About

Rakesh Patwari is a seasoned design leader and educator with over 20 years of experience working in large enterprises, consulting organizations, and startups. He has a proven track record of designing solutions for technically challenging and complex enterprise problems, enabling design teams to build cohesive solutions, and initiating and facilitating product thinking discussions across teams. Currently, Rakesh serves as the Director of Product Design and Research at Cisco, where he supports the product design and research practice. He has also worked as a Product Design Manager for Privacy Org at Meta, where he supported the entire design organization for Privacy Infra, a suite of products used by engineers, privacy SMEs, legal, and product owners. Rakesh has shipped multiple products, including productivity-focused products, marketing experiences, and large cloud-based enterprise SaaS products. He has also shipped an award-winning next generation of cloud-based SaaS product spanning across multiple form factors. In addition to his work in design leadership, Rakesh is also a design educator at UC Berkeley X, where he enjoys mentoring startups and sharing his expertise as a speaker and panelist on design, storytelling, leadership, and security. He is also a member of the Design Leadership Forum at InVision, where he works to advance the practice of design leadership by fostering a community where the world's best can learn from one another. Rakesh's education includes a Product Management Executive Education degree from UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, a Design Strategy Master class from UX Strat, and a BCA in Computer Applications from Osmania University. He has also completed courses in presenting data and information by Edward Tufte and marketing at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School. With 18.54 years of relevant experience as a product designer, research scientist, and infra expert, Rakesh is a versatile and accomplished design leader who enjoys collaborating with cross-functional teams to successfully deliver products and experiences.