight the proof of the value of our product and effortlessly demonstrate how our automated detection (Situations) helps save valuable manhours. You can read more about it in the Forrester Wave Q2 2023 Report & GigaOM’s NDR Radar Report.
Chris has done a great job addressing design shortcomings in the NDR product when compared with industry best practices. He has established technical systems and design processes that improve communication and collaboration as well as accelerated implementation work both within the NDR team and more broadly at Arista.
Keith Amidon · Co-Founder of Awake Security & Distinguished Architect
Leading DANZ Monitoring Fabric
I oversaw the design strategy of DMF, Arista’s network TAP aggregation solution. In 2023 we shipped one of the most requested customer feature requests, a single pane of glass with all of the relevant information a network engineer would need to troubleshoot faulty hardware or misconfigured policies.