Fractional Product Design for Startups
Get the product out of your head and into the hands of your users.
FREE 30-Min Consultation
We're building a better model for contract design.
100's of customer interviews have trained us to speak to your users with all the tact and grace that you'd give them.
We don't claim to be design generalists. A product focus has allowed us to hone our process to a science.
When you build products and only products you get pretty quick. We'll help you identify where to innovate and when to avoid reinventing the wheel.
Staff up fast for a short term engagement without the overhead of full-time employment or the hand-holding of junior designers.
How We Do It
The Kickoff Meeting
Where do we want to be at the end of the sprint? What about 3 months after that? The goal of the kickoff meeting is two-fold: Alignment and Planning. We’ll cover off on the process of a sprint, then jump into an exercise intended to map our short, medium, and long-term trajectory.
Then, we’ll get into User Journey Mapping. We’ll have asked that your team arrives with a clear idea of your audience. Ideally, that means the names of 3-5 customers who you’d be willing to connect us with. But if we’re not that far along, then some simple traits and characteristics will allow us to identify and recruit real people to participate in testing at the end of the sprint.
Discovery Research
Over the next few days, we conduct research that allows us to define in granular detail what the interface will allow users to do. We’ll take the documents you have—like a business plan or vision deck—and combine that with our own research interviews to form User Stories.
This might not be familiar concept to everyone, but in digital design the User Story is the base unit on which everything is built. A user story describes one action or ability that the interface allows a user to do. For instance: “As a user I can enter my email and password to login” or “As a user I can invite a team member.” The most complicated products start with simple declarations like this; they don’t detail how exactly a user will accomplish these tasks—that’s for design to figure out—but they offer everyone a plain language description of what jobs need to be done.
Design Round 1
This is the first pass at the application, an intentionally messy sketch with wireframes or diagrams to get to a common visual ground as fast as possible. We don’t worry about fine-tuned interactions, or flowery language here, just connecting the dots all the way through an experience.
Design 1 turns up potentially complicated corners of the interface, areas that will require heavy technical lift for an engineer. Many disciplines have a corollary to this phase, in architecture it’s modeling with cheap, pliable materials; electricians use an exercise called breadboarding. We’ll work through the nitty-gritty details later, what matters now is shining a light on all the dark corners of the app.
Functional Feedback
We’ve made it to the first review. For many people this is the first time they've felt their idea was real. At this stage we’re looking for functional feedback. What are the things we expected the application to do that we don’t see represented?
We’ll look back to our user journey map and determine which of the assumptions still need to be more deeply explored. The main goal from this first review is to identify the sections of the interface that we feel most confident about in terms of their usability and appeal to the audience of users. This will inevitably leave us with a few interactions—like a critical user flow—that need the most attention. With that flow identified, we’ll set out to build a clickable prototype that can be tested at the end of the sprint.
Design Round 2
Sometimes this section is called High-Fidelity design, it’s when we strive for pixel-perfection. If you have a clear brand already, we’ll leverage the assets you have to bring the interface to life in full-color. If you’re still landing on a visual identity that’s also okay; we’ll help run a quick matching exercise to help choose an aesthetic that fits.
The best part of digital design is that nothing is (or should be) permanent, what matters is that we build with a real audience in mind. If we can successfully solve a users problem, the visual considerations will fall into place.
Design 2 ends with two critical documents: A clickable prototype that we’ll use in the testing phase, and a product book that documents the design decisions we’ve made, and lays out in granular detail all the pages that the application should include. Once testing concludes, we’ll update the book to reflect any necessary changes our research turned up.
User Testing
A sprint is a framework for challenging assumptions. As we design, we make informed decisions, but nothing can confirm these decisions hold true until real users have a version of the tool in their hands.
For many founders, this is their first experience with Task-Based user testing. We test, but we also teach new product leaders how to recruit, plan, and conduct empirically rigorous tests.
The Deliverables
Our goal is to equip founders with a best in class set of artifacts that allow them to test, build, and pitch their ideas. Whether you're ready for development or looking to raise a seed round, the Full Sprint package sets you up for success.
Clickable Prototype
Data Dictionary
The Product Book
OKR's and Analytics
Product Roadmap
Plans
Plans
Clickable Prototype
Dev-ready. Perfect for user testing and investor demos.
The Product Book
Product documentation. On-board customers and new hires with ease.
Data Dictionary
The database schematic, grounding the sprint in real technology.
OKRs and Analytics
Metrics that matter and a tagging plan to reach your goals.
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Product Roadmap
Product specs + research guides for the next epic features.
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Finding Talent
Vetting the best talent for your first design hire.
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Training and Onboarding
Prospective designer is full participant in design sprint. Ready to hit the ground running with deep business understanding.
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Ongoing Mentorship
Access to growing community of 1st design hires + Full Sprint Senior design guidance.
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2-Weeks to Prototype with the Full Sprint Design Accelerator.
Clickable Prototype
Dev-ready. Perfect for user testing and investor demos.
The Product Book
Product documentation. On-board customers and new hires with ease.
Data Dictionary
The database schematic, grounding the sprint in real technology.
(1) Sprint per quarter, activate at any time. The first actually useful Fractional Product Designer plan.
Clickable Prototype
Dev-ready. Perfect for user testing and investor demos.
Product Documentation
Product documentation. On-board customers and new hires with ease.
Data Dictionary
The database schematic, grounding the sprint in real technology.
Analytics and OKR's
"Objectives and Key Results" help you set a course for improvement through data.
Roadmap Planning
Monthly check-ins for feature planning and support.
Quarterly plan + recruitment and mentorship of your team's first design hire.
Clickable Prototype
Dev-ready. Perfect for user testing and investor demos.
The Product Book
Product documentation. On-board customers and new hires with ease.
Data Dictionary
The database schematic, grounding the sprint in real technology.
Analytics and OKR's
"Objectives and Key Results" help you set a course for improvement through data.
Roadmap Planning
Monthly check-ins for feature planning and support.
Finding Talent
Vetting the best talent for your first design hire.
Training and Onboarding
Prospective designer is full participant in design sprint. Ready to hit the ground running with deep business understanding.
Ongoing Mentorship
Access to growing community of 1st design hires + Full Sprint Senior design guidance.
Founders choose Full Sprint to accelerate their product roadmap.
Exceptional digital products come from rapid iteration.
Clickable Prototype
Get to "This Feels Real" with a fully interactive prototype to show customers, investors, and engineers.
Product Docs
We document everything, so you don't have to. You wouldn't buy a Porsche without an owner's manual.
User Testing
We'll test the critical assumptions, then teach you to lead empirically significant research.
User Journey Mapping
The essential product discovery exercise, learn to think about your audience in detail.
Data Dictionary
Digital products store data for users. The dictionary presents a flexible architecture in layman's terms.
Analytics Strategy
Learn to measure what matters with our simple measurement framework.
Frequently Asked
Today we're focusing on the huge problem-space of fractional product management and design. If you have external development needs we can help find suitable firms to accomplish the tasks. Our delivery is dev-ready and always grounded in realistic technical solutions. The Full Sprint mission is to equip founders with product skills they might not have; we strive to do the heavy-lifting that often falls on engineering teams.
Though the additional need for engineering solutions on a similar model is clear, we know that for the time being we'll be able to deliver the greatest value for our customers by limiting our offerings to the engineering-adjacent disciplines.
Our experience has shown that marketing websites are the cheapest and easiest piece of the tech-stack to contract out. In the rare case we will build a site for you, but that is not our core area of focus. Full Sprint designs and documents web and mobile applications for consumer and enterprise audiences. A simple test is this: if your platform will have accounts (users sign-up) and a database, then it's a good chance Full Sprint is exactly the firm you're looking for. Our focus on product design has allowed us to achieve a mastery that many general, digital agencies will not be able to provide for you.
We bill sprints as 2 weeks or approximately 10 days. The time-bound nature of a sprint is for you and for us.
For you it keeps the project highly-focused according to the best practices of digital design and development. To have in your hands a clickable prototype of your applications after just 10 days will feel like a miracle of the modern age. We conduct user-testing to ensure our solution truly meets the needs of your audience, but we also equip founders with the skills necessary to test the product on their own.
For us a 2 week sprint ensures we do not bite off more than we can chew. It's important to recognize that the vast majority of digital products do not require seriously complicated interfaces. Our job as product coaches is to hammer home the advice that every book, mentor, and senior leader should be telling you: build a tool that solves a problem for one audience. User retention and growth will give you permission to add features and begin branching out to address your vision.
In general you should think of it like this, 80% of your application should rely on tried and true models of human-computer-interaction. That other 20%—the novel technology—is where we focus our user-testing. Our extensive experience in product development allows us to get you that 80% faster than anyone on the market. That gives us plenty of time to play in the 20% problem area.
We don't measure our deliverables in number of artboards, but core user flows is a helpful framework to estimate. We build closed-loop applications that allow a critical audience to enter an application, accomplish the important tasks, and manage their account for the lifecycle of their use. In the case of a two-sided marketplace we'll build the necessary additions to support core users on both the seller and buyer side.
In short, don't count us out, you'll be blown away.
Testimonials
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