Benjamin Lerch Email & Phone Number

Reno, Nevada, United States

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Projects include: UX vision and end-to-end Figma prototype of an LLM-based digital sales assistant.UX consulting on a SaaS consumption forecasting app in Salesforce.Generative user research on integrating employee performance management experiences and tooling.

Reno, Nv, Us

Early-stage customer research platform. Rutabaga allows teams to rapidly gather, transcribe, and visualize customer insights into knowledge graphs with AI technology. Centralizing customer knowledge with Rutabaga empowers product organizations to make evidence-based product investment decisions.

San Jose, Ca, Us

● Leading teams of up to 40 user experience designers, researchers, ui engineers and managers to deliver delightful experiences for Cisco’s network management and cloud virtualization product portfolio.● Led the team delivering the user experience strategy, design and specifications for Cisco’s new virtualized managed services platform (vMS) — productizing the experience of an early PoC to first customer ship. vMS — with its easy-to-understand, delightfully visual web interfaces — dramatically shortens go-to-market for service providers while creating a new addressable market: Users with basic technical knowledge can now order, configure and deploy networking services within minutes - directly from the provider website. We are building on early customer success, aggressively expanding vMS market penetration across our entire service provider business.● Spearheaded customer co-design practices with my team — moving a traditional speeds-and-feeds conversation between Cisco and large service providers into one that starts and ends with the business outcome — made visible through customer-led UX prototype iterations (“one-week-design-sprints”).● Introduced the practice of articulating product functionalities as “user capabilities” to consolidate and unify functionality across product families from a “what-does-it enable-the-user-to-do” perspective. Unified the look-and-feel of the Cisco product offerings my team supports through corporate brand advocacy and adaptation of Cisco’s new design language — collaboratively developed by Cisco’s brand experience team.● Drove design quality internally via bi-annual “design-to-delight” portfolio showcase from each team member as a factor in the annual performance review.

San Jose, Ca, Us

● Currently leading the experience of digital convergence that will allow Cisco to orchestrate digital user journeys that span social, web, video and mobile modalities with intelligent, distributed services that allow seamless digital touch points that build on one another.● Thought leader and experience strategist and UX implementation manager for Cisco digital properties with millions of external users and thousands of internal users● Key driver of an enterprise content recommendations service -- partnered with development to harness big data and agile methodologies with direct customer participation.● Managing teams of 12 user experience professionals conceiving and delivering large web initiatives that span mobile, social, video and web experiences● Create and and facilitate visioning and definition workshops● UX Patent Committee -- the patent committee of subject matter experts evaluates and decides on UX-related innovations to become intellectual property of Cisco

San Jose, Ca, Us

● Mobilized and focussed a large Sales Enablement Initiative towards agile business definition and user experience outcomes; and helped conceive a platform-independent experience architecture of intelligent content delivery to our sales force. Mobile and desktop platforms delivering measurable user success.● Built a research practice to drive product development teams to drive our enterprise collaboration products towards higher accountability towards improving user experience● Built a team of UX professionals● Intellectual property and innovation -- collaborated on a patent (see patent section below)● Customer-led innovation with our internet business strategy group -- consulting with Coke and the R&D team of Kraft. Prototyping of immersive collaboration rooms including virtual realities, robots and "reach-thru" enabling collaboration on physical products

San Jose, Ca, Us

● Experience architecture consulting for our internal social enterprise platform● Product definition and experience consulting for the collaboration engineering group

San Francisco, Ca, Us

● Experience strategy, planning and design for enterprise and start-up clients. ● Clients include: Saba (market-leading enterprise learning platform), Mulesoft (Apache server extensions for enterprise)

New York, Ny, Us

● Experience lead on ecommerce and large enterprise clients of the San Francisco Razorfish office, generating significant revenue and client success.● Build/Manage teams of UX professionals● Cross-functional leadership across business analysis, experience and technology in large client engagements● Collaboration with exceptional design and development teams● Participate in new business pitches● Clients include:Williams-Sonoma, Smith & Hawken, Nortel, Visa, Ancestry.com, Microsoft, Kaiser Permanente

● Led user research projects for major clients that included client revenue sharing based on client revenue increase following research and design recommendations● Collaborated on the development of remote user testing software● Published best practices on remote usability testing facilitation● Collaborated with Adaptive Path veterans of information architecture, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garret. Including a project for AllState insurance in which the client-side language Ajax was first used in a mainstream context. Following this project, Jesse published an article in the Wall Street Journal to promote Ajax. Ajax helped the asynchronous entry of web forms, enabling insurance brokers to quote with increased speed and fluidityClients include: AllState Insurance, Dolby Laboratories, Wine.com

Stanford, Ca, Us

● Defined and architected the user experience for the school of engineering and the school of humanities web site re-design● Consulted on the information architecture and experience functionality of the integrated Stanford events calendar● Created the navigation approach for a large HR web application

Denver, Colorado, Us

● Created web content publishing process bringing together ops, technical and editorial teams ● Led the user experience of B2B pricing web applications, including algorithm visualization● Frequently illustrated new product ideas visually to facilitate venture funding rounds● Worked with an amazing group of individuals in what today could be likened to "agile design and development"

Bachelor Of Arts (B.A.), Multimedia Journalism

Philosophy, Political Sceince