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Product Engineering · LAUNCHPAD
Product Engineering.
Senior product engineers from MVP through scale. Embedded squads that own discovery, design, build, and operate — alongside your team or as the team. Founder-friendly cadence; enterprise-grade rigor.
- Sub-services
- 2
- Department
- LAUNCHPAD
The problem
Most product engineering vendors either ship demos or ship features in isolation — rarely a real product.
There are agencies that build beautiful prototypes and walk away after the launch slide deck. There are dev shops that take feature tickets and ship them faithfully without ever questioning the roadmap. Both fail growth-stage companies in the same way: the product never gets the senior, opinionated engineering attention it needs to compound. Velocity drops, technical debt accretes, the founding engineers burn out, and the next hire is a CTO replacement.
LAUNCHPAD — our product engineering practice — exists for the founders and growth-stage CTOs who need senior engineering capacity that thinks like product. Embedded squads with a senior engineer who can challenge a roadmap decision in standup, a designer who sits inside the squad rather than throwing screens over the wall, and a department lead who joins the operating cadence weekly. The engagement starts with discovery (what's the product trying to do, and what's actually built so far?) and ends with you owning a system that compounds — not a hand-off you'll have to re-engineer.
What we deliver
2 capabilities, one bench.
Zero-to-one and zero-to-scale product teams that ship and operate.
How we engage
4 phases, in writing.
The methodology shows up in the statement of work — not as slogans, but as deliverables, owners, and acceptance criteria.
- 01
Product discovery
One-week intake: real product audit, not a sales call. We read the codebase, talk to your senior engineers, look at the roadmap and the analytics, and write a 10-page memo on what we'd do if we owned the squad. The memo names tradeoffs, not magic. You get it whether or not we engage.
- 02
Embedded senior squad
Senior engineers (G6+) plus a designer from CANVAS embedded into your product cadence. Two-week sprints. Direct line to a LAUNCHPAD lead for architectural decisions. CITADEL co-pilots if you're in a regulated market. Engineers ship through your repos under your engineering culture — not a parallel dev silo.
- 03
Compounding velocity
We instrument throughput, deployment frequency, and feature ROI from the first sprint. The goal is not 'more output this week' — it's a velocity curve that bends up over a quarter. Quarterly reviews against the curve, with explicit conversations about staffing, scope, and architectural bets.
- 04
Continuity option
End of engagement: convert engineers to your full-time hires (we make this easy and have done it dozens of times), continue under Dedicated Teams, or hand off cleanly. Most growth-stage clients hire 1–3 engineers from us during the engagement and run the rest as a long-running embedded relationship.
Capabilities
What’s in scope.
- Product engineering from MVP through Series D scale
- Full-stack delivery: web, mobile, API, data, infra — by senior generalists
- Embedded designer (CANVAS) inside the squad — not a separate phase
- Roadmap engineering: estimation, sequencing, dependency analysis
- Architecture-as-product: decisions documented in ADRs the team owns
- Growth-stage instrumentation: feature ROI, velocity curves, debt tracking
- Hire-to-convert option: embedded engineers become your full-time hires
- Founder coaching for non-technical founders running engineering
Stack
Tools we use in production.
- Frontend
- Next.jsReactRemixTailwindTypeScriptVite
- Backend
- Node.jsPythonGoPostgreSQLRedistRPCGraphQL
- Mobile
- React NativeExpoSwift / SwiftUIKotlin
- Infra & cloud
- VercelAWSGCPCloudflareTerraformDocker
- Product analytics
- PostHogAmplitudeMixpanelStatsigGrowthBook
- AI in product
- Vercel AI SDKOpenAIAnthropicLangChainPinecone
Selected work
Quantified outcomes, not adjectives.
- 01Growth-stage SaaS
3.2x
deploy frequencyEmbedded squad through Series B for a developer tools company.
Embedded a G8 product principal + 3 G7 product engineers + a G7 designer for 14 months. Shipped the company through a Series B, two product launches, and a SOC 2 Type II audit. Three of the embedded engineers converted to full-time at the close of the engagement.
14 months
- 02Consumer Fintech
6 → 240K
MAU in 8 monthsMVP-to-scale build for a YC-W23 consumer fintech.
Built the original product (web + iOS + Android + payments backend) in 14 weeks, then scaled the platform through PCI-DSS audit, ten new features, and an India rollout. Founding engineering team grew from 2 to 11 with three of our engineers as senior hires.
9 months
- 03B2B SaaS
+47%
premium-tier conversionAI-feature integration for an HR-tech Series C.
Embedded a G8 product engineer + G7 ML engineer to design and ship the company's first AI features (resume parsing, candidate matching, interview summarization) — without disrupting the existing roadmap or deploying mock features into production.
7 months
Common questions
Asked before the first call.
- 01
How is this different from staff augmentation?
Two real differences. First, seniority floor: G6 minimum, with a G8+ engineer as the squad lead. Staff aug pools rotate juniors as 'available'. We don't. Second, department backing: every embedded engineer has a LAUNCHPAD lead they meet with weekly, and they can pull a senior peer in for architecture, AI, security, or compliance work at no extra cost. Staff aug bills hourly for everything; we pre-include the backing.
- 02
Do we have to use Prosigns infrastructure or can we keep ours?
Yours, always. The embedded squad ships through your repos, your CI/CD, your cloud accounts, your design system, your ceremonies. We work inside your engineering culture rather than imposing ours. Where we recommend tooling changes (e.g., switching test frameworks, adopting feature flags), it's a recommendation in writing — never a fait accompli.
- 03
Can we hire your engineers?
Yes — and we make it easy. Conversion fee is a percentage of first-year salary, scaled down by length of engagement. Most growth-stage clients hire 1–3 engineers from the squad over the course of an engagement, and we view that as a feature of the model rather than a leak. We negotiate the terms in the original MSA so there are no surprises.
- 04
What's the smallest engagement size?
Two engineers, one quarter. Below that, the department-backing model and the squad cohesion don't pencil out. Single-specialist engagements (one G7 engineer for 8 weeks) are better served by other firms — we'll happily refer you to specialists we trust if that's what you actually need.
- 05
Do you do design as part of product engineering?
Yes — through CANVAS embedded inside the squad. Product designers, interaction designers, and design systems engineers are part of the engagement, not a separate phase. We don't do isolated 'design sprints' that hand off to engineering after a Figma review; design and engineering ship together in the same cadence.
- 06
What happens at the end of the engagement?
Three options, named in the SOW: convert engineers to your full-time hires, continue under Dedicated Teams (multi-quarter rotation), or hand off cleanly with a 90-day shadowing period. Most engagements end as a mix of the three. We'd rather end an engagement clean and revisit in two quarters than overstay.
- 07
Can you build AI features into a product without disrupting it?
Yes — that's a frequent ask from growth-stage product teams. We embed an ML engineer alongside the existing product engineers, design the feature with the eval harness and cost controls in mind from day one, and ship it through the same release cadence as any other feature. The AI work doesn't get a separate roadmap; it gets the same product discipline as everything else.
- 08
What does product engineering cost?
Discovery + product memo: 2 weeks, $25K–$60K. Production engagements: $40K–$120K per month per embedded squad of 2–4 engineers, multi-quarter cadence. Founder-friendly engagements at the lower end of the bracket; growth-stage at the higher end. Conversion fees for hiring engineers are typically 18–24% of first-year salary, scaled down by length of engagement. Brackets published honestly so visitors self-qualify before the first call.
Related practices
Often paired with Product Engineering.
Talk to us
Bring a product engineering problem. We’ll bring a senior engineer.
A senior engineer plus the LAUNCHPAD department lead joins the first call. No discovery gauntlet, no junior reps, no obligation.