EchoMode: First Product Hire

First product hire at EchoMode, a Berkeley SkyDeck Pad-13 company, from November 2025. Product design first, then the marketing surface, then the whole customer-facing frontend, then founding product engineer.

I did not want to spend my first years refining someone else's workflow at a product I did not care about. I wanted to own a surface, and to believe in what was on it. That is most of why I joined EchoMode.

Senior year I was recruiting for a junior designer role, at the bottom of the 2024 market. I got interviews at Palantir, TikTok and MoneyLion, and none of them was a job I wanted. I stayed for a master's instead, mostly because of the people I had met in the master's-level classes, and because nothing I had found was worth more than another year with them.

That year did two things. Friends of mine were getting into YC, and being that close to a founder's seat made me want to build something of my own. And I could see what the design peers who had landed at big firms were doing, which was not much. A junior designer's seat there is narrow by design: you do not know where you stand, and there is a lot of process between you and anything you could own.

Somewhere in there I stopped thinking of myself as a traditional designer. I like making things look right, but my CS and Entrepreneurship background is what grounds me, and there was no way I was working on a product I didn't at least find interesting. A startup was where my time was worth the most risk and where I would learn the fastest.

The intro came from my manager at a New York consultancy, where I had spent a summer. They knew the two founders. I started small, as product design lead.

The role widened from there: product design, then design for marketing, then the whole customer-facing front end. I built the product's interfaces, the website, the one-pagers and the slide decks, and I got to put my own perspective into all of it.

What I learned is that no one in the room knows design as well as you do. Everyone has a view, and you should take it in. But if there is no one to follow, you set the direction yourself, go on your own intuition, and make it work. Then you close the feedback loop as fast and as tight as you can.

No one in the room knows design as well as you do.

By the end the role reached past design. Getting into systems, latency, prioritization, etc... I argued a backend decision with our engineer on product grounds, because the user-facing option was the better product, and that is the one we went with.