Twitter alum becomes Cornell Tech’s first Designer-in-Residence

Cornell Tech is excited to welcome our first Designer-in-Residence: Leland Rechis.

Along with Cornell Tech’s Chief Entrepreneurial Officer Greg Pass, Rechis is a Twitter alum, where he led the development of Twitter’s mobile platform and has since worked with several industry powerhouses as an interaction designer, product manager and head of product. He was a member of the Android launch team at Google, and he’s played a key role in strategy and design for Kickstarter and Etsy, to name a few.

Rechis will become a familiar face in Cornell Tech’s studio, where he will leverage his extensive experience designing platforms with engineers to become a hands-on mentor to both our computer science and MBA students as they work together on company and start-up projects.

His focus will be on product design, ensuring that students think not just about the technical systems they’re building but about the user experience. Rechis will help the students connect their engineering and business backgrounds with product design to produce new products and companies that will have real impact.

Rechis also hopes to teach students how to embrace ambiguity: there are many unknowns when you’re launching a company, and product design can be used to iterate and explore, to anticipate and solve problems before they exist.

Rechis sees the Cornell Tech approach as something of a calling. He made the move to Cornell Tech because it operates like many of the successful start-ups he’s worked at in the past. It’s an experiment – programs are still being shaped, with faculty and administrators who are open to ideas from all levels and welcome feedback and change. In addition to mentoring students, Leland will be working to integrate product design into Cornell Tech’s innovative curriculum.

And after years of commuting back and forth from Silicon Valley, Rechis is excited to be living in New York full time. He sees Cornell Tech’s presence here as a unique opportunity to weave tech into NYC’s diverse economy, and to work with companies to attack real world problems.