01 / Brand and site3 weeks
A health and human services nonprofit
A site still wearing the branding before last, and client intake still on paper. Both rebuilt in three weeks.
1day a weekback to program staff
Jordan Mars / Design EngineerBuilding since 2020
DESIGN. BUILD. SHIPPED.
One person, end to end. Design, frontend, backend, deployed to production. For early-stage teams with more roadmap than people and ambitious teams with more ideas than time. Your engineers stay on their roadmap.
Book 20 minutesOne retainer slot open now
- Based in Tucson, AZ
- Fixed scope and timeline
- Same-day reply, from me
- 1 day a week
- back to program staff
- A health and human services nonprofit
- 453
- students and faculty, one system
- An independent K‑12 school
- 4 weeks
- no accounts to nested tenancy
- An early-stage B2B SaaS product
01 / The argument
Most teams do not need another contractor. They need one person who can hold the whole problem. The positioning, the interface, the schema, the deploy, and come back with it finished.
02 / Selected workThree problems,
Three problems,
and what changed
Every engagement below is a fixed scope from the index further down this page. Same shape, same terms, real outcomes.
02 / Embedded engineering retainer2 months to build, a year on call
An independent K‑12 school
Scheduling for a program that touches everyone ran across a plugin, a spreadsheet and a thread of email. One system replaced all three.
453students and faculty, one system
03 / Feature sprint4 weeks
An early-stage B2B SaaS product
A working prototype that no team could actually log into. Four weeks later it had organizations, nested workspaces, and three ways in.
4 weeksno accounts to nested tenancy
Every one of these started as a 20 minute call. Book yours and I’ll tell you which of these looks most like your situation.
03 / Ways to work together
Fixed scope. Fixed price.
You’ll know what you’re getting and what it costs before anything starts.
- 01
Audit and roadmap
$5,000One weekA week inside your product and codebase. You get a written assessment of what’s slowing you down and a prioritized plan for fixing it.
Fully creditable against a project
- 02
Brand and site
$14,0004 weeksPositioning, visual identity, and a marketing site designed, built, and deployed. A brand to look like the company you’re becoming.
- 03
Feature sprint
$20,0006 weeksOne meaningful feature taken from first sketch to production. Scoped together up front, then designed, built, and shipped without adding to your team’s load.
- 04
Embedded engineering retainer
$10,0002 days a weekTwo days a week inside your team, on your board and in your codebase. A senior pair of hands on whatever matters most that month, without the hiring cycle.
Per month, three month minimum
Not sure which one fits? Tell me what you’re building and I’ll point you at the right one. Also available for select work outside of these scopes. In 20 minutes I’ll tell you how we can work together, or if you need someone else.
04 / What you’re thinking
The four questions I always get.
Better to have them out now than three weeks into a project.
01On your team
“We already have engineers.”
Good, and you should. Keep them on the thing only they can do. I take the piece that keeps getting bumped to next quarter because nobody ever has a clear week for it. Not a seat on your roadmap. The item that has been sitting at the bottom of it longest.
In practice / Your team never stops what they’re on
02On hiring
“Why not just hire someone?”
Sometimes you should, and I’ll tell you so on the call. But a hire is three months to find and two more to be useful, and you carry them long after this piece of work is done. I start in two weeks, at a fixed price, and finish before the interview process would have completed.
In practice / A date on the calendar, not a headcount
03On risk
“What if it runs over?”
Then it runs over on my time. That is why I work on a fixed price, the estimate is my problem, not a line item you find out about in month two. And you are not waiting to find out: something is running at the end of every week. Not a status update, the actual thing.
In practice / The overrun is mine, and you see progress weekly
04On the end
“What happens when you’re gone?”
Nothing, ideally. The work lives on your board and lands in your repository, in your review process, from the first week. There is no separate environment to migrate and no knowledge sitting on my laptop. The handover is half a day because nothing was ever held apart. If you need me further, we can work together on retainer, embedded in your team, or on future projects.
In practice / Nothing to migrate, nothing to unpick
05 / Who you’d be working with
No team. No handoff.
Six years as an engineer, designing and building product. Worked on projects spanning from enterprise SaaS startups to nonprofits and independent schools.
Design and engineering aren’t two skills I’m claiming so much as one job I stopped splitting. The interface, the schema behind it and the pipeline that ships it are the same decision made three times, and holding all three is what makes a six-week scope possible.
What I’m not is a team. Limited clients and projects at a given time, no account manager, no handoff. If you need four people in parallel, or someone on call at 3am, you need to hire, and I’ll tell you on the first call.
- Building since
- 2020
- Education
- BS & MS MIS — U of A
- Based
- Tucson, AZ
- Usual stack
- TypeScript, React, Next.js
- Reply time
- Same day, from me
Book 20 minutes
Worst case you leave with a second opinion on your roadmap and never hear from me again.
06 / The next step
Twenty minutes.
No deck, no discovery phase. You describe what’s stuck, and I tell you whether it’s one of the fixed scopes above, something out of scope that I can still help with, or something you should be hiring for.