Woody Kim · NYC · Open to Product & GTM roles
I design
AI products.
Ten years in product — designing across the Pentagon, Series A startups, and the MIT AI Accelerator. Now aiming that experience at go-to-market: product marketing, sales, and solutions engineering.
Receipts
70%
Adoption of a net-new enterprise AI product across Kessel Run
16+
DoD product teams shipped human-in-the-loop AI workflows
90+
Minutes cut from per-case reporting at Pearl Harbor — made policy
$1M+
Annual software acquisition savings from USSF / NASA partnerships
The Arc — five chapters
Building in the open — by way of
classified systems and client decks.
01
2026
Boston → Tokyo → NYC
Independent
Builder & Student
Building Midnight — a health automation app.
Tokyo Design Forum, MIT Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL), four hackathons back to back, and an AI health tracker.
Building back in public again after finishing up my time as a public servant.
02
2024–2025
Pearl Harbor, HI
Dept. of Defense
Customer Facing Product Designer
Became the customer-facing guy.
Forward-deployed to Joint Base Hickam for one of the largest on-site software modernization efforts since the '90s — living with operators, translating their reality into product and policy. Cut per-case reporting by 90+ minutes.
The job quietly became sales engineering: listen, translate, demo, deliver, repeat.
03
2022–2025
Boston
Kessel Run · Dept. of Defense
Senior Product Designer
Shipped software that mattered.
Built apps supporting FEMA, NASA, and many other government agencies. Partnered with the MIT AI Accelerator to launch writing tools.
Traveled 150+ days, became a Hyatt Globalist, saw the world.
04
2022
NYC
a.Team
Product Designer
Design that raised money.
Had a chance encounter with Aaron Cohn at SXSW. Worked with a.Team across several pre-Series A startups to ship end-to-end product design and investor-facing materials that supported successful raises.
05
2018–2022
LA · NYC
Independent
Design Consultant
Learned the craft in public.
Product design, branding, and digital experience for the Call of Duty League, Overwatch League, and independent clients. Spoke at Quant UX Con at Spotify in 2022.
Client work taught me the thing school doesn't: design only matters if someone buys it.
Case in point
Midnight.
An AI health companion that fights decision fatigue for you.
Angel funded by clients who know my work best. Supported by Meta and Google engineers — built to keep you focused on your health goals without making any extra decisions.
Funding
Angel
Technical Advisors
DEPT · Google · Meta
Status
Currently building
Selected Work
The design is still the proof.
Newsroom Discovery
Independent / Self-directedRebuilt a decade-old open-source research technique into a working, self-hosted product for investigative journalists — one that finds documents about a topic using AI similarity search, including the ones a keyword search would completely miss.
Self-hosted, end to end
Keyword search, similarity search, OCR, and the vector database all run locally — zero cloud API calls, zero telemetry.
4,251 → 3
Out of every page in the corpus, semantic similarity search narrowed the field to 3 genuinely relevant matches — each topically connected to a seed document, without sharing its exact keyword.
Notebook → product
Went from a broken, years-old research script to a working search tool, ingestion pipeline, and shareable public demo in one session.
Autonomous Health Tracker Agent
Independent / Self-directedConsolidated a fragmented health-tracking routine — smart scale, wearable, and progress photos — into one silent system. No new habits, no new apps to check: the tools I already used just started talking to each other.
Net-zero
No new touchpoints added to daily life — the habits already existed, the system just started listening.
3 → 1
Smart scale, wearable, and photo tracking consolidated from three silos into a single running record.
Standardized
Every photo assessment now follows the same repeatable protocol instead of ad hoc, one-off evaluation.
AI Writing Tools at Scale
Kessel Run × MIT AI AcceleratorDrove 70% adoption of a net-new enterprise AI product. Partnered with the MIT AI Accelerator to design human-in-the-loop writing workflows now used across 16+ product teams.
70%
Adoption rate across Kessel Run product teams within 60 days of launch
16+
Product teams using the human-in-the-loop writing workflows
MIT AI Accelerator
Partnership that shaped model-UX alignment and responsible AI patterns
Zero-to-Stable Field Deployment
Dept. of Defense · JB Hickam, HIForward-deployed to operators to stabilize mission-critical software. Redesigned case management workflows that cut per-case reporting overhead by 90+ minutes — then led policy revisions to standardize the change.
90+ min
Reduction in per-case reporting overhead after workflow redesign
Policy-level
Changes standardized across teams — not just a product patch, but a procedural revision
Field-validated
Every change tested in the actual operational environment before rollout
Series A Product & Compliance UX
a.Team — multiple startupsLed end-to-end product design across multiple pre-Series A teams. Delivered compliance-adjacent tooling and investor-facing materials that contributed to successful fundraising outcomes.
Multiple
Startups supported through the Series A fundraising process with end-to-end product design
Successful
Fundraising outcomes across engagements — investor-facing materials directly contributed
0 → shipped
Compliance tooling and product flows delivered from blank canvas to investor-demo-ready
The Pivot
“Ten years of design taught me how products earn trust. Now I want to be the one in the room when they're sold.”
What I'm hunting
- Product marketing
- Sales & solutions engineering
- Forward-deployed / GTM roles
- Early-stage, AI-native teams
What I bring
- A decade of product design craft
- DoD-grade customer empathy
- I build and demo my own products
- Story, deck, and demo in one person
What I optimize for
- A manager worth learning from
- Customer-facing, visible output
- The AI × GTM wave
- Speed over ceremony