My Journey Into Product Design

I studied electrical engineering and got pulled into communications and signal processing. There was something deeply satisfying about the problem: get information from point A to point B as efficiently as possible, with as little loss as you can manage. Balance time, capacity, and cost. Optimize the system. I liked that it was both technical and creative at the same time.

I stayed in it long enough to get a master's degree, then went into aerospace, designing satellite communication systems.

Over several years, I got comfortable moving across the full development lifecycle. Coding, research, data analysis, prototyping, documentation. The work was rigorous and I learned a lot. But something was missing, and I couldn't quite name it yet.

At work, I got to know a product designer. I'd watch her whiteboard sessions, go through her research findings, see how she moved from a messy user problem to a working, testable solution. What struck me was that she was wrestling with the exact same kinds of problems I found interesting in engineering. Constraints, tradeoffs, efficiency. But the outcomes were immediate. You could see them working.

That's when something clicked. I'd spent a lot of time since I was young reading about psychology — not for school, just out of curiosity. How people make decisions. Why certain experiences feel effortless and others create friction. Why we behave the way we do. I'd never thought of it as professionally relevant until I saw what product design actually was.

It turned out to be the field where both of those interests had a real home.

Engineering gave me a way of thinking about systems, constraints, and feedback loops. Psychology gave me a framework for understanding the person on the other side of those systems. Product design turned out to be where both of those things actually mattered.

I spent the next year learning everything I could. Interaction design, research methods, visual design, prototyping. My engineering background helped me think analytically about design problems and feel at home working closely with engineers. My interest in psychology kept me focused on behavior, not just aesthetics.

Each day I spent learning it reinforced the feeling that I'd found the right thing.

The work I find most interesting sits at the intersection of technical complexity and human behavior. I'm drawn to problems where the product has to do something genuinely hard, and still feel simple to the person using it.

That's the same challenge I was working on in satellite communications, just with a different medium. Get the right experience to the right person, as efficiently as possible, with as little loss along the way as you can manage.

The tools are different now. The underlying problem is the same.