Demo experience research → cross-org infrastructure changes
Mixed-methods study of Meraki demo experiences that expanded into cross-org findings and concrete platform changes.
Context
Cisco employees and external partners use demo environments — built on a shared Cisco platform called dCloud — to walk customers through the Meraki product. The team I was on owned the Meraki side of those demos. The original question was narrow: what pain points exist for users of Meraki demos specifically?
The research expanded as participants kept surfacing friction with the underlying dCloud platform itself, not just with Meraki content. By the end the work was no longer just a Meraki demo study — it had become a cross-org input into the broader demo platform.
What I did
Qualitative: in-depth interviews with both Cisco-internal users and external partner users, exploring how demos fit into their actual sales and pre-sales work, and where the friction was.
Quantitative: a larger-scale survey on demo friction, sent to a wider audience to validate and weight the qualitative themes.
Synthesis: mixed-methods analysis pairing the qualitative depth with the survey’s reach. Findings clustered into Meraki-specific issues (which my team could act on) and platform-level issues (which required handing off to the dCloud team).
Outcome
On the platform side, the dCloud team made concrete changes traceable to the research: improved content tagging, removal of outdated demos, and improvements to the platform’s search experience.
On the influence side, the work was presented in meetings well beyond my immediate team — including with leadership in sales enablement and sales engineering. That cross-org reach was the unexpected outcome; the original scope hadn’t anticipated being a useful input for organizations outside Product Enablement.
Reflection
This was the project that taught me to design research with permission to expand the scope. If I had held strictly to the original “Meraki demos only” framing, the dCloud findings — which turned out to be the most actionable piece — wouldn’t have surfaced.
It also reinforced that the right time to broaden a study is when participants are already drawing the broader picture for you. The platform-level pain wasn’t something I went looking for; participants kept bringing it up unprompted. The job was to listen, recognize the pattern, and then make space in the synthesis and the readout to address it honestly.