Product Manager
James Burney
I built products at Zillow and The Motley Fool, took 2023 to hike the Appalachian Trail end to end, and have spent the time since consulting and building things on my own. Now I'm looking for what's next.
Projects
What I've been building
The past year has been less about job titles and more about actually shipping things. Here's what I've been working on.
What Mile?
LiveGeospatial guessing game for the Appalachian Trail. Players identify a location from a photo, scored by how close they get in trail miles.
Learned: Geospatial UX on mobile is harder than it looks. Every interaction had to be rethought.
View project →Tiny Doodle
LiveA drawing app for kids with daily creative prompts. COPPA-compliant, minimal interface, designed so a five-year-old can figure it out immediately.
Learned: Designing for children means ruthless simplicity. Every feature needs to pass the five-year-old test.
View project →Carbon Tracker
In betaBrowser widget that helps users understand the carbon footprint of their web browsing, through data visualization and behavioral nudges.
Learned: Carbon data is messy. Building trust in the numbers matters as much as the numbers themselves.
View landing page →Selected work
A couple of highlights from the career
Five years across real estate, fintech, and digital media. Full story on the experience page.
Every property page on HotPads was making 10 separate calls just to load its SEO links. I built a unified API that collapsed that to one — cleaner, faster, and a lot easier to maintain going forward.
Full experience →The Motley Fool had never really focused on a free product. I was selected to lead it, taking it from a blank page through discovery, prototypes, and executive buy-in to a fully defined product ready to build.
Full experience →Let's talk
I like building things -- products, digital experiences, ideas that don't have a shape yet. If you have a product role, a web project, or something you want help bringing to life, let's talk. And if you want to compare notes on trails, climate, geography, or beer, I'm always up for that too.
Get in touch