James Acklin

Profile

Senior product manager who designs and ships. Seventeen years across design, engineering, and product; the last five leading a peer-to-peer messenger through a rewrite, a stability turnaround, and a pivot to agents, with mean time to recovery as the north star metric. Previously a design systems director at Nielsen.

Experience

2021–Present

Tlon Messenger · Product Lead

A private, user-owned, and incentive-free communications suite.

Leads product for Tlon Messenger: sets the roadmap and release cadence for a peer-to-peer messenger on iOS, Android, web, and desktop, writes the weekly product update to leadership, and manages design and user research on a ten-person team.
Led a 2025 stability turnaround: stopped feature work, built the end-to-end test framework, and root-caused every bug. Push notification reliability reached 99%, monthly bugs fell 75%, and releases moved from daily hotfixes to a biweekly cadence.
Drove a 2026 pivot to agentic messaging: designed the bot-led onboarding flow, wrote the positioning and launch materials, and set the retention and sync-reliability targets the team prioritizes against. Agent cohorts doubled 7-day retention, the best result in five years, and the company repositioned around it.
Owns growth experiments and outside-facing work: ran a 2025 reactivation campaign that emailed 2,027 dormant users in six cohorts and retained 22% of returning users at week three, launched a 2026 agent waitlist, and demos the product to investors.
Ships hands-on across the stack: designs in Figma, lands front-end pull requests, owns QA sign-off, and deploys to the live network. Coordinates distributed protocol upgrades, with a track record of catching showstopper bugs before they reach production.

2021–2024

Tlon Landscape · Design & Product

Tlon project team. Launchpad and framework for building and distributing software without app stores or centralized servers.

2021–2022

Tlon Bridge · Product Direction

Tlon project team. User-facing management interface for on-chain public-key infrastructure; coordinated rollout of the first Ethereum L2.

2019–2021

Nielsen · Design Systems Director

Built a WCAG-AAA design system and pattern library used by 20+ designers across 18 verticals.

2019–2021

PointLogic · Product Design

Nielsen unit. Decision-support software for planning $100M+ marketing campaigns.

2013–2019

Rhiza · Design & Engineering

Geospatial data visualization for media and academic researchers; organization acquired by Nielsen in 2017.

2011–2013

Smith Brothers Agency · Engineering

Developed web properties for multinational CPG brands.

2009–2011

Elisco Advertising · Graphic Design

Produced print campaigns for regional clients.

Projects

2026: Alex ebook reader · Side Project
Self-hosted PDF and EPUB library. Drop files in a folder, then browse, read, and track progress from any browser. A reverse relay serves the library to the wider internet from the user's own machine.
2026: ship-launcher · Side Project
Runs a self-custodied Tlon node from a standalone macOS or Linux executable. Handles runtime updates and launches the web interface. Takes user data exported from Tlon hosting.
2026: %cron · Side Project
Schedules and runs recurring tasks on a Tlon personal server, for use with Tlon Messenger.
2020–2021: Bloomfield Robotics · Data Visualization
Dashboards for growers to check crop health and estimate yield from plant-level imaging and ML processing; ran early market validation with trial clients.
2019–2024: Steady State Cycles · Visual Design
Branding and marketing support for a road cycling boutique.
2019–2020: Dirt Rag Magazine · Editorial
Archive reader for ten years of the magazine's articles: a progressive web app for browsing and reading them, built as a Vue.js and Nuxt frontend over a headless WordPress API.
2010–2019: Various · Design & Web Development
Websites, logos, and graphics for small businesses, startups, and friends, from strategy through execution.
2001–2006: Phirebrush · Co-founder
Open-submission online magazine for digital art, illustration, photography, music, and writing; grew to over 1 million unique visitors across 38 issues.