Kayhan Space

I joined Kayhan Space as Head of Design, but the company’s needs quickly extended beyond design. Over time, the role expanded into product direction, process design, technical feasibility work, brand, customer discovery, and executive-level company building. I ultimately grew into the Chief Product Officer role because product strategy, design quality, commercialization, and engineering velocity were tightly connected and had to be treated as one system.

My work operated at multiple altitudes at once: defining product strategy with leadership, designing customer-facing experiences, shaping internal processes, helping technical teams make better product decisions, and translating ideas into code and implementation when the company needed them to become real.

One of the biggest shifts I drove was Satcat, a B2B and public-facing product direction that expanded Kayhan from a specialized customer base to a public product with thousands of registered users, hundreds of thousands of visitors, and millions of page views over the last 24 months.

The thesis was that space data did not need to stay locked behind operator-only workflows. A public product could help people understand the quality of Kayhan’s product experience, expand the audience beyond a small number of satellite operators and launch providers, and create awareness, distribution, and commercial gravity around the company.

Satcat became more than a satellite catalog. It grew into a unified product ecosystem for orbital operations, including conjunction assessment, orbit determination, collision avoidance, ephemeris management, launch coordination, LEOP workflows, and space traffic coordination.

The design challenge was to make high-stakes orbital workflows usable without hiding the underlying uncertainty. Conjunction assessment, for example, involves covariance, sensor uncertainty, propagation differences, operator-to-operator data quality, and risk mitigation decisions. The product needed to make recommendations clear while still showing users why those recommendations existed.

I designed and developed Satcat Terminal and Satcat AI Analyst, extending the platform beyond satellite operators by making orbital intelligence accessible to financial, insurance, media, and analyst audiences without requiring astrodynamics expertise.

That product direction came from a broader thesis: the number of satellite operators and launch providers is limited, but the number of people who need to understand space activity is much larger. Satcat AI Analyst already automated core orbital-investigation workflows, giving us a foundation for deeper custom analysis while creating a path to fold new methods back into the product.

Beyond the product itself, a recurring part of my work at Kayhan was helping journalists and analysts make sense of time-sensitive space activity. I frequently translated orbital data into defensible answers by reconstructing historical satellite activity and evaluating data collections across orbital geometry, illumination, cloud cover, and various sensor limitations.

The most visible example was a CNN investigation into whether Russian reconnaissance satellites could have supported Iranian targeting of U.S. military assets. For that collaboration, I produced detailed reports, source data, interactive web tools, 3D reconstructions, explanatory animations, and broadcast-ready graphics and After Effects assets. CNN used the analysis and visuals throughout its finished investigation, which aired across multiple programs and became part of broader national-security coverage.

Satcat AI Analyst made work at this depth possible by automating much of the underlying orbital investigation. After the CNN collaboration, I folded the custom methods and new requirements back into the product, extending the system so increasingly sophisticated investigations could be repeated end to end without a human analyst manually assembling each one.

I led the redesign of Kayhan’s brand, logo, website, and product experience. I designed and developed the company website using Next.js and Strapi, and worked hands-on across product strategy, UX, frontend development, data visualization, prototyping, customer discovery, technical architecture, marketing support, and executive strategy.

I treated brand and product quality as strategic assets rather than surface polish. In a technical industry, coherence, clarity, and usability shape trust long before procurement or contracting begins.

One of the shifts I am most proud of was helping move Kayhan toward AI-native operating workflows across engineering, analytics, internal documentation, product knowledge, and cross-functional enablement.

This was not just about asking AI to write code. It meant creating expectations, systems, and shared practices around AI-assisted development, internal knowledge, non-engineering enablement, analytics, and documentation. It also meant pushing the team to test work as end users in deployed environments with real data, not simply treating a successful build as proof that a product experience worked.

The strongest proof point was not just traffic, but market pull. Satcat became a major product and brand conduit for Kayhan, supporting customer conversations, new services, external analysis, and broader awareness across the space industry.

That work contributed to external recognition as well. Pathfinder’s redesign was honored with three Finalist distinctions in Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards in 2023, and Satcat received recognition there in 2025. To me, that recognition mattered less as decoration and more as evidence that the company’s product and design quality had become visible beyond its immediate market.

The biggest lesson from this period was that product can reshape a company’s identity when it is treated as more than interface design. At Kayhan, the combination of product direction, UX clarity, branding, technical execution, AI-enabled workflows, and market framing changed what kind of company we could be.

Just as importantly, I helped push the engineering culture beyond a narrow definition of success. The strongest outcome was not only shipping better products myself, but helping create an environment where engineers increasingly owned the user experience consequences of what they built. That shift made product quality more durable than any single feature or redesign.