I'm Justin Paluch, a product designer based in Pittsburgh, PA.
I've spent fifteen years designing software for people doing difficult work. Nurses managing complex rotating schedules across multiple facilities. Dispatchers coordinating heavy equipment fleets across job sites. HR executives trying to make data-driven decisions with AI-generated insights. While the domain has changed, the problem hasn't: software needs to help someone get shit done quickly and confidently.
I'm now focused on climate. Not as a career strategy, but because I've watched it get worse from my own backyard. In 2010 I left my office in Boulder early because of the Four Mile Canyon fire. In 2018 my family stood in our Portland backyard watching ash from the Eagle Creek fire fall like snow. In 2020 we watched the Bighorn Fire rise above the Catalinas from our windows in Tucson. I'm done watching.
I completed Terra.do's Climate Action Fellowship in 2025, and I've been building toward this for a while. The operational complexity in climate tech (making field data usable, designing tools for people who can't stop mid-job to figure out an interface) is the type of problem I've been solving in other industries.
Outside of work I volunteer with BikePGH and Lawrenceville United's Farmers Market, donate to Pittsburghers for Public Transit and 412 Food Rescue, and I'm on the board of New Sun Rising. When I'm not doing any of that I'm probably on a bike, cooking something ambitious, or camping somewhere without cell service.