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Brandon Davis

Product Designer / Design Engineer / Product Engineer — design, product, and engineering in one

Fourteen years across design, product, and engineering — now building and designing through AI. I rebuilt MRU's economics learning experience — now in production for 2.5 million learners a year, built entirely with agentic coding — and next I'm rebuilding the teacher experience the same way for 20,000+ verified educators worldwide. I enjoy simplifying complexity, creating value for users, and using technology to help a lean nonprofit team go further.

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 for 2.5 million learners a year.
  • Proposed abandoning the slow Drupal 7 → WordPress migration for a modern, AI-first stack — and won team buy-in by returning with a working AI-built prototype and roadmap.
  • Hardened the rebuild for launch: CI gates, Playwright + k6 load testing, row-level security, prompt-injection guards, documented backup/recovery runbooks, and an idempotent Drupal → Sanity migration pipeline with SEO-preserving redirect maps.
  • Built the repo's AI operating system — guardrail invariants (AGENTS.md), 11 scoped rule files, docs-as-canonical, verification gates — plus a scheduled Codex automation that reviews site health and analytics reports and flags anomalies.
  • 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.
  • Relaunched a declining email product as Econ in the News after surveys showed 78% of users didn't realize they had to re-enroll — driving a 105% jump in verified educators from 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 tech-stack rebuild — 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