About · Tucker Stern

I am Director of Product Development in Austin. I started in July 2023 at United States Gold Bureau. We rebuilt the storefront for purchases that run into six figures. I run the pages, the integrations that keep price and inventory accurate, and the engineering team that ships both.

From 2015 to 2022 I was Vice President of Product and Development at Golden Frog. I led product, user experience, and customer support for VyprVPN on iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows. The product organization was up to five product managers. VyprVPN reached ten million users during those years. We rebuilt the four native apps and the connection quality behind them. Store rating moved from 3.2 to 4.7.

How I work

I take ownership of the outcome, good or bad. When something needs attention I am on it. I do that with the team, not instead of them. A miss does not become someone else's ticket because it did not start with me.

A team I ran used "we build cool shit" as a motto. Cool, and usable, and profitable, and it had to change what people did so subscriptions grew.

How I decide

Most calls start with data. I put it at about 80 percent measurement, 20 percent judgment. The 20 percent only counts because the 80 percent trained it.

A metric is usually late. I look for the cause, then for more than one signal. One number can be gamed.

The longer write-up of how I break a tie is What I optimize for.

Work I point to

VyprVPN, Golden Frog, 2015–2022. I led product, UX, and support across four native platforms. We rebuilt the apps and the connections. Rating went from 3.2 to 4.7. In July 2017 Apple removed VyprVPN from the China App Store, with dozens of other VPNs, after a Chinese licensing demand. We said so publicly, appealed, and kept the service running for users in China after the app was gone. A year earlier Golden Frog had filed an amicus brief supporting Apple against the FBI on encryption backdoors.

Commerce rebuild, United States Gold Bureau, 2023–present. Custom Next.js storefront on Magento 2. Then a conversion program: funnel, product pages, merchandising, bundles. Checkout completed more often. Typical orders got larger.

AI-first delivery, United States Gold Bureau, 2025–present. Moved the engineering org onto Cursor and Claude Code in stages, then Linear and a shared Notion knowledge base. Cycle time halved. Substantive pull requests per contributor tripled.

Off the clock

I skydive. Mostly angle flying: you set your body on an angle and turn part of the fall into forward drive. A group holds a line one person sets. A few degrees off and you are somewhere else.

I was a member of the US Virgin Islands Olympic team, in show jumping.

If you are hiring for commerce, payments, or native apps, I am on LinkedIn.