Howdy, I’m Jarod.

I believe good design is like an invisible string–subtly guiding people in the right direction. Kind of like how it led you here.

I craft scalable design solutions that empower teams.

I partner with designers, engineers, and product teams to scale and evolve the Atmosphere Design System at Cisco. My focus is on creating tools and frameworks that remove friction, drive adoption, and multiply impact across teams.

I believe people matter more than pixels, everything is an experiment, and storytelling is a foundational design skill. Off the clock, you’ll find me training for my next race, exploring new technologies, and taking far too many photos of my pets.

Jarod

Recent projects

Designed in 2024–present

Without Metrics, We Were Flying Blind—So I Built a Framework to Change That

Over six months, I championed and delivered a framework of metrics that allowed our team to measure progress, demonstrate our value, and gather reliable insights on a quarterly basis. These metrics have proven instrumental in charting our roadmap, informing our priorities, and casting a multi-year vision for the design system. With our metrics framework in place, I’m now partnering with engineering to develop an automated dashboard that streamlines data collection and gives leadership a clear, real-time view of our impact and progress.

Designed in 2025–present

From Chaos to Clarity: Establishing a Single Source of Truth for Our Design System

I led an effort to migrate, consolidate, and reimagine our design system’s documentation. Transforming it from a collection of disparate resources to a single source of truth for all of our consumers. Now, I’m collaborating with a team of engineers to train our enterprise instance of ChatGPT on our design system documentation, making it easier for designers and developers to get immediate, AI-powered answers to their questions.

Designed in 2023

Future-Proofing Our Products with Design Tokens

As part of a broader initiative to revamp our color palette, I worked closely with design and development partners to architect our design token naming convention and workflow. In addition to developing a set of global and semantic tokens for color, type, spacing, border-radius, shadow, and motion – we successfully delivered a dark theme!

Designed in 2024

Closing the Gap Between Design and Development

Our design system is built on-top of Harbor, an extensible library of web components and utilities, which we theme, extend, and deliver to our consumers. To drive parity between our system and Harbor’s offerings, I conducted an audit of both libraries. With the gaps identified and documented, I partnered with product to build and prioritize a backlog of features and enhancements that our team is continuing to work from today.

Designed in 2024

Up-leveling Our Consumers

Working with a design system was new to many of our designers, leading to a lack of confidence, frequent questions, and inconsistent use of our assets. To help, I began hosting lunch-and-learn sessions, to share tips & tricks for working with the system. After several well received sessions, I took it upon myself to develop a structured training curriculum and host a session to educate over 50 designers on how to effectively use, extend, and contribute to the design system. This boosted confidence, led to smoother adoption, and became an evergreen resource for FAQs.

Let's connect

Portfolios, much like the work they represent, are full of nuance. I believe that is best discussed one-on-one – if you'd like to do that drop me a line at jarodyork@gmail.com or reach out on LinkedIn .