Product Design

The Journey to Product Design

I had my first taste in product design back in 2013 just after graduating from university. Four friends and I founded something amazing. Before Instagram live became a thing, we created something called Kast which allowed users to stream live content straight from their phones to anyone the world. Today, that’s nothing that special, but in 2013, that was the future. Kast was accepted at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) - StarR incubator program and we worked from a small communal space with other startups at the bottom floor of Rady School of Management. But through the UCSD mentorship program, we changed our tech from just streaming content, to actually helping people – the visually impaired and we renamed the product KastEye. Initially I was brought on mostly to support Marketing and helped our CEO with his presentations, create powerpoint decks and videos to help get investors excited and in the door, but I also helped designed and test the first UI that our agents would use to help navigate our customers. This was my first taste in UX/UI and product development work. But mostly I helped with marketing and branding. Fun fact, the name the company as it’s known today – Aira.io that was my doing. Aira is now live and is actually at most Starbucks for anyone with vision impairment to use and help navigate. Unfortunately, dreams and ambition to compete for Emmy’s got in the way after Fox contacted me. I left Aira in pursuit of those dreams, but I am still very grateful to have had the opportunity to help set up the foundation for an amazing product that’s helping thousands of people everyday.

2019 was when I started to develop a real passion for product design. After my attempt in starting my own business came to an end, I joined HoverCam, a small EdTech company. I took a hybrid role of marketing and product design. Initially, I spent a lot of time at trade shows talking to customers and hearing their ideas. Things they loved and things they hated about our product and what they wished it could do. The feedback was amazing and we brought those ideas back to the office. This spawned an ambitious project called ClassFusion – an application that would allow teachers and students to work together in the digital and physical world.

When you decide to decide to make the leap to a new field, there’s a lot of learning you have to do. We’re fortunate enough that many of the answers are available with a simple Google search, but there’s still a lot of things we don’t know and won’t know and experience until you do it. And at least for me, the best way of learning is to dive right in and do it.