Went through the Cisco product designer interview recently for a role in the Webex team. Wanted to write this up because design interview content for enterprise companies is rarer than for consumer tech.
The loop was four rounds total.
Portfolio review (60min): this is the central round and they're very serious about it. They asked me to walk through two case studies in detail. Not just the final designs, the full process: research methods, how I defined the problem, iterations, how I handled pushback from stakeholders, what the outcome was. They specifically asked about projects where I worked within heavy constraints, either technical or organizational. Cisco ships to enterprises with strict IT policies, so they want designers who understand that not everything is a blank canvas.
Design exercise (take-home, 2hrs suggested): I was given a prompt about improving the Webex meeting experience for a specific user segment. They explicitly said they're evaluating reasoning more than polish. I treated it like a working doc: problem framing, user assumptions I was making, rough flows, annotated wireframes. No pixel-perfect mockups. I think that was the right call.
Cross-functional round (45min): with a PM and an eng lead. Focused on how I collaborate, how I handle when eng says a design isn't feasible, how I work with PMs who have strong opinions about the UI. Real collaboration questions, not theory.
Design system / component thinking (30min): this one I wasn't as prepared for. We talked about design tokens, how I'd approach building a component library that needed to scale across multiple products. If you're interviewing for an enterprise design role anywhere, have an opinion about design systems even if you haven't built one from scratch.
Things that helped: being specific about research methods (I've done contextual inquiry and moderated usability studies, which they liked), and having at least one case study where things didn't go according to plan. The messy project story landed better than the clean success story.
Timeline: got an offer about 3 weeks after the take-home which felt reasonable.