The people who use our boards.

Who are you, and what do you do? What do you like to do outside of work?

My name’s Ben. I’m a senior product manager who’s worked across a variety of industries in the tech landscape.

I grew up in Seattle, Washington, where I made some of my fondest childhood memories jumping on our backyard trampoline with my two younger brothers.

We would spend most afternoons and evenings playing the games that we invented together. When we weren’t on the trampoline, we were huddled around our GameBoys, PlayStation, GameCube, or Xbox playing games like Crash Bandicoot, Super Smash Brothers, and Halo.

In K-8 school, I was a straight-A student who had fun inventing games with my friends at recess. Some of those games became fairly popular, and a few even landed me in the principal’s office (it wasn’t my fault, I promise!) 😁

Professionally, I’ve built a career in Product Management, which basically involves designing and building software that makes people’s lives easier. I’ve enjoyed this role for +5 years and hope to for many more, because I love how dynamic Product Management is – you get to make big decisions every day that change the course of a company while getting to know and work with nearly everyone. In fact, I enjoy it so much that I often write and share short thought pieces on LinkedIn, where I’ve somehow built a following of +2K.

Outside of work, I love playing and building video games.

There’s a surprising amount of skill overlap between Product Management and Game Development. You have to come up with something worth playing, anticipate what might be hard about building it, write the code & arrange the moving parts until they match your vision, then have people play it and see how it lands with them. It’s a complex, dynamic process that requires curiosity, ingenuity, persistence, and passion.

My brother Sam and I began creating video games in early 2026. We entered 2 game jam competitions and were blown away when we placed 15th out of 50 in our first jam, and 5th out of 50 entries in our second.

We spun up our own game studio that we named Double Bounce Games as an homage to the days we spent inventing games on our trampoline together.

While our approach to game development is still taking shape, we enjoy centering our games around unique mechanics, interesting physics, and environments that feel simple but alive.

As we learn and grow, we’re particularly excited to explore building:

Couch co-op games like Ultimate Chicken Horse, Boomerang Fu, and Overcooked. Creating digital adventures that people can enjoy in-person with the people they love.

Multitasking games that my partner will love - she’s obsessed with cute, high-octane multitasking games like Cooking Mama.

And strategy games. I’m fascinated by games like 2048. They demonstrate that with the right idea, even the simplest of games can be worth playing over & over again. Erez’s own recommendation of Cribbage with Grandpas also fits this well.

I’ve wanted to create games for over a decade, but – funnily enough – ZSA is partly to blame for why I didn’t start sooner.

After I bought a Desktop PC in 2021 to begin learning Game Development, I became obsessed with which keyboard to use. As someone with a longstanding interest in both ergonomics and human-computer interaction, my eyes lit up when I found ZSA’s Moonlander keyboard.

Cut to 3 months later, and not only had I ordered it - I had built 10 custom layers in Oryx while reteaching myself to type from the ground up, switching from QWERTY to Colemak so I could type pain-free for the rest of my life.

This was quite the ordeal for a few reasons.

Switching from a traditional keyboard to a split ergonomic keyboard is not as easy as it looks — and it probably doesn’t look very easy to begin with. Every bad typing habit instantly reveals itself.

If you’ve spent 20 years using your left hand to hit the Y key - guess what: that key now lives 12 inches away on the other side of your keyboard. There’s no spacebar, no dedicated backspace key; your numbers row is split in two. I decided to take it a step further and switch keyboard layouts from QWERTY to Colemak, which requires 220% less finger movement and lets you type 35x more words without lifting a finger – but also requires you to move most of the keys around.

Learning a new layout² was a humbling, frustrating experience. I felt stupid and frustrated, witnessing the muscle memory that had served me well for 10-20 years repeatedly failing to adapt. That said, I’m glad I stuck with it because the payoff was worth it.

A similar side-project of mine is invisible iOS. Essentially, I wanted my phone to serve as a dumbphone that can still do smart things when I need it to. I built an invisible homepage that omits icons and text by placing each app where it intuitively feels right. By removing the visuals, I removed its allure to help me reclaim attention. This can be taken a step further with a grayscale-mode shortcut.

Outside of work and game development, I enjoy photography, audiobooks, biking, bonsai, cooking, drawing, TV, and spending time with my partner Riah and our dog Max.

What hardware do you use?

I lean towards minimalism, so my gear list isn’t too extensive. Too much visual clutter tends to clutter my mind, so I keep it clean.

My PC is a Lenovo Legion Tower 7i with Windows 11, 48 GB RAM, RTX 3060, and an Intel i7-10700K CPU. I use a ProtoArc Ergonomic Mouse with a white ZSA Moonlander with the ZSA Platform tent kit.

For a monitor, I use a Dell gaming model + a Hue Play Gradient Lightstrip for backlight. I somehow came to own 35+ Hue Lights, they’re spendy but worth it. My speakers are Pebble v3s.

It all sits on a Fully Jarvis Standing Desk. I sit on a Steelcase Leap v2 chair, bought refurbished from BTOD.

I use an iPhone Pro with a set of Airpods Pro 3. I bring these everywhere: their noise-cancellation is life changing.

And then there’s all the hardware beyond the desk. I consistently sleep better on my four-foot futon from Futon Beds from Japan than I have in 6+ years of sleeping on a high-end Purple mattress. Got hooked on my apartment’s communal Peloton bike & bought my own off of Facebook. Never found it so easy to break a sweat. My Sunny Bay heat pad is great for muscle tension or warming up in cold weather.

Special thanks to my little 16-year-old WarmWave space heater, which has kept my feet roasty-toasty through high school, college, and beyond.

And what software?

For game development, I use Unity. Then there’s Notion for notetaking which has absolutely incredible voice note & summarization functionality. FigJam for mind-mapping and collaboration, and Claude to help me code and troubleshoot.

I like Libby & Libro.fm for audiobooks, to support local libraries and bookstores. Qobuz is my favorite for music, with better discoverability than Spotify. It also pays artists more fairly.

My browser is Brave, which makes YouTube ad-free automatically, plus has better data privacy than Chrome.

I use Philips Hue for light customization and Wallpaper Engine for animated wallpapers. Dark Reader & f.lux save my eyes.

For stretching, I use Down Dog yoga. Then there’s Robinhood for investments, high-APY savings account, and 3% cash back on everything . 1Password keeps my accounts safe.

What’s your keyboard setup like? Do you use a custom layout or custom keycaps?

I designed my keyboard around minimizing finger movement, because I wanted my hands to last for a long time. After +6 years of working a desk job, I experienced near-constant tension and fatigue in my hands from typing all day. After switching to the Moonlander and Colemak, that pain disappeared entirely, and has never resurfaced in the 4 years since.

A little bit more about my custom layout:

Space & Shift both live where your thumb rests. Backspace is right next to your pinky. The keys that your fingers naturally rest on let you activate various keyboard layers for Browser Navigation, Symbols, Arrow Keys, Numbers, and Mouse Navigation.

Most of these layers offer unique, in-depth functionality. For example, the Arrow Key layer lets you navigate character-by-character, word-by-word, to the start or end of a line, or to the beginning or end of a document or text field. By combining this with Shift, you can rapidly navigate, highlight and edit text with minimal effort.

Additionally, with this layout you rarely have to hold more than one key to get things done. common keyboard shortcuts like Select All, Cut/Copy/Paste, and Find activate when you briefly hold down particular keys. Functions like Screenshot, Undo/Redo, and Dictate have their own dedicated buttons on the keys traditionally used for a Numbers row.

For a full walkthrough, check out this guided Layout Tour.

If you’re interested in using this layout but still use QWERTY, you can and easily rearrange the letters back to QWERTY in Oryx. If you use a Mac, I’ve built in MacOS-specific layers to support its unique functionality and key combinations.

What would be your dream setup?

One of my passions is to build technology that works for people, and not the other way around.

My moonshot idea - something I’d love to help build - is a combination of eye-tracking software and wearables that make the computer mouse almost obsolete for day-to-day tasks: where you look, your cursor goes. To click or scroll, tap or slide your thumb along on the outside of your index finger. I’d love to see something like this come to fruition in the next 5-10 years, and I’m so curious how it would feel to use it.

As for today’s dreams, I thought I could use this interview to connect people with incredible things. I sometimes find things that strike me as such brilliant masterpieces that I need to shout about them from the rooftops. Please note that items marked “caution” may include sensitive or triggering content.

Watch

• Haikyuu,
• Survivor:Pearl Islands
• Avatar: The Last Airbender,
• Attack on Titan (caution),
• Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End
• Bridgerton (caution), and
• Steven Universe.

Read

• Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu (Brian Browne Walker translation);
• Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer;
• Children of Time (caution), Adrian Tchaikovsky; and
• Us Against You (caution), Fredrik Backman.

Listen to

• Invisibilia, NPR (podcast).

Play

• Super Smash Bros. Melee,
• Hollow Knight,
• Zelda: Breath of the Wild,
• Call of Duty: Warzone (caution),
• Skyrim,
• Undertale, and
• Super Mario Odyssey.

Eat/Drink:

• Masubuchi-en Sencha (green tea),
• Delice de Bourgogne (brie) + Rosemary Croccantini crackers + Divina Chili Fig spread (charcuterie), and
• The Best Chocolate Cake by Broma Bakery (a recipe worth learning how to bake for).

Visit

• Blue Lagoon, Iceland;
• Chivit Thamma Da, Chiang Rai, Thailand;
• The Enchantments, Alpine Lakes Wilderness, Washington State, USA; and
• Portland Japanese Garden, Portland, Oregon, USA].