James Acklin

Profile

Senior product manager with 17 years' experience. Have held roles in design, engineering, and product as an individual-contributor, manager, and director. Currently leading product at Tlon and producing collaborative tools people own forever.

Experience (PDF)

2021–Present

Tlon Messenger · Product Lead

A private, user-owned, and incentive-free agentic collaboration platform.

I lead product for Tlon Messenger by setting roadmap and release cadence. We produce a peer-to-peer system with a companion app on iOS, Android, and the web. I compile weekly product updates for the leadership team and manage design and user research. We are about 10 people.
I ship hands-on at every level of the stack - designing in Figma / Claude, authoring client and back-end PRs, owning QA sign-off, and running live deploys. I coordinate distributed protocol upgrades and have a near-perfect track record of catching showstopper bugs.
In 2025, I led a stability turnaround by stopping feature work, building an end-to-end testing framework, and root-causing every bug. By the end, push notification delivery reached 99%, monthly bug reports fell 75%, and releases have stabilized on weekly, scheduled updates. After this, I ran a reactivation campaign that emailed 2,027 dormant customers in six cohorts and retained 22% of returning users at week three.
In early 2026, I drove a pivot to agentic messaging. I designed an educational onboarding tour, wrote the positioning and launch materials, and set WAU retention goals and reliability targets. New cohorts doubled 7-day retention (the best result in 5 years) and Tlon repositioned around it.
My current focus is on improving the user experience and product quality of our agentic messaging platform. I own the end-to-end capability suite of our agent harness, which is a suite of 50 evaluations built from real-world user interactions. Our tool use efficacy reaches a perfect 100% score against our benchmarks. We closely monitor run failures and fold them into the eval suite daily.

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.