I’m a product, UX, and CX executive with 20+ years scaling customer-facing platforms across government and the private sector — including a run as the Department of Defense’s first Customer Experience Officer, work that earned me the 2024 DefenseScoop Industry Leadership Award. I’m also the author of Laid Off and Lost, and the host of the Life Between Titles podcast network. Most of what I write and talk about comes from the same place: figuring out who you are when the title, the role, or the certainty you built your identity on is suddenly gone.
Savan Kong is a product, UX, and CX executive with 20+ years of experience building and scaling customer-facing platforms across government and private sector organizations.
He served as the inaugural Customer Experience Officer (CXO) for the U.S. Department of Defense, work that earned him the 2024 DefenseScoop Industry Leadership Award. Prior to that, he was General Manager at Rebellion Defense, a venture-backed defense AI company, where he owned product strategy for IRIS, an AI-driven ISR platform, and led the launch of Dispatch, an autonomous readiness platform, from concept to shipped product.
Before Rebellion Defense, he spent over three years as a Digital Service Expert at the Defense Digital Service (DDS), a posting worth explaining on its own. DDS was established by the Secretary of Defense in November 2015 as a small, handpicked team of designers, engineers, and data scientists pulled in from industry, and it reports directly to the secretary of defense rather than through the normal DoD IT chain of command. It became known, including in coverage by the U.S. Army’s own news service, as the “swat team of nerds” brought in to work on some of the hardest problems in the Defense Department. Being selected into DDS means being pulled into one of the most elite, fast-moving technical units in the federal government.
While there, Savan designed BOBA, a biometric data collection platform deployed across 10+ field sites including Afghanistan. During Operation Allies Refuge in August 2021, he led design and delivery for Project Oscar, building interfaces under extreme time pressure that helped support the evacuation of 120,000+ Afghan allies. He also designed Project Rabbit, a data matching system for Special Immigrant Visa processing that replaced a manual, error-prone workflow and helped clear a backlog of 10,000+ cases, and co-authored the DoD Digital Hiring Playbook, later adopted across 15+ federal agencies to modernize technical recruiting.
In the private sector, he was a founding employee at Redfin, where he co-invented the company’s map-based search technology (US Patent 9436945B2). He later led design for Kindle at Amazon and served as Director of UX and Product at Kareo.
He’s also built a portfolio of his own ventures, each solving a concrete problem for its users:
He currently serves as a Principal at Deep Water Point & Associates (DWPA), a PE-backed GovCon advisory firm, and as a Strategic Advisor to Deep Fathom, an AI compliance platform for the Defense Industrial Base.
I’m Cambodian-American. My parents survived the Khmer Rouge genocide and rebuilt a life in Washington state after resettlement. That history stayed mostly unspoken for most of my life — it’s the subject of Halfway Light, the memoir I’m currently writing.
I live and work in Longview, where the podcast is recorded and most of what I write gets its first draft.
A lot of what I do outside of writing and hosting is informal — checking in on people mid-search, making introductions, being the person who picks up the phone. It’s the same instinct that started the podcast in the first place.
The fastest way to get a feel for the work is to listen to an episode, read the book, or catch up on the journal.