benji kim

Senior Product Designer

I design products by improving the process behind them—not just the interface. I bring extensive startup experience, taking products from 0→1.

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Healthcare & Life SciencesFinance & InsuranceB2B & Consumer ProductsStartup ExperienceSole Designer
On the Traverse /

Product Designer & Builder

Helping skiers choose
their next mountain.

Designed and built a mobile-first Northeast ski guide, connecting structured resort data, editorial context and AI-assisted discovery.

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Travel Insurance in the Age of AI Agents /

Senior User Experience Designer & Researcher

A traveler using a phone, with the message: Your next customer may never see your homepage.

Watching travel insurance shopping
move into the chatbot.

Over four years and about 100 interviews, travelers increasingly turned to ChatGPT to understand coverage, and what looked like AI agents began showing up in session recordings. A case study on what that means for comparison sites.

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FirstThought /

Founding Member & Product Designer

FirstThought product interface

Building an ML-powered
expert network from 0→1.

As FirstThought’s co-founder and sole designer, I led the 0→1 design of an expert-research platform that transformed fragmented scientific data into actionable workflows, reducing research time from days to hours for a 25-person analyst team.

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Cureatr/

Lead UX Designer

Cureatr product interface

From paper medication lists
to a mobile experience.

As lead UX designer, I simplified fragmented medication data into a mobile history clinicians could quickly interpret at the point of care. Validated with hospital staff across New York, the product was deployed across 20+ hospital systems nationwide.

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Earlier work

Design leadership across
complex products.

Quality Reviews 2014–2015 Founding Employee, Head of Product Design, Product Consultant (2021–2024)

Joined as the first employee; designed the patient-facing survey tool and provider analytics dashboard for real-time patient feedback.

Helped recruit the first CTO/developer, supported fundraising and early product strategy, and traveled to hospitals to demo the product and support sales. Helped scale the product to 21M patients and 10 of the top 35 U.S. healthcare providers.

Axial 2011–2014 Lead Product Designer & Product Development

Led UX and visual design for a middle-market capital-raising platform and managed the design/front-end relationship across a five-person team.

Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG) 2008–2011 Senior UX/UI Designer

Designed an expert-network platform, used performance metrics to drive iterations, and managed and trained two junior designers.

My experience designing expert-network products at GLG laid the groundwork for helping start FirstThought and building its ML-powered research platform.

About me

I also surf, snow, cook

Benji surfing a waveBenji preparing food in a chef’s jacket