Brandon Davis

Product Designer / Product Manager / Product Engineer

Fourteen years in product and design — now building end to end with AI. I rebuilt MRU's economics learning experience solo, in five months; it's now in production, reaching 2.5 million learners a year. Current focus: AI features for learners and a rebuilt teacher experience for MRU's 20,000+ verified educators.

Experience

Director of Product, Tech & Design

MRU (Marginal Revolution University) Oct 2023 — Present
  • Rebuilt and migrated MRU's entire learning platform solo in five months with Claude Code and Codex (Next.js, TypeScript, Supabase, Sanity) — now in production, reaching 2.5 million learners a year.
  • Redesigned the learner experience end to end, mobile-first — every screen answers "what should I do next?" — and built the design system behind it: semantic tokens and a CI lint that blocks new hardcoded styles.
  • Hardened the rebuild for launch: CI gates, Playwright + k6 load testing, row-level security, and documented backup/recovery runbooks.
  • Built the repo's AI operating system — guardrails and verification gates, plus scheduled Codex/Claude agents that review site health, scan for bugs, run backups, and pull analytics reports.
  • Initiated and led the re-host of MRU's most-used product — interactive economics tools used by 600,000+ learners a year — from Heroku to AWS App Runner, fixing the school-network blocking that had left them unreachable in classrooms.
  • Launched single sign-on for MRU's 20,000+ verified educators — replacing an email-and-forms patchwork with one account for restricted answer keys, trainings, certifications, and community.
  • Repositioned and relaunched a declining flagship teacher product as Econ in the News, guided by educator surveys and interviews — growing verified educators 105% past the prior peak (180% year-over-year) within 4 months.
  • Ship as part of a small distributed team — full-timers and contractors across engineering, design, content, ops, and marketing.

Tech & Design Product Manager

MRU Oct 2022 — Oct 2023
  • Led research and planning for the earlier tech-stack rebuild — the move off Drupal that began as a WordPress migration — market analysis, user interviews, roadmap, and product requirements.
  • Improved workflows and forms, increasing adoption conversion rates by up to 140%.
  • Stabilized and documented critical middleware after key departures, working with enterprise tech and operations leadership.

Visual Designer & Project Manager

MRU May 2017 — Sep 2022
  • Led MRU's first rebrand — logo flexibility, mobile responsiveness, and resolving naming confusion — guided by 5-second tests and competitor analysis.
  • Project-managed the first site redesign; within six months, course engagement rose 11% and resource navigation improved 45%.
  • Ran product and marketing experiments with A/B testing, heatmaps, session recordings, and analytics; built personas, wireframes, and prototypes.

Graphic Designer & Web Administrator

Mercatus Center Jun 2012 — Apr 2017

Selected Projects

MRU Platform — AI-first rebuild

learn.mru.org

Ground-up solo rebuild and migration of MRU's whole learning experience in five months: monorepo folding five sites into three apps, modular learning-object schema, rebuilt learner flow with "next up" logic, review cards, Algolia search, and an idempotent Drupal → Sanity migration pipeline.

BitcoinBoost

bitcoinboost.info

Free passion-project web app (Vite, React, TypeScript) that shows how everyday savings yield and spending rewards can passively build a small Bitcoin allocation — concept, design, build, and deployment.

Skills

Builds with: Claude Code, Codex, and agentic coding; Next.js, React, TypeScript, Node, Supabase / Postgres, Sanity, Tailwind, HTML/CSS, Playwright, PostHog, Vercel

Leads with: Product design, UX research, design systems, prototyping, product strategy, product management, roadmapping, team leadership, branding, experimentation

Recognition

  • 1st place, Open Web Governance Hackathon — redesigned how NEAR distributed its $5M community fund.

Education & Certs

  • Aha! Product Management Professional Certificate — 2024
  • UX Boot Camp, Cooper Professional Education — 2017
  • Visual Design, General Assembly — 2015
  • B.A. Political Science, American Public University — 2012