Pooja Konde | Product Designer

[About]

Hey I'm Pooja and this is my story

I didn’t always know what kind of designer I’d become

I just knew I loved making things. As a kid growing up in India, I was always sketching, crafting, painting anything that let me turn an idea into something real. I dreamed of fashion school, poured everything into it… and didn’t get in. At the time, it felt like a dead end. But that “no” led me to industrial design, a path that ended up teaching me that design isn’t just about how things look, but how they work for people.

I learned better by doing, even when it was messy

During undergrad, I took on freelance work, designed products for local businesses, and said yes to anything that scared me a little. One of those yeses was a fashion-tech startup that was everything I loved. We were ambitious, and building through chaos. That startup didn’t survive COVID. That startup didn’t survive COVID and I felt like it 18 months of work went to vain. But I learned something new again, too: how to work with constraints, stay calm when things change, and get things done without a perfect plan.

When design started creating ripple effects

At my next venture, I wasn’t “just the designer” anymore. I led end-to-end design across 4+ hardware and software products. Those products helped scale the company to $7M+ in revenue and secure $4.9M in funding. But the part I’m most proud of? Building a design team from scratch and mentoring others like I once needed mentoring myself. It taught me that design isn’t just what we ship, it’s how we listen, advocate, and help others grow too.

Moving across the world reconnected me with why I started

My Master’s in Human Factors & UX brought me to Silicon Valley — and back to the human side of design. I dove into accessibility, behavioral research, and the ethics of AI. I mentored 40+ grad students, joined AI for Good hackathons, and taught what I once had to Google my way through. And that long-forgotten startup from 2020? It finally launched in beta in 2025 with 20+ real businesses onboard, built on the product vision I helped shape five years earlier.