Leading Through Change: How Cisco DevNet Engineering Sustained Excellence Amid Disruption

Purpose and What to Expect from this Blog

Cisco DevNet Engineering underwent one of the most disruptive periods in its history in the past year. Facing leadership transitions, organizational realignment, and consequential  Limited restructuring (LR)  amidst a globally distributed team, the environment demanded urgent yet thoughtful transformation. This blog will take an in-depth look at how the team embraced structured change management strategies to rebuild stability, elevate engineering standards, and foster transparent collaboration across regions.

You can expect insights into how Cisco DevNet Engineering navigated this period of intense organizational change with purpose, clarity, and resilience. This account will focus on how the team overcame leadership transitions, operational restructuring, and global coordination challenges while maintaining engineering quality and accelerating innovation. The blog highlights how a disciplined change model, a security-first strategy, and organizational transparency led to meaningful and lasting improvements, driven not by individual heroics but by collective commitment and intentional leadership.

Executive Summary

During a period of notable disruption, including leadership turnover, budget constraints, and global team restructuring, Cisco DevNet Engineering focused on regaining stability through clarity, resilience, and purpose.

The team employed a structured change management strategy, grounded in Lewin’s Three-Stage Model. This model served as the foundation for transforming three critical pillars: Development, Cloud Operations, and Transparent Engineering Organization. With a renewed focus on a security-first mindset, operational discipline, and transparent execution, the team was able to unify global teams, despite geopolitical and logistical barriers.

Through this transformation, the team not only preserved uptime and compliance on developer.cisco.com, but also accelerated innovation. Notably, the development of five AI agents, each aimed at solving high-impact business challenges, is on track for proof of concept by Q4 FY25. This case demonstrates how thoughtful leadership, when rooted in process and empathy, can turn disruption into sustainable progress.

From Disruption to Direction: Change Grounded in Lewin’s Model

As the organization navigated LR, leadership shifts, and cultural change, there was an urgent need to stabilize engineering operations and reestablish trust. The approach taken drew upon Kurt Lewin’s Three-Stage Change Model:

• Unfreeze – Challenges were acknowledged openly to foster psychological safety and collective awareness of the need for change.
• Change – New processes were introduced gradually but consistently, emphasizing collaboration, security, and transparency.
• Refreeze – As momentum built, these behaviors were reinforced, recognized, and embedded into daily workflows.

This structured approach helped reconnect a dispersed global team, aligning execution with Cisco’s long-term goals.

Change Strategy Anchored in Three Pillars

The change management approach was structured around three foundational pillars critical to engineering continuity and transformation:

• Development – Revitalizing engineering practices to ensure secure, scalable, and high-velocity software delivery.
• Cloud Operations – Enhancing cloud infrastructure to maintain uptime, compliance, and rapid response to threats.
• Transparent Engineering Organization – Establishing clear, consistent communication across all stakeholders for alignment and accountability.

This framework allowed the team to execute change with discipline while preserving agility and innovation capacity.

Security-First Engineering Development: Building Smarter and Safer

One of the earliest and most deliberate shifts during the transformation was embedding a security-first mindset into every aspect of the development lifecycle. This strategic focus ensured that innovation progressed in tandem with compliance, operational integrity, and long-term scalability. Key measures included:

• Standardizing development pipelines to meet Cisco Security Insight and privacy mandates
• Introducing reusable components to improve velocity and reduce redundancy
• Integrating quality assurance and threat mitigation early in the development process

In the wake of the LR, the team encountered notable knowledge gaps, presenting a clear moment of disruption. However, through structured transition playbooks, cross-team collaboration, and targeted upskilling of frontend engineers in backend development, the organization not only adapted but regained stability. This represented a change and refreeze milestone, responding to immediate challenges while reinforcing a more secure, resilient engineering environment.

Equally significant was the emerging culture of shared ownership and mutual support that guided the team through this transition. A collective commitment to business priorities, transparency, and collaboration helped forge a stronger, more cohesive team dynamic, ensuring alignment across regions and disciplines.

This momentum carried into April with the launch of the DevNet Eng AI Launchpad, a program where engineers with deep AI expertise proactively trained and mentored peers across the broader engineering organization. This initiative not only accelerated AI readiness but also reinforced the values of teamwork, trust, and continuous learning.

A direct result of this evolution is the development of five AI agents, each designed to solve high-impact business challenges through automation and insight. These agents are on track to reach proof of concept by Q4 FY25 and enter production by the end of Q1 FY26, a testament to the team’s commitment to building secure, intelligent systems with speed, discipline, and cross-functional strength.

Cloud Operations: Secure, Compliant, Always-On

Managing the DevNet AWS infrastructure demanded high resilience amid tighter budgets and reduced staffing. The transition called for proactive risk management and automation. Key actions during the Change and Refreeze phases included:

• Integrating role-based access controls, automated vulnerability scans, and CI/CD security gates
• Adopting infrastructure-as-code to ensure consistency and faster incident response
• Maintaining full Cisco security and privacy compliance, including GDPR and CCPA standards

During the disruption caused by the LR, the team faced an immediate challenge: losing the only Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) who managed cloud operations. In response, a frontend engineer stepped up to assume the SRE role. He trained himself on AWS and other relevant technologies, ensuring that cloud operations continued smoothly with no outages during this challenging period. The whole engineering and leadership organization supported the SRE who stepped up, demonstrating the cultural norms of the engineering organization, emphasizing ownership, initiative, and mutual support.

Leadership worked diligently to find a replacement, eventually securing an internal candidate who joined as SRE. The transition ultimately saw the new SRE and the existing engineer collaboratively manage cloud operations, ensuring continuity and security.

These measures and efforts ensured that developer.cisco.com maintained 99.999% uptime, safeguarding customer trust across all geographies, even amidst the disruption.

 Transparency in Action: Unified View Across All Stakeholders

Rebuilding momentum also meant improving how teams and stakeholders engaged. Transparency became a core value, ensuring alignment regardless of location or function.

To achieve this:

• A real-time engineering dashboard was introduced to monitor delivery status.
• ASANA was implemented to coordinate tasks and surface blockers early.
• A weekly stakeholder alignment call created space for shared priorities and progress tracking.

This combination provided visibility across all initiatives and helped foster a culture of trust and accountability, key to the Refreeze stage of change.

Global Collaboration, Local Impact

DevNet’s global team embodied the principles of an ambidextrous organization. It drove innovation while sustaining operational excellence. The bold move to develop a new portfolio of AI agents shows this balance, exploring new opportunities while maintaining a strong, secure foundation. This dual focus allowed the organization to explore new frontiers without compromising the consistency required for enterprise grade engineering.

Despite travel restrictions, the global DevNet team worked as a cohesive unit. Cisco’s own collaboration platforms—Webex, Webex Teams, and TelePresence, were instrumental in bridging distances between the U.S. and China.

Clear communication protocols, shared accountability structures, and unified goals ensured that regional limitations never became innovation barriers. These tools enabled remote leadership to feel local, effective, and deeply connected.

Engineering Culture: The Invisible Architecture of Resilience

Amid organizational disruption and shifting priorities, the most profound transformation was cultural. Cisco DevNet Engineering didn’t just navigate change, it redefined how people showed up for each other and for the business.

A culture of shared ownership, mutual support, and execution grounded in business impact emerged as a stabilizing force. Engineers stepped beyond role boundaries, filled knowledge gaps collaboratively, and prioritized team goals over individual silos. What began as a necessity became a strength.

This shift wasn’t incidental. It was fostered through intentional trust-building, peer mentorship, and clear, empathetic leadership. Communication was transparent, decisions were inclusive, and a “business-first” mindset was encouraged across every layer of the team.

Today, this cultural foundation is the quiet force behind the team’s ability to adapt, deliver, and innovate, resilient not because it avoided change, but because it embraced it with purpose and unity.

Enabling Change Through Trusted Collaboration

This transformation was made possible not through individual effort, but through the shared commitment of key contributors across the organization. Two direct managers within the engineering organization played a critical role in operationalizing new processes and driving alignment across teams. Alongside them, a dedicated architect ensured technical coherence and best practices across initiatives, while a dedicated program manager provided essential coordination, structure, and cross-functional momentum throughout the transformation.

Above all, the ongoing guidance and oversight from the organization’s Vice President provided clarity and confidence. Regular 1:1s and weekly check-ins ensured that progress remained aligned with strategic goals, and that support was available at every critical juncture. This level of trust and sponsorship elevated the team’s ability to execute with discipline and purpose.

Steady Leadership, Sustainable Excellence

Engineering through uncertainty requires more than technical expertise; it demands humility, consistency, and conviction. By applying Lewin’s Change Model, aligning to a security-first philosophy, and embedding transparency and process discipline, DevNet Engineering was able to transform disruption into forward momentum.

The team now stands stronger, more aligned, and better equipped to deliver meaningful innovation securely, reliably, and at scale. This transformation highlights the importance of steady leadership, collective ownership, and the power of cultural norms rooted in mutual support and shared responsibility. With this solid foundation, Cisco DevNet Engineering is not only positioned to thrive amid future challenges but also set to continue its legacy of sustainable excellence.