DESIGN
HITACHI VANTARA
PROGRESSION
AT PEAK
BROUGHT TO MARKET
From hands-on designer to setting design direction
Hitachi Vantara
Enterprise data infrastructure: block, file, and object storage, plus the SaaS platforms that manage it. I joined as a hands-on designer and was running design direction for the portfolio by the end.
Assistant Director of Product Design
Set design direction across the full product portfolio and internal tools, working at the organizational level rather than heads-down in production.
- Set overall design direction for the entire product portfolio and internal tools.
- Led the VSP One File redesign with five designers across six countries and five time zones. Support engagements fell 20% after rollout.
- Brought engineering, product management, and design together, and led workshops to work through complex cross-team problems.
- Ran user research initiatives so customer feedback reached product decisions directly.
- Mentored designers from junior through senior, several of them through promotion.
Product Design Digital Infrastructure Lead
Led product design for the Digital Infrastructure product line.
- Aligned 20+ contributors across three companies (Hitachi Vantara, Method, and GlobalLogic) on one product direction for Tomoe.
- Drove adoption of the Next Design System across the platform, replacing a decade of one-off screens with shared components, tokens, and patterns, so consistency stopped depending on any one designer being in the room.
Product Design Site Lead
Led the US product design team, focused on modernizing the object storage portfolio.
- Began adoption of a unified design system across existing products for a consistent look, feel, and usability.
- Mentored junior designers.
Lead UI/X Designer
Led a team of front-end developers working across five products.
Senior UI/UX Designer
- Designed and helped develop the UI for three new products brought to market: Content Platform S Nodes, Content Intelligence, and Content Monitor.
- Built new features for the core Hitachi Content Platform.
Three programs, in full
VSP One File
Modernized a decade-old enterprise file platform with 5 designers and 10+ stakeholders across 6 countries. Support engagements fell 20%.
Tomoe
Three organizations (Hitachi Vantara, Method, GlobalLogic) and 20+ contributors, aligned around one unified management platform.
Content Platform S Nodes
A petabyte-dense, fully customer-serviceable object platform, designed and largely built from zero. Its patterns outlived the product.
Also hands-on: VSP 360 Clear Sight, AIOps observability for VSP One data platforms: predictive capacity forecasting, anomaly detection, performance and latency optimization, and energy and carbon reporting, across a cloud portal, a mobile app, and on-premises analytics (2+ years), and Hitachi STaaS, a storage-as-a-service product (~1 year, since discontinued).
Full case studies: eric.waitwut.com/work
What I bring
WCAG guidelines work alongside the design-systems team, VPAT testing coordination for U.S. federal sales, and European Accessibility Act familiarity from EU business. Depth most design leads do not carry.
Before product design
Eight years of web design and front-end development across startups, hospitality, and non-profits, where I learned to build the thing I designed.
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