Product design, prototyping, workshops and programs — for founders, teams and mission-driven organizations. Every engagement below has a defined end, a named deliverable, and one person doing the work.
You do not need to read the whole page. Four situations cover almost everyone who gets in touch.
Nothing built yet. You can describe it but not show it.
Innovation Lab, or a prototype →It exists, but people drop out, complain, or never finish.
Product Audit, then design work →Six people, six versions of the project, no way to settle it.
Workshops & facilitation →The thing works. The posters, ads and emails around it do not match.
Brand & marketing design →I review one core flow of your product and send back a recorded walkthrough plus a fix list ranked by impact and effort. No slide deck, no six-week discovery phase.
Credited in full toward any project booked within 30 days. If we go on to work together, the audit costs you nothing.
Those are the follow-on project, and this is what tells us whether it is worth doing.
Four disciplines. Each one says who it is for, what you actually receive, and roughly how long it takes. If a project needs something outside this list, I will say so and point you at someone better.
For: teams with a product in market that is not performing, and founders past the prototype stage who need the real thing designed properly.
End-to-end product work — research through dev-ready handoff. Most of my decade has been inside regulated, high-traffic products where a decision had to survive legal review, an accessibility standard and an executive sign-off before anyone saw it.
For: founders who need something real to show a user, a partner or an investor — and teams who want a direction tested before committing engineering time to it.
I work on app projects as a consultant, not as a production dev shop. You get a clickable prototype that behaves like the real thing, and the technical direction whoever builds it will need. I do not take production engineering.
I shipped my own app this way — Before Us, React Native, on the App Store — so the direction comes from having done it.
For: teams where the same debate reopens every few weeks, and organizations that need a decision to survive a stakeholder review.
Sessions that move a room from discussion to a tested solution — with a decision at the end and a written record of why, so it does not reopen next quarter. Organizational training and multi-week programs are detailed on the Washington DC page.
For: anyone whose product is fine but whose posters, ads and emails look like they came from three different places.
The visual layer around a product or a program, designed by the same person who designed the product. Usually attached to a larger engagement, but I take it on its own.
These are not client projects. They run on their own schedule and you take part in them.
Six people, two evenings a week, taking one idea from a sentence to a working prototype and a launch plan. No code required. The October 2026 cohort runs October 27 to December 10, and applications close October 20.
Four years of it at Thinkful, with 85% of the designers I mentored landing roles. Portfolio reviews, mock interviews, job-search strategy, and the specific feedback that moves a portfolio from nearly to hired.
These cut across everything above. Any of the four disciplines can run in any of these shapes.
Defined scope, defined deliverables, one number agreed before we start. Priced per engagement, not per hour.
A short, fixed-price block aimed at one question. The Product Audit is the smallest version of this.
A set block of hours each month as a fractional design lead — review, direction and second opinions for teams with designers but no lead.
One workshop, one talk, or one working session. Good for conferences, offsites, incubators and campus programs.
An idea, or a first version that needs to get real. Usually no technical team, and often no design budget to waste on the wrong thing first.
In-house groups that need a neutral facilitator, extra design capacity, or a lead for a stretch. Heaviest in insurance, health, media and hospitality.
Mission-driven work in health, education, civic services and the arts — where the people using the thing often have the least room to work around a bad design.
Non-profit and community-organization rates available.
If you do not have a design team and never will, there is a shorter page for you — the same work described as web design, email, ads, video and print, with the contract, freelance and retainer arrangements laid out.
Hiring is not always the right answer, and I would rather you knew that before you spend anything — including with me. I charted what an agency, a freelancer, and building it yourself actually cost, side by side, with the sources.
I build clickable prototypes, and I designed and built my own app — Before Us, in React Native, on the App Store — using AI-assisted tooling. For client work I do not take production engineering. What you get from me is the design, a prototype that behaves like the real thing, and technical direction for whoever builds it. If someone tells you a solo designer will also deliver your production app, be careful.
Per engagement, not per hour, so the scope and the number are both settled before we start and you are not watching a clock. The Product Audit is a flat $2,500. Everything else is quoted against your actual scope — tell me what you need and I will send a fixed number, usually within two business days.
Yes, and it is the arrangement I would usually recommend. You keep the person who knows your codebase; I handle design and give them specs, flows and states they can build from without guessing. I am happy to join their standups or reviews if that helps.
Then the Product Audit or an advisory retainer is probably the right size, and a full project is not. A $2,500 audit that tells you to fix three things is a better purchase than a project you did not need. If your question is smaller than that, email me and I will answer it.
Yes. Most engagements run remotely and always have. Baltimore and DC are where I am, which matters for on-site workshops and in-person sessions — but nothing on this page requires us to be in the same room.
If you book any project within 30 days of the audit, the full $2,500 comes off that project's price. Not a discount code, not a percentage — the whole amount. The audit exists so you can find out whether working together is worth it without committing to a project first.
I do. There is no bench behind me and no handoff to someone junior after the sale. The person on the intro call is the person in the room and the person on the write-up. That is a limit as much as a feature — it means I take a small number of engagements at a time.
A few sentences is plenty. I read every one myself and come back within two business days with an honest read — including when the answer is that you do not need me, or need something smaller than you think.
Prefer email? hello@fezmedia.co
Tell me what you're building, who it's for, and where it's stuck.
