Make strategic product design your secret weapon.

Lethally effective senior practitioners who think strategically and execute faster than your competition.

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Our team is very senior. We can jump in wherever.

We typically start with customer insights.

If you don't have them, we will generate them.

We're skilled at teasing out the need, the objections, and the hidden opportunities for delight.

We synthesize and show you the options available.

We line it up against your business strategy.

Most consultants stop here and deliver a deck.

If you're lucky, design files.

Then you build it.

We keep going.

We believe building is learning.

We discover multiple ways to solve the problem, arriving at the best one for your business.

We do this as a team.

We do this with you.

So you can choose between tradeoffs that you can actually see.

Your senior practitioner decides what to do and then does it.

There is no handoff.

No loss of context between research, design and engineering.

You get a cohesive product UX, designed, built, tested, and launched.

Right into your main branch.
At the speed of light (almost).

3 ways to work with us.

FractionalA senior design leader on your team, in Slack, in your repo.ProjectsOne product problem, from customer conversations to a shipped product or prototype.AgencyA full-service partnership: we deliver fractional services while we build your team and shape your operating model.
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An example

Want proof?

A restaurant-technology company went from a 90-minute stakeholder conversation to 5 customer interviews to a customer-validated product ready to ship. In 3 weeks. For a fraction of the cost, with zero recruiting.

Another example

Half a day with the founders. A strategy and a prototype for the raise.

A defense-technology company. We spent half a day with the founders on the vision, the market and what the product had to do. We produced a product strategy and a prototype with a narrative, which the founders used in fundraising and early customer validation. We then placed a fractional design lead to keep validating with design partners and build the MVP, at half the cost of hiring those skills full time.

Which fits you

Which best fits your situation?

Which best fits your situation?

Agency. Build the team that builds the product.

Agency

Build the team that builds the product.

We put senior practitioners on your product now, so the work keeps shipping while we hire and build your design team and shape how design, product and engineering work together. Where your engineers own the code, we work in our own repo and deliver reviewed pull requests. Your design system arrives as working code with years of design judgment built in, so the team we build can keep building inside it after we step out.

An Agency engagement ends with a design team of your own, built and in place. It can continue as an ongoing agreement in which we advise and direct the product that ships.

Book a callHow Agency works

Projects

One scoped challenge, priced on what we deliver, at the speed of your business.

We help you scope it, then we de-risk it with your customers, then we make it delightful, then we build it and ship it.

Projects are priced on the deliverable and are only bound by how fast we can deliver.

Book a callHow Projects works

Fractional

A senior product design leader on your team. Part time, full value.

We join your team part time. We model what modern design leadership looks like. We run sessions with your customers, set product design vision with your leadership, and ship alongside your engineers. If you need a design team of your own, we help you build it.

A Fractional engagement can be scoped for a period of time or until an objective is met. We prefer the latter.

Book a callHow Fractional works
How it runs

It's easy to start and continues as long as we can add value.

Every engagement starts with The Runway: two to four weeks in which we interview your customers and run a facilitated workshop with your stakeholders. You receive a strategy and a plan, with several concepts that show both.

Then The Loop, which runs for at least twelve weeks and ends one of three ways: a delivered product, a design team built and in place, or an ongoing agreement in which we advise and direct the product that ships.

How this stays affordable: one senior practitioner, part time, covers the design and front-end skills you would otherwise hire full time, and there is no search to run.

See how The Runway and The Loop work.

Who does the work

Senior designers who ship code, led by Brett Marlin.

Brett has led product design for about 25 years and works from San Francisco. He designed the StudioNow product suite that led to its acquisition by AOL for $40M in 2010. At Mixpanel he was promoted to Head of Design and launched the company's first customer beta program, which brought customers into the design process and still runs. At Carta he built a five-person design technology team, drove design system compliance to an 80% OKR with a score on every pull request, and established the company's first user research practice.

At Altana he led the research and design of Value Chain Management, now the company's flagship product, for a customer base that includes five of the ten largest logistics providers. At Sayari he rebuilt the design team and recruited a Google principal designer and a Google UX researcher. He has also taken two founders from concept to a fundraising-ready prototype in five consecutive days.

Alongside him is a network of very senior, hands-on practitioners who have worked for him or alongside him, among them a former principal designer at Google and a former principal designer at Walmart. We build our own products too: MAF Machine, an endurance training coach, is a live product we designed and shipped.

Next step

Tell us what you need to decide.

Book a call. We will tell you which way of working fits, or that none does. Or write to [email protected].

Book a call