Fractional
For a company with no design function, or designers without a strategic lead. We join your team, talk to your customers, set product design direction with you, and ship with your engineers.
Your practitioner directs a team of AI agents, so one person covers work that used to take a team. They draw on a shared practice that every one of our engagements adds to. The judgment stays theirs.
Founders, CEOs and CPOs at B2B product companies. You have no design function yet, or you have designers who execute well while nobody sets product design direction at a strategic level.
Either way, product decisions are being made without senior design judgment or customer evidence, and the pressure to ship does not wait for them.
A senior product design leader from Marliin joins your team part time, with the background your product needs.
They run facilitated sessions with your customers, bring what they hear to your leadership, and turn it into product decisions you can defend. Then they design and build alongside your engineers, directing a team of AI agents, and the work lands as code in your repo.
Customer insight from sessions we run, a product strategy and a plan with concepts that show both, and a product validated with the people who use it, shipped from your own codebase.
Most clients start with The Runway: two to four weeks in which we interview your customers and run a facilitated workshop with your stakeholders. You leave with a strategy, a plan, and several concepts that show both. Because your practitioner builds with a team of AI agents, those concepts can arrive as working code. The Runway is fixed price, and we quote it on the call. If you already know us, you can start a Fractional tier directly.
Every tier runs in The Loop. We work inside your feedback loops with customers and stakeholders, and our AI agents work inside them with us. We design and build with your team, ship, and go again. The work ends in a delivered product, a team built and in place, or an ongoing agreement in which we advise and direct the product that ships. A Fractional engagement can run for a period of time or until an objective is met. We prefer the latter.
How this stays affordable: one senior practitioner, part time, directs a team of AI agents and covers the design and front-end skills you would otherwise hire full time. There is no search to run.
We shape the team to your stage. Before product-market fit, one product-minded designer often owns product decisions with a few engineers. Once it fits, a senior engineer joins to oversee the AI-assisted engineering. At scale, product and design split back into their own roles. That is a guide, not a rule: scope sets the tier.
We set the price by scope, and we work that out with you on a free 30-minute call.
From our track record
At a product analytics company, we launched its first customer beta program, which brought customers into the design process and still runs.
Fractional. One senior practitioner on your team.
Fractional Team. Several senior practitioners across the skills you need: product design, product, engineering and account service. Quoted after a free 30-minute call.
Fractional + Hire. We start knowing we will replace ourselves, and we hire the people who do. Quoted after a free 30-minute call.
Hire can be added to Fractional or Fractional Team at any point.
You want a deck or advice to file. You want someone to take tickets from a backlog with no say in what gets built. Or you are ready to hire a full-time head of design today and only need help with the search.
Book a free 30-minute call and we will tell you whether Fractional fits, or which tier does. Or start with The Runway.