A six phase process built around embedded delivery, not vendor style handoff. Designed for product organizations that need to ship while building toward design maturity. Read this if you are evaluating partners.
We start by understanding what is actually broken, not what was scoped. Most engagements arrive with a brief that describes a symptom (the app feels dated, conversion is dropping, the team is stuck). The first week is about finding the underlying cause before we commit to a direction.
This is intentionally short. If discovery extends past a week, it usually means we're substituting analysis for action. We end Week 1 with a working hypothesis and proceed.
Before we design new things, we make sure the foundations support what comes next. That can mean tokens, components, naming conventions, file structure in Figma, or how design hands off to engineering. Foundations work is unglamorous. It is also what prevents the engagement from producing pretty mockups that engineers cannot actually build.
The designer or design squad joins the team. Same Slack, same Jira, same standups. Pairs with engineers, attends roadmap discussions, contributes to PR reviews when relevant. This is the shape of the engagement for most of its duration. Not "design hands off mockups and disappears" but "design is part of the team that ships features."
The Ooma engagement (5.0 Clutch rating, 4 years and counting) has been in this phase since Week 4 of 2022.
Every quarter we run usability research on what shipped. Not formal lab studies, the kind of focused, low overhead testing that produces actionable insight in 2 weeks. The findings feed back into the next quarter's roadmap. Research is woven into delivery, not separated from it.
As the engagement progresses, we work alongside your team to build the structures that let design contribute strategically: design rituals, review cadences, the documentation that lets a new designer onboard quickly. The goal is to leave the design function more capable than we found it, regardless of whether we stay long term.
Some engagements are time bounded. Others extend for years (Ooma: 4 years and counting). Either is fine. What matters is that the transition is clean: documentation is current, knowledge has transferred, and your in house team owns the work. We design every engagement to be exitable from month three onwards. That changes how we work, in a good way.
Designers join your team. Same tools, same standups, same accountability. Not "external resources delivering to a SOW" but team members contributing to outcomes.
Pretty mockups that engineering cannot build are waste. We invest in tokens, components, and handoff protocols before we design the next feature.
The senior designer who has been on your product for two years can move ten times faster than the equivalent designer hired last quarter. We optimize for retention, not rotation.
We work in a way that lets you end the engagement cleanly at any point past month three. That constraint changes our documentation and handoff practices for the better.
Every quarter we test what shipped. Not formal lab studies. Focused, low overhead research that produces actionable insight in two weeks.
Book a 30 minute discovery call. We'll tell you honestly whether this process fits your situation, and what to look for if it doesn't.
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