PRODUCTS | Kurstin Burnham PM Portfolio

Launch

For the roughly 200 million small businesses that sell on Instagram but lack an official website, Launch transforms an Instagram page into a fully functional website in minutes, empowering entrepreneurs to expand their reach and deliver a better customer experience.

I led a team of six software engineers to bring this product to life, overseeing everything from their interviews and role assignments to task management and weekly standups.

InstaRemit

For the over one million Indian students studying in the U.S. who rely on international transfers to cover daily expenses, InstaRemit is a banking app that uses stablecoin to provide secure, near-instant money transfers from India to the United States in under 15 minutes, reducing stress for students and families who need to transfer money fast.

I conducted over 100 customer interviews with international students to understand their pain points and map the end-to-end remittance journey. Using these insights, I led the product discovery process, defining user requirements, creating user flows, and prototyping the solution. I then collaborated with our team to design and test our MVP with students.

Arthentic

In this new generation of AI scraping, Arthenic empowers millions of digital artists to protect their work through advanced cloaking technology. Artists can upload their creations, have them cloaked, and showcase or sell their art through our AI-only digital art marketplace.

I led the design and development of Arthenic from concept to prototype, conducting user research with artists, illustrators, and creative professionals to understand their pain points around AI. I then designed and tested the prototype directly with artists.

Peony Garden

Peony Garden is an app designed to teach users how to grow plants augmented reality. The objective of the game is to successfully care for each plant, by adjusting environmental settings to provide the appropriate amount of sunlight, moisture, and temperature for optimal growth.

We aim to offer an educational experience by providing users with detailed information and care instructions for each plant. By creating an accessible, immersive, and educational app for users to virtually grow plants, we aspire to empower individuals of all ages and abilities to discover the joys of gardening.

AltNarrate

Altnarrate is an app that provides blind users with custom alternative text for images. We discovered that on social media and in text messages, blind people often lack access to meaningful alt text. Altnarrate allows users to upload images and receive detailed, descriptive alternative text, making digital content more accessible.

This project challenged me to think deeply about how blind people interact with products and to prototype a system that mimics speech-to-text. I conducted user interviews to understand pain points, created user stories and mapped workflows, defined product requirements, assigned development priorities, and led the build-out of the prototype. Finally, I tested the product with blind users to ensure it met their needs.

IUCG Insights Page

As a product manager for BUILD UMass, I helped develop the Isenberg Undergraduate Consulting Group's Insights page. The goal of the Insights page is to provide a place for IUCG to showcase their industry reports, case studies, and client projects.

I met with our client to update them on progress and ensure that our design met their expectations. I also helped develop the client agreement, created the design on Figma, and met with engineers to make sure development met customer needs.

LEAP

LEAP is a web extension that allows users to shop for specific items of used clothing through our AI image recognition technology. Users can download our web extension, search for a piece of clothing on any website, and when they click on the item, we automatically populate pieces of used clothing that looks very similar.

Our mission is to combat the textile waste crisis by increasing the lifespan of clothing. We aim to inspire people purchase used, and to donate their clothing instead of throwing it away and promote more sustainable clothing consumption by driving more traffic to used clothing sites.

UMass Wellness Chatbot

The UMass Wellness Resource Chatbot is an AI-powered platform that recommends wellness resources to students based on their inquiries. The system was trained on data from the UMass Center for Counseling and Psychological Health (CCPH) to provide accurate and personalized guidance.

I led the project from concept to MVP, initially inspired by an Employee Wellness Hub I developed during a 2023 UKG hackathon. At UMass, I pivoted the idea to a Student Wellness Hub, enabling students to track their health and receive surveys recommending relevant resources.

Through the UMass Minute Pitch Competition, I was invited to join the UMass I-Corps Jump-Start Program, where I conducted extensive research with students, faculty, and CCPH staff. Interviews revealed major pain points: students struggled to find resources, professors wanted better guidance for referrals, and CCPH faced challenges with resource allocation.

To address these issues, I designed and trained an AI chatbot, recruited and managed a team of 11 UMass software developers, and built the MVP. The chatbot streamlines access to wellness resources, providing students with quick, personalized recommendations. Due to copyright restrictions on CCPH content, the chatbot has not yet been publicly released.