20+ years designing clear, intuitive digital products. Agency and consulting roots, Accenture, Droga5, Publicis Sapient. Deep expertise in design systems, UI craft, and engineering collaboration.
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You've secured funding and built your team, but lacking design leadership turns product direction and usability into guesswork.
We partner with Series A–C startups and profitable SMBs as your Fractional Head of Design Duo — acting as embedded UX research and product design leadership tailored to your stage.
The outcome is a product your best users recommend with a caveat: "It's a little weird at first."
When decisions default, the loudest voice wins, not the user.
The first five minutes is costly, and often ignored without design ownership.
Without clear UX, engineers guess. Rebuilding is costly, validation isn’t.
Technically sound, but forgettable, users choose whatever feels easier.
Design stops being reactive and starts leading. Here's what changes when there's a senior design executive embedded in your team:
No more distributed UX debates across the team. One vision, one voice, one standard — accountable to the product and the business.
Clear flows, defined component systems, and reduced back-and-forth during build cycles. Developers ship what was actually designed.
New users understand what your product does and why it matters within minutes, not sessions. Activation improves. Churn drops.
Your highest-stakes user paths are mapped, tested, and owned, not improvised sprint by sprint by whoever had time.
What you show investors matches what users actually experience. The product tells a coherent story at every touchpoint.
Repeatable frameworks, quality standards, and a design system your team continues using long after the engagement ends.
40+ years of combined experience bringing clarity, usability, and product direction to growing teams.
Co-Founder, Head of Design
20+ years designing clear, intuitive digital products. Agency and consulting roots, Accenture, Droga5, Publicis Sapient. Deep expertise in design systems, UI craft, and engineering collaboration.
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Co-Founder, Head of Strategy & UX
Product design leader with 20+ years turning complex problems into clear digital products. Specialist in UX research, strategy, and design direction, solving the right problem before designing the solution.
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Choose the entry point that fits your product today, designed to create alignment before commitment.
We partner with Series A–C startups and profitable SMBs who want a strategic partner—not a vendor. Limited engagements, fully embedded, pushing decisions forward.
We partner with teams that...
We partner with Series A–C startups and profitable SMBs who want a strategic partner—not a vendor. Limited engagements, fully embedded, pushing decisions forward.
A full-time Head of Design at your stage typically costs $160K–$220K in salary alone—before benefits, equity, and a 60–90 day ramp-up before they're fully productive. And if the hire doesn't work out, you've lost six months and significant budget. Fractional design leadership gives you the same seniority and strategic input at a fraction of that cost, with none of the hiring risk. You get someone embedded in your product from week one, on a defined scope that scales with your needs. When you're ready to build an in-house design team, we help you do that too—and can stay on as the senior layer while you hire below us.
Yes. We offer end-to-end design services from UX research all the way through to development handoff. That includes discovery research, information architecture, wireframing, UI design, prototyping, usability testing, and working directly with your engineering team to make sure what gets built matches what was designed. Whether you need a single project completed or an ongoing partner, we have an engagement model that fits.
We integrate into your existing workflow—Slack, Jira, Notion, whatever your team already uses. Each month runs in design sprints: we align on priorities, do the work, and present findings or deliverables in a regular cadence you set. You're not waiting on a proposal every time something comes up. We're already there.
Closely and in their language. We've worked inside engineering-led teams long enough to know that showing up with a Figma file and a handshake doesn't work. We document decisions, write clear specs, participate in sprint ceremonies when it's useful, and stay available during implementation to answer questions before they become bugs. The goal is fewer back-and-forth cycles, not more.
That's completely fine. Our audit tiers are designed to stand alone—you get a finished, actionable deliverable with no obligation to continue. If a single project makes more sense than a retainer, we'll scope it as such. We'd rather be the right fit for a smaller engagement than the wrong fit for a large one.
A good rule of thumb: if you have a specific flow or feature that feels broken, start with the Signal Audit. If you want a complete picture of your product's human experience before making a bigger investment—a redesign, a new feature, a fundraise—the Full Diagnostic is the right call. When in doubt, book a call and we'll tell you honestly which one fits.
