Connections · Editorial interpretation
Making complex systems feel usable.
A connecting theme: make complex systems understandable, with dependable rules underneath.
At Pilot
At Pilot, forecasting and capacity products help operational teams make decisions. Ben led the combined rollout with the delivery team, adding $10M in gross profit over the 12 months following July 2025.
In 1d20
In 1d20, Ben designs flexible narration around explicit rules and persistent state.
Sources and details
Ben was Bencin’s first design specialist and fifth employee, progressed through Senior UX to Product Owner as the company grew to approximately 20, and owned discovery, requirements, backlogs, estimates, proposals and delivery across three to four concurrent client engagements with teams of up to four.
Ben’s product and UX work within delivery teams
Bencin: UX Designer to Senior UX Designer, 2018–2022; Product Owner, 2022–June 2023. Pilot: Product Manager, June 2023–September 2024; Senior Product Manager from September 2024.
Ben Kroft
A connecting theme is making complex systems usable while keeping their underlying rules dependable: operational workflows and forecasts at Pilot, and flexible narration over persistent rules and state in 1d20.
Editorial interpretation
1d20 compiles role-specific context from versioned state and source pins, exposing only permitted facts and actor knowledge. Recent dialogue is bounded and labeled noncanonical; it cannot become persistent game truth merely by appearing in conversation.
Ben’s product and experience direction; AI-assisted implementation and review
1d20’s SQLite commit coordinator writes the event, state, immutable result, random inputs and interaction checkpoint in one transaction. Matching retries return the same committed result without recalculation; stale or conflicting writes are rejected. Tests inject faults after partial writes to check rollback.
Ben’s product and experience direction; AI-assisted implementation and review
Professional Scrum Product Owner I (2022); Indiana University Certificate in Human-Computer Interaction (2017) and B.S. in Exercise Science (2012).
Ben Kroft
Ben directs 1d20’s product, experience design and AI-assisted delivery: a mobile-first solo fantasy campaign for short sessions, meaningful choices and persistent consequences. AI performs the world; deterministic systems own rules and state.
Ben’s product and experience direction; AI-assisted implementation and review
Ben built a functional React prototype using Figma Make and Claude to validate workflows across Supply, Wholesale, Logistics, Billing, Accounting and Pricing. It supported an approved price-management business case.
Ben Kroft
Ben led end-to-end UX in Figma for a five-person team developing a Microsoft HoloLens training and communications prototype for a NASA subcontractor, supporting live remote coaching through complex aerospace procedures.
Ben’s UX direction within the five-person team
1d20 combines Ben’s interests in product design, AI, storytelling and games: a solo tabletop roleplaying app with an AI Game Master, designed for roughly five-minute sessions that fit more adventures into the day. He calls this “building products for nerds.”
Ben Kroft
Ben has a bachelor’s degree in Exercise Science and enjoys lifting weights. “Gym Scientist” is a playful label. Health and fitness are longstanding interests; he wants to apply his product skills to experiences that improve health and everyday life. Ben follows Indiana sports and Chelsea FC. He jokes about yelling at games like the players can hear him. Ben enjoys PC gaming, PC building and thinking through tabletop character builds. “Button Masher” is his deliberately unpretentious gaming label.
Ben Kroft
Ben is married and has a daughter. His outside-work introduction is “Husband / Dad / Dungeon Master / Gym Scientist / Button Masher.” Ben has a Great Pyrenees and a Great Dane.
Ben Kroft
Ben runs a customized Pathfinder 2e: Kingmaker campaign in Foundry Virtual Tabletop. His players founded Greenhold, with Bridgepoint as its capital. His campaign includes original characters, political intrigue and pickle-obsessed goblins; preparation includes encounters, maps and character art.
Ben Kroft
Pilot replaced a six-week rolling average with a Meta Prophet model on Databricks trained on two years of history, reducing forecast MAPE from 28% to approximately 13%. Ben led business discovery, requirements, data-engineering coordination and downstream optimization changes.
Product, modeling and data-engineering team
The mobile composer has separate Play and Ask drafts, selection restoration and queued saves. Mode-change recovery fences late writes and blocks submission in the wrong mode. Browser regression cases cover held responses, reloads, failed saves and newer-tab checkpoints.
Ben’s product and experience direction; AI-assisted implementation and review
At Pilot, Ben owned strategy and roadmap for supply planning, graph optimization, price management and logistics integrations supporting over eight billion gallons of annual fuel sourcing.
Ben Kroft
The résumé describes Ben leading product direction for a 17-person delivery team and data-engineering partners building a greenfield price-management suite and Databricks Lakebase calculation engine for hundreds of thousands of daily prices from market APIs, rack feeds and AI-enabled email capture.
Ben Kroft
Ben designed and delivered a Google Maps-based capacity-management product with a seven-person team alongside a new sales forecast. Following the July 2025 rollout, the combined products added $10M in gross profit over 12 months and improved execution versus plan by $0.0011 per gallon after market normalization.
Combined forecasting and capacity products and delivery team
The approved price-management business case projected processing in minutes instead of up to one hour and elimination of a six-figure annual software license.
Business case supported by Ben’s functional prototype
1d20 persists AI request and attempt state, checks request/checkpoint ownership before accepting output and preserves the committed result across narration interruptions. The lifecycle bounds retries and records failures instead of inventing fallback narration or rerolling to fit generated prose.
Ben’s product and experience direction; AI-assisted implementation and review
Résumé skills: strategy and roadmapping, discovery, user research, KPI definition, build-versus-buy analysis, executive alignment, Figma, journey mapping, React prototyping and AI-assisted development; SQL, Databricks/Lakebase, AWS, APIs/integrations, graph optimization and Tableau.
Ben Kroft
The inspected 1d20 code rejects AI candidates that target stale state, propose canonical writes, reveal forbidden facts, exceed an actor’s knowledge or narrate an uncommitted consequence. Candidate acceptance tests exercise those boundaries and separate hard rejection from semantic review.
Ben’s product and experience direction; AI-assisted implementation and review