Product design consulting
Your product does not have a design problem. It has an undecided problem.
Most products that look wrong are not badly drawn — they are badly decided. Nobody wrote down who the user is, which single decision the screen exists to make, or what happens when the data is empty, slow or wrong. A designer hired to make it pretty will make those choices silently, in your product, with no way back. This arrangement makes them deliberately, with someone who has to build the result.
We take a small number of companies at a time so the answers stay fast. If there is no room this quarter you will be told, not queued.
From
$2,500/month
- $2,500/month — Design review, 6 hours a month
- $6,000/month — Design partner, 16 hours and a weekly call
- $12,000/month — Embedded, 36 hours including production
- $300–$400/hour — project work, 10 hours minimum
The same rate card as the CTO arrangement, because it is the same seniority. Month to month, no notice period.
What this is actually for
Six design decisions that are really product decisions
None of these are solved by a better-looking screen, and all of them are cheaper to decide than to undo once they are in code and in customers' habits.
What is this screen for
Every screen exists so someone can make one decision. When nobody named it, the layout gives eight things equal weight and the user does none of them.
The onboarding that loses them
Sign-up asks for everything because every field seemed reasonable in isolation. The first thirty seconds decide retention, and they are almost always designed last.
Empty, loading, slow, wrong
Real products spend a lot of time in these four states and generated designs never show them. The empty state is the first thing a new user sees.
The design system nobody follows
Not a component library — a small set of rules the team and the AI tool can both apply consistently, so screen nineteen looks like screen two.
The flow that survives the edge cases
Refunds, partial failures, permissions, two people editing the same thing. These are designed in a spreadsheet, not in Figma, and then drawn.
Design that can actually be built
A comp that ignores what the API returns becomes an argument in sprint three. Designing next to the person who knows the data model removes it.
Why not a freelance designer or a template
Because the expensive decisions are made before anything is drawn
Templates and freelance designers are good at what they are for — producing screens. Neither is accountable for whether the screens were the right ones, and neither will be there in month seven when the flow meets a case nobody designed. Hire a designer for production. Hire this for the decisions production is based on.
A template decides for you, invisibly
Every template encodes assumptions about your user and your business. They are someone else's assumptions, and you inherit them without seeing them.
A freelancer draws what you asked for
The brief you write is the brief you get. The value here is in questioning the brief — which is uncomfortable, and which nobody paid by the comp will do.
An AI tool is fast and has no taste in your market
Lovable and v0 produce competent layouts instantly. What they cannot do is know that your users are nurses on a night shift, or that the number on the right is the only one anybody reads.
Design and engineering in the same head
The direction is set by someone who has to build it and operate it. Nothing is specified that the data model cannot support, and nothing is simplified away that the business needs.
How to work together
Three depths, one rate card
Hours are stated on every tier. Production design — the drawing — is done by a designer we have worked with for years, named on the call, working to the direction set in these hours.
Design review
$2,500/month
6 hours a month of critique and direction on what your team or your AI tool is producing.
Best when you are shipping screens weekly and want a senior eye before they reach customers.
- 6 hours a month — send flows, screens or Figma files as often as you like
- Written critique within one working day: what the screen is for, what is fighting it, what to change first
- The product one-pager: user, job, the metric, the smallest slice that proves it
- Onboarding and empty-state review, which is where most of the loss is
- Direction the team can apply without us in the room
Most founders start here
Design partner
$6,000/month
16 hours a month including a weekly call, and real design work rather than only opinions about it.
Best when the product is being actively shaped and the decisions need arguing every week.
- 16 hours a month, calls and work together
- A weekly call on what is being designed and why
- Flows and wireframes for the parts that carry the most risk
- A design system your team and your AI tool can both follow
- Written specs for the states nobody designs: empty, loading, error, permission-denied
- Review of what the engineers actually shipped, against what was designed
Embedded design
$12,000/month
36 hours a month across direction and production — the screens get drawn, not just decided.
Best when you are launching or rebuilding and need the design function itself for a few months.
- 36 hours a month across direction, calls and production design
- Production design by a designer we have worked with for years, named before they start
- End-to-end flows delivered in Figma, built to your design system
- Brand and visual direction where the product needs it
- Usability sessions on the flows that matter, with what we changed afterwards
- Handover your engineers or your AI tool can implement without interpretation
A single piece of design work
A flow redesigned, an onboarding rebuilt, a design system written: $300–$400 an hour with a 10 hours minimum, scoped and agreed before anything starts. Retainer clients get first call on the calendar.
These arrangements are for companies that can fund senior engineering properly — funded startups, profitable businesses, and teams with a deal or a raise on the line. If you are pre-revenue and self-funding, the free audit and the guides on this site are genuinely yours to use, and that is the honest answer rather than a discount.
Why this, from an engineering company
Because the design decisions we make are ones we then have to live with
Golux has built and still operates fifteen products of its own — a planning platform, a portfolio monitor, monitoring SaaS, a booking marketplace, an agriculture platform. Every design decision in them came back to us as a support ticket, a confused user or a schema we had to change. That is a different teacher from a portfolio: we have paid for our own bad flows, which is why the questions here are about the decision rather than the pixels.
See the product design practice- 15
- products designed, built and operated by this team
- 15+
- years of shipping products to real users
- 1
- person accountable for the direction, named collaborators for production
- 0
- comps delivered that the data model cannot support
How it starts
Four steps, and the first two cost nothing
- 01
An intro call
Thirty minutes. What you are building, who it is for, and where the product stops making sense. If design is not your actual problem we will say so.
- 02
We go through the product
The flows, the screens, the analytics if you have them. A couple of hours before anything starts, so the first critique is about your product.
- 03
Pick a depth and start
Month to month from day one. No notice period, no minimum term.
- 04
Change it when you change
Up during a launch, down when the team can carry it, out when you hire a designer — and we help you hire them.
Questions
Product design consulting, in detail
- Who actually does the design work?
- The product and UX decisions are Nikola's — they are engineering decisions wearing a design hat, and he is accountable for them. Visual and production design comes from a designer he has worked with for years, named on the call before they start. On the Embedded tier that production is included in the hours.
- Do you work in Figma or directly in our tool?
- Both. Figma when the flow needs to be argued before it is built, straight in Lovable, v0 or the codebase when it is faster to show than to draw. We will not insist on a deliverable that exists only to justify the invoice.
- We already have a designer. Is this still useful?
- Often more useful. A designer with nobody to argue with makes every call alone, the same way a founder does. The review tier exists precisely for that — a senior second opinion on the decisions, without taking the work away from them.
- Can you make our AI-generated screens look less generic?
- Yes, and the reason they look generic is worth understanding first: the tool used a template because nobody gave it a system to follow. We write the system — type scale, spacing, hierarchy, component rules — and then the tool produces your product instead of everyone's.
- Do you do brand and marketing design?
- Brand direction where the product needs it, and the site or landing pages around it. Full brand identity programmes, campaigns and print are not what this is — we would point you at people who do that properly.
- Why is this the same price as the CTO arrangement?
- Because it is the same person's hours and the same seniority. One rate card across the company means you can combine them without a negotiation, which is what the Startup Partner arrangement is.
Related
- Fractional CTOThe same arrangement for architecture, hiring and technical decisions.
- Startup PartnerProduct, design, architecture and engineering as one monthly arrangement.
- Product design & UXThe practice behind this: research, prototypes, design systems.
- Lovable development helpProduct and design help while you keep building on Lovable.
- Free production auditThe outside view of your app in sixty seconds.
- Who runs GoluxThe person setting the direction, and the collaborators behind him.
Next step
Thirty minutes on what your product is actually for
Bring the screens and the thing users keep getting wrong. If the problem turns out to be engineering or positioning rather than design, you will hear that instead.
