Your startup needs senior design.
Not a $180K hire.Starting this week, not next quarter.No equity. No overhead. Just results.Cancel anytime.Not another agency with a 6-week ramp.15 years of craft at startup speed.Prototype today. Ship this week.AI-accelerated. Senior-led.Without the 3-month hiring process.12 engagements. Some have exited.
I pair 15 years of product design with AI tools to move at a pace that used to require a full team. I embed with seed & Series A teams, own the design side end-to-end, and start in a week, not three months.
You have momentum but no map
Strategy lives in someone’s head, or nowhere at all.
You need a senior designer, but not full-time
A full-time hire takes 3–4 months to find and costs $200K+ all-in. You need design moving this week.
Your designer and PM aren’t in sync
You need someone who holds both threads and can execute on either side.
Senior product design,
embedded with your team.
Fractional Product Designer
I embed as your most senior design person, owning UI/UX, research, systems, and prototyping. I use AI tools heavily to move at a pace that would otherwise take a full team.
Fast start.
Steady momentum.
I’ve done this enough to know that early-stage teams don’t need a 90-day onboarding plan. They need someone who gets up to speed fast and fills the gaps that are slowing everything down.
Get the lay of the land
Product, users, team, constraints. I talk to everyone.
Find what’s blocking momentum
I find the gaps and fill them with sketches, docs, and prototypes.
Ship, learn, repeat
Steady cadence. The team stays aligned without me in every meeting.
Leave the team stronger
Design system documented. Team trained. When you’re ready to hire full-time, you know exactly who you need — because you’ve seen it working.
Working code, not flat files.
Joshua is your guy if you want high-quality work and excellent communication.
Evan King Co-Founder — HelloInterview.com
The pattern I repeat.
I embed, build the product foundation, teach the founders to think like product people, then hand it off. I’ve done it at 12+ startups. Some have exited.
Two technical founders building an employee wellness tool. Strong vision, no product or design process, and a team that needed leadership fast.
Embedded as their first product and design lead. Rebuilt the dashboard from scratch, created a design system, ran user interviews to validate the roadmap, and, critically, spent every session teaching the founders how to think about product decisions so they wouldn’t need me forever.
ARR grew 41% in 6 months. The team developed product instincts they still use. The company was positioned for acquisition conversations.
A consumer app with strong retention but a leaky top of funnel. Users weren’t understanding the core value fast enough.
Ran user interviews, redesigned the core discovery flows, and built a design system to move faster. Every decision was tested against real users before shipping.
Paid trial starts grew 250%. The team had a repeatable design process and a system they could extend themselves.
A consumer Bible app with a growing user base and a product that had outgrown its original information architecture. Subscriptions, groups, and payment flows were bolted on without a coherent system.
Rebuilt the onboarding flow from scratch to reduce drop-off. Designed a full design system to give the team a shared language. Restructured the information architecture to handle subscriptions, group accounts, and payment management without breaking the app’s warmth.
A cohesive product system the team could build from. Onboarding drop-off reduced significantly. The design system gave engineering and design a shared source of truth for the first time.
Full write-up in progress.
This is the pattern. I’ve done it at AchillesHR, Hello Interview, DwellApp, 7Sage, and others. I come in, build the thing, train the people, and leave them stronger than I found them.
Josh was invaluable in helping us envision how our product could evolve long-term.
Besart Çopa Founder — Chestr.com
“Should we just hire someone?”
Full-time senior designer
Working with me
The right design help at the right stage.
Too early for me
You’re still finding product-market fit. Founders should be designing and talking to users themselves.
Fractional designer
You have a product and users but no design process. I embed, build the foundation, and move fast.
Fractional designer
You need senior design thinking but aren’t ready for a $180K hire. I own design end-to-end and help you hire when you’re ready.
Full-time hire
You have enough design work for 40+ hrs/week. Time for a dedicated head of design. I can help you find one.
One email.
Then we get to work.
Send me an email and we’ll figure out if it’s a fit. If it is, I can start within a week. No contracts, no 90-day ramp.
Strategic design guidance without the hands-on retainer. Quarterly commitment.
- Monthly 1-on-1 strategy call
- Async access via Slack or email
- Design reviews & feedback
- Hiring & team-building guidance
- Product direction & roadmap input
- Quarterly commitment
Senior design for teams with an existing PM.
- 1 active workstream at a time
- Bi-weekly live call + async Loom updates
- Figma-ready design deliverables
- Roadmap input & prioritization support
- Best for teams with an existing PM
Committing to 3 months? $3,750/month, save 25%. Mention it in your email.
Full design ownership. Discovery to shipping.
- Multiple concurrent workstreams
- Weekly live sync + same-day async response
- Full design ownership & systems work
- Product input, roadmap support & stakeholder comms
- Designer mentorship included
- AI workflow buildout for your team
Questions about fit? Email me. I typically respond same day.
15 years of design.
Built for startups.
I’ve spent 15 years doing product design across consumer apps, B2B SaaS, mobile, and e-commerce. For the last five, I’ve worked exclusively as a fractional designer for seed and Series A teams, usually as the sole designer in the room.
I use AI tools daily (Claude, Cursor, v0, Midjourney) to ship at a pace that used to require a full team. The 15 years are what make the tools actually work.
Available across timezones — async-first, same-day response.
Joshua is one of the best designers and all-around teammates I’ve worked with.
Alex Ross Founder — Greg.app
Joshua is an async magician who deeply understood our customers and business.
Stefan Mai Founder — HelloInterview.com
He understands user needs and how to visually express them brilliantly.
Derek Herman CTO — Yoast
Need a designer
who ships?
Let’s figure out if it’s a fit. Send me an email — I respond same day. If we’re aligned, I can start within a week.
Not the right fit if…
- You need someone to manage a large design team full-time
- You’re pre-revenue and not yet sure who your customer is
- You need a pure consultant who hands off a deck and disappears
joshua@joshuawold.com · Remote-first, available across timezones