I build AI-enabled products — and the operating systems behind them — that turn complex marketplace, data, and delivery problems into measurable value.
Across 11 years at LTK, I worked from hands-on product architecture through executive portfolio leadership. My through-line is translating ambiguity into a clear product bet, aligning Product, Design, Engineering, Data, and commercial partners, and staying accountable through launch and learning.
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Brand teams had more creator demand and gifting inventory than they could operate through messages and spreadsheets. I worked with a staff engineer to test a different operating model: let creators choose from brand-approved products and variants, accept by submitting the complete order, and move that order through the brand's normal Shopify fulfillment workflow.
The 3-week feasibility integration was tested with 5 enterprise brands. It reduced active brand-team handling time by approximately 95% per collaboration and supported approximately 10x program scale. The case shows the product judgment behind the result: broaden creator access, automate repetitive coordination, keep Shopify authoritative for commerce and fulfillment, and leave creator fit, inventory, economics, and performance decisions with the brand.
Executive Summary · Product Requirements · MVP User Stories · Product Press Release
| Product leadership | Evidence of impact |
|---|---|
| 0-to-1 platform architecture | Served as product architect for a creator-commerce Brand Platform informed by direct customer research and used for active campaign work by 5K+ brands. |
| Commerce and attribution at scale | Launched and scaled Hyperlink to 250K+ creators and $30B+ in lifetime attributed sales. |
| Applied AI and data products | Designed Match.AI's fit and ROAS vectors and collaborative-filtering approach, then validated it with managed-service teams before productization. |
| Agent-ready product delivery | Co-designed a six-stage, AI-enabled product development system that reduced Ideation-to-Development-start time from eight weeks to four for initiatives not requiring new user research. |
| Commercial product leadership | Led product delivery for Zara's LTK launch and helped shape the move from subscription pricing toward performance-based monetization. |
| Leadership leverage | Developed five product leaders; all expanded their scope, and three were promoted. |
- Executive product strategy paired with principal-level building.
- 0-to-1 platform, marketplace, workflow, payments, attribution, and monetization experience.
- Customer discovery and product architecture that connect user behavior to business outcomes.
- Agentic product judgment: explicit tool permissions, evaluation criteria, quality floors, human approval points, and cost/latency/quality trade-offs.
- Cross-functional operating systems that improve decision quality without turning process into bureaucracy.
My leadership style is supportive, direct, and intentional about creating autonomy. I make the customer problem, business outcome, decision owner, and boundaries clear, then expect the people closest to the evidence to state their intent and act. I stay close enough to coach and challenge without becoming another approval layer.
- Autonomy with accountability: teams should know what they own, how success will be judged, and when a decision needs escalation.
- High trust, high candor: we debate ideas vigorously and respectfully, invite written input so quieter and distributed voices shape the decision, then commit once the owner decides.
- Sustainable urgency: focus comes from a small number of priorities, explicit trade-offs, and time-bound surges—not permanent firefighting.
- Evidence before ego: I label hypotheses, ask what would disconfirm them, and adapt quickly when the system tells us something different.
I measure leadership by the judgment and capability that remain when I am not in the room. All five product leaders I directly managed expanded their scope, and three were promoted. I also work to make my own influence visible: my energy can anchor a discussion, so I invite others to frame the problem first, ask for disconfirming evidence, and often speak last.
For AI products, I make the operating contract explicit: what an agent may observe and change, how success is evaluated, which silent failures matter, where people remain accountable, and how cost, latency, and quality trade against one another.
“CJ is one of the most effective and complete product managers I've worked with in my 20+ years in software.”
— Gary Kanazawa, former VP of Product Management at LTK; managed me for six years
“CJ is one of the most exceptional product managers I've had the pleasure of working with—truly in a league of his own.”
— Jim Phillips, VP of Engineering and executive partner at LTK
“If you need a leader who can drive big picture vision, master the technical details and inspire the people around him, CJ is the person.”
— Aaminah Saifuddin, product leader who reported to me for four years
I translate product judgment into reusable agent operating contracts—not just one-off prompts. My public AI skills library shows how I structure evidence, decision gates, permissions, verification, and human accountability across the product lifecycle.
I completed DeepLearning.AI's three-course Generative AI for Software Development specialization, covering LLM-assisted development, team software engineering with AI, and AI-powered software and system design.
- Strategy and discovery: Working Backwards PRFAQ and PROBE product analysis.
- Direction and operating model: product vision alignment and outcome and metric design.
- Market, growth, and decisions: market and GTM strategy and competitive product teardown.
- Measurement and learning: next-generation product analytics and metric root-cause investigation.
- Operational execution: cross-functional status synthesis and a fictional Athena-backed MCP automation example.
The playbook library turns several of those operating contracts into practical methods readers can run with a team:
- PROBE Product Analysis — connect purpose, evidence, obstacles, bets, and a decision-changing experiment.
- Problem-to-Outcome Story Mapping — map the current journey, define outcome intent, and slice end-to-end releases.
- Continuous Discovery — establish a sustainable evidence, opportunity, assumption-test, and decision rhythm.
- Diverge → Converge — escape solution fixation and compare genuinely different mechanisms.
- Executive Communication — make decisions, trade-offs, escalations, and outcomes easier to act on.
Explore all product leadership playbooks →
- Executive Communication PM Workshop — a ProductCamp Dallas workshop on making executive conversations clearer and more actionable; private deck available by request.
- EP 55 — Shortcut with CJ Burns — a Product for Product Management interview on LTK's move from Jira to Shortcut and the trade-offs behind the decision.
- The Product Team as a Bespoke Suit for Your Organization — why product operating models should fit their business context.
- The Monetization Barrier — a framework for recognizing when a customer-value problem is really a business-model constraint.
- The Modern Checkout Funnel: How Social Commerce Is Disrupting Retail Forever — a talk on social commerce and the changing path to purchase.
I am most interested in AI-centric Principal Product Manager, Director of Product, VP Product, and Head of Product roles with a meaningful player-coach mandate. The best fit will involve building new value across agentic products, marketplaces, data platforms, commerce, energy, defense technology, or public-service platforms.
I am especially useful when a team needs to:
- Turn an ambiguous opportunity into a crisp, testable product strategy.
- Make difficult build, reuse, partner, or stop decisions.
- Connect an AI experience to authoritative product state and measurable business outcomes.
- Align executives and builders around a plan that can actually ship.
- Public resume
- Product case studies — the flagship Shopify case, an independent EPD collaboration and SDLC case, and shorter selected examples.
- Shopify-enabled Creator Gifting case study
- Improving Collaboration Across Engineering, Product, and Design
- Other selected product leadership case studies
- Product leadership playbooks — practical guides for analysis, discovery, journey mapping, decision-making, communication, and agent-ready delivery.
- Reusable AI skills library — public-safe skills and fictional example playbooks for product strategy, agent analytics, investigation, delivery, and operational automation.
I am a married father of two, newly rooted in Traverse City, Michigan. Family keeps me grounded; outside work, I am happiest skiing, hiking, trail running, or sailing around Northern Michigan.
Giving back to the product community is how I refill my cup. I served as president of ProductCamp Dallas from 2019 through 2025 and helped the community move from in-person events to virtual and hybrid experiences. I am an enthusiastic optimist with an economist's respect for evidence—curious about complex systems, generous with what I learn, and energized by helping other people do their best work.
This repository contains public-safe summaries of my work. It intentionally excludes former-employer confidential information, internal links, customer data, source code, and non-public operating details.