Design & engineering, at the same table

Here’s what concretely goes wrong in the designer → PM → engineer relay: details and nuance get lost at every handoff, and by the time an idea reaches the person building it, nobody fully owns it. We’re structured so that can’t happen. We build our own work: when we have an idea, we run with it and build it, with buy-in from the other principal and a second set of eyes to review it and sharpen it.

There’s a lot of ownership in that model. The person who brings an idea into reality is in charge of what makes it in, so the details don’t get missed.

We’ve both worked at agencies, and we know they can often get regulated work wrong in a predictable way: they underestimate how much time and process it takes to understand the technical requirements up front, and to work with the client’s IT department so that everything will pass the final security review. That information shapes what stack you build on, what tools you can use, and what you’re able to integrate into the experience.

That’s why we work diligently to understand all of it before we build a single thing; it’s how we avoid losing time and money to rework that could be avoided in the first place.

Every engagement starts with a shared document (call it a PRD or a statement of work) that says what our goals are, what we’re agreeing to build, what we’re not, and the risks and assumptions we’re carrying.

Then comes information gathering: stakeholder interviews, previous research, whatever knowledge is sitting in people’s heads, all of which become inputs into the solution we design.

We meet with your team throughout and show our iterations, keep track of every edit and suggestion, and follow up on all of the threads.

What we deliver is shaped to what you need: a fully built and running product, a package for your team to deploy, specs for your engineers, or a specific blend for your team. We’re partial to the full lifecycle, since end to end is where the two-person model really gets to shine. We love delivering a full-stack experience that meets all of the requirements and also delights the end users.

We don’t take many clients, and that’s what lets us be deliberate about both the work we do and how we execute it. We care deeply about the details, and we hold what we produce to a high standard of quality and polish.