Your senior design lead, embedded in days.
Your design team is the bottleneck of the roadmap and a senior hire takes six months. I embark as your continuous senior design partner: I unblock the velocity, I build the design system that scales the whole team, and I’m operational in days. No fixed-term contract, you stop at the end of any month.
The senior design function your Series A needs now, embedded.
A senior design hire takes three to six months and one in three of those hires misses. The retainer fills the gap right now: continuous capacity, design direction, and a living design system, inside the team and inside the rituals you already run.
- [01]
A senior design function operational in days, the way a six-month hire never can be.
- [02]
A design system built and maintained inside the engagement, scaling the whole team.
- [03]
A roadmap that stops being throttled by design capacity or design direction.
- [04]
A monthly value review packaged for the board, so the retainer pays for itself in visibility.
What the retainer covers.
Four working pillars, all running in parallel inside the team: embedded senior capacity, a living design system, design direction and standards, and an async-first operating rhythm that turns the time zone into leverage.
[01]
Embedded senior capacity
Senior design inside your sprints from week one.
Dedicated capacity inside your sprints and rituals, not external supplier work
Around 10 days per month: async-first, with weekly priority sync
Continuous design direction in your Slack and your standups
[02]
A living design system
Patterns that scale the whole team.
Built and maintained over the cycles, not handed over as a static doc
Patterns the engineering team can actually use, with the right level of discipline
A system that scales the rest of the design team as you hire
[03]
Design direction & standards
Quality stops being personal, becomes shared.
Reviews and standards for the in-house designers, so quality stops being personal
Mentoring of the existing team, so seniority transfers rather than sits with me
A defensible point of view on tradeoffs, not opinions
[04]
Async-first EU-hours head start
Time-zone leverage built into the cadence.
For US clients: work delivered overnight, ready when your team logs on
A guaranteed daily overlap window for syncs (East Coast ideal, SF works async)
For EU clients: same operating rhythm, no time-zone friction
Operating model.
A continuous engagement with explicit rituals. The retainer runs inside the team rather than alongside it, and the rhythm is the same the first month and the twelfth.
[Week 1]
Onboarding
Express product / UX audit, design system scorecard, and joint prioritization. You leave week 1 with a working punch list, not a slide deck.
[Each month]
Cycle
Dedicated capacity engaged inside your sprints and rituals. The work shows up where your team already works, not in a separate tracker.
[Each week]
Priority sync
A working session with the CPO or Head of Product to prioritize, arbitrate, and unblock. Short, decision-led, written down.
[Each month]
Value review
A board-ready review of value delivered, the system progress, and the next cycle. So the retainer is defensible upstream, not a black box.
[Daily]
Async availability
Priority Slack availability and continuous design direction between syncs. The kind of presence a full-time hire would bring, on day one.
[For US clients]
EU-hours head start
Async-first cadence with work delivered overnight, plus a guaranteed daily overlap window. The time zone becomes leverage, not friction.
Meet the Design Strategist.
Lucas Rappart
Senior Product Designer
8+ years · 15+ products shipped
I work as the embedded senior product designer Series A teams plug in when the roadmap is blocked by design capacity and a full-time hire is six months out. Continuous, accountable, and operational in days.
Proof: Dentsply Sirona (NASDAQ: XRAY), where I embedded into the product team to consolidate and accelerate the work, with a Head of UX quote and a renewed collaboration. Foodhack (now KAPITAL), designed from zero with a documented design system shipped alongside engineering. Hafnova DoHzel, redesigned in a two-week sprint with a reusable system handed off to the team.
The retainer packages all of that into one ongoing function. Maximum 3 active retainers at any time, so the engagement you book actually gets the attention it’s priced for. Monthly, no commitment: if I’m not delivering the value, you leave at the end of the month.
Book a discovery callWho this retainer is for.
Your design team is structurally understaffed and the roadmap is slipping because of it.
The product shipped at seed is cracking under scale and you have no design system.
You’re 3–6 months away from a senior design hire and you need seniority on Monday.
You want one senior, embedded, with continuity. One name, one accountability.
Who this retainer is not for.
You need one-off project work without ongoing partnership.
You want a rotating pool of designers from an agency, not a single embedded senior.
You already have a senior design lead and you’re looking for execution capacity.
You want execution decoupled from direction. The retainer holds both together.
Inside the retainer.
Embedded senior design capacity
Around 10 days per month of dedicated senior capacity inside your sprints. Continuous, not project-scoped.
A living design system
Built, maintained, and evolved across the cycles. The system that lets the rest of the team ship faster as you hire.
Design direction & standards
Reviews, standards, mentoring of in-house designers. Seniority transfers across the team, it does not park with me.
Monthly board-ready review
A monthly value review packaged for the CPO and the board: what shipped, what changed, what is next.
Bonuses included
Week-1 audit + design system scorecard
A working punch list at the end of week one: product / UX audit and a scorecard of where the design system stands today.
Hiring kit for your future design hire
Framing and onboarding of your future design hire so the retainer cleanly bridges into a full-time function instead of competing with it.
Board-ready monthly review
A packaged monthly review of value delivered, so the retainer is defensible upstream every month.
No commitment, monthly
You start with no fixed-term contract and you stop at the end of any month, no penalty and no justification. The risk of continuing is on me: if I don’t deliver the value, you leave.
Hard cap on capacity
Maximum 3 active retainers at any time. One senior, embedded seriously into each engagement, so the retainer you book actually gets the attention it’s priced for.
Frequently asked questions.
We’re hiring in-house anyway.
The retainer fills the gap right now. The Hiring Kit bonus is built around exactly that scenario: I help frame the role and onboard your future design hire, so the engagement ends cleanly when the hire is up to speed.
We already have a designer in the team.
You’re still understaffed at the seniority level the roadmap needs. The retainer is reinforcement, direction, and a design system. Your in-house designer gets mentoring and reviews, not displacement.
Why a retainer and not an agency?
Agencies rotate a pool of designers. The retainer is one named senior, embedded, accountable across cycles. The continuity is the value: a design system, a point of view, mentoring of the team. You can’t get that from a rotating pool.
How is the price set?
The forfait is benchmarked against the loaded cost of a senior in-house hire, plus the 3–6 months of hiring delay. Starts at CHF 5,000 / month; broader scopes (more days, multiple workstreams, US engagements) move up from there. Scope confirmed on the discovery call.
What if it doesn’t work?
You stop at the end of any month, no penalty and no justification. The risk-reversal is structural: zero friction to start, zero friction to leave. If I’m not delivering the value, the retainer ends.
How does the discovery call work?
A 30-minute call to qualify the bottleneck and confirm the scope. No pitch, no pressure. If a retainer isn’t the right shape for your problem, I’ll tell you on the call.