Who is the day-to-day contact on Boldare's side?

Each engagement is led by a single senior experience strategist who stays with you across all phases. There's no account manager layer between you and the person doing the thinking. The same person who runs your audit facilitates your discovery sessions and attends your quarterly strategy reviews.

Do we need to have an internal design team to start?

No, but the partnership works differently depending on your internal setup. If you have designers in-house, the strategist works above them – setting the frame they execute against. If you don't, the audit and early partnership phases help you define what kind of design capacity you actually need before you hire.

What does the first week of the Strategic Design Audit look like in practice?

We review your current product experience against your business goals and competitive positioning, map where design decisions are being made in your organisation today, and identify where the gaps are costing you. You receive three prioritised strategic recommendations at the end of the week – specific enough to act on immediately, whether or not you continue to the next phase.

Is this engagement model right for a company our size?

The partnership is designed for enterprise product teams and high-growth companies past Series C where product experience is a competitive differentiator. If your team has multiple squads shipping product and design alignment is a recurring problem, the model fits. The one-week audit is the lowest-risk way to find out.

What should I look for in a design partnership agency?

The most important signal is whether the agency positions itself as a delivery partner or a thinking partner. A design partnership agency worth engaging should be able to describe exactly how it enters your decision-making process – not just your delivery process. Ask where their strategists sit during discovery, how they handle scope that should be challenged, and what metrics they track beyond deliverable completion.

How do you measure the ROI of user experience in a design partnership?

We track four metrics from the start of every engagement: conversion rate, task completion rate, NPS, and design velocity. These are reviewed monthly against your OKRs and presented in your quarterly strategy sessions in business language, not design language. ROI of user experience becomes visible when design decisions made upstream start reaching production – typically within the first quarter of the BUILD engagement.

Is this similar to hiring a fractional design leader?

There's an overlap in intent – both models give you senior design thinking without a full-time hire. The difference is scope and integration. A fractional design leader typically operates within your existing process and team structure. Boldare's partnership model changes the process itself: where design enters, how decisions get framed, and how outcomes get measured. You also get the institutional knowledge and delivery context that comes from 300+ products built across industries.

Design consulting services to drive the outcomes you need

Most design engagements start with a brief. By then, the important decisions have already been made - without a senior strategist in the room. Our outcome-driven design consulting gives you that expert voice - at discovery, at problem definition, at the point where direction is still open.

Who has benefited from Boldare's expertise?

See the companies that trusted Boldare to get it done.

Why project-based design keeps failing enterprise product teams

Most design problems in enterprise companies aren't design problems. They're timing problems that implementing correct design consulting processes can solve easily - no more losing context between projects or authority struggles between project managers.

Your designers are executing a frame they never helped build.
By the time a brief reaches your design team, product direction, budget, and key constraints are already set. They execute well – but within boundaries that should have been challenged earlier, before the cost of changing them became too high.
Every new agency starts from zero
Your context, your failed experiments, your stakeholder landscape – none of it transfers. Each engagement begins with onboarding, relationship-building, and rediscovering what your team already knows. You pay for it every time.
Your design reviews keep reopening settled questions
Without a strategic frame set upstream, your team spends cycles re-aligning on decisions that should have been made before anyone opened Figma. The work slows down exactly when you need it to move.
You can't connect your design decisions to board-level metrics
Conversion rates, task completion, NPS – they're in your dashboards but they don't drive how design priorities get set. When your CPO can't translate design investment into business outcomes, design stays a cost centre.

EXPLORE YOUR OPTIONS

Start with an audit. Scale to a partnership.

Where you start depends on where the gap is. If you need clarity fast, begin with the audit. If you need design consulting embedded in your leadership, move to the partnership. If you need a long-term strategic relationship at board level, that's the advisory retainer.

ASSESS

Strategic Design Audit

A review of your product experience, competitive positioning, and where design decisions are currently being made – and where they should be. You get three strategic recommendations your team can act on immediately, with or without continuing to the next phase.

1-2 weeksFixed price

WHAT YOU GET:

1
Product experience review
An audit of your current user journeys against business goals and competitive benchmarks.
2
Top 3 automation targets
Where design enters your process today and where the gaps are costing you
3
Competitive positioning analysis
How your product experience compares to the two or three competitors your buyers actually consider
4
3 strategic recommendations
Prioritized, actionable, and specific to your product and organization

Want to know if your product challenges are a good fit for a strategic design audit? Talk it through with AI

BUILD

Design Partnership

An embedded design team at senior strategist level, present in your product leadership for the duration of the engagement. Present at discovery, problem definition, and stakeholder workshops – not just in design reviews. This is where the strategic frame gets built that your internal team executes against.

8–16 weeksFixed price per phaseMonthly retainerT&M

WHAT YOU GET:

1
Discovery facilitation
Structured sessions with your CPO, product leads, and key stakeholders to define the right problems before scope is set.
2
Problem framing
Translating business goals into design briefs your team can act on without re-opening strategic questions mid-sprint.
3
Stakeholder workshop series
Recurring sessions that build design alignment across product, engineering, and commercial leadership.
4
Monthly OKR alignment
Design priorities reviewed and adjusted against your business metrics each month.

Wondering what embedded design leadership actually looks like in practice? Ask AI to walk you through it

SCALE

Executive Design Advisor

Long-term design leadership at board level. A quarterly strategy session with your CPO or CEO, ongoing availability for high-stakes product decisions, and a named design thinking partner who accumulates context across your organisation over time.

OngoingMonthly retainerQuarterly billing

WHAT YOU GET:

1
Quarterly strategy sessions
Structured reviews of product direction, design maturity, and business outcome metrics.
2
Executive advisory access
Available for high-stakes decisions, new product bets, and pivots that need a senior design perspective before the team commits.
3
Design metrics reporting
Conversion rate, task completion, NPS, and design velocity tracked and presented in business language.
4
Continuity across engagements
One relationship, one context, no ramp-up cost when priorities shift.

Wondering how a quarterly design retainer works at executive level? Ask AI to walk you through it

Design knowledge, straight from the work

The thinking behind our work – written down and open for anyone building something worth building.

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What changes when design has a seat at the right table

Most of the cost is invisible until you see what the alternative looks like.

BEFORE

You're briefing a new agency every few months and paying for their ramp-up every time
Your designers are executing scope that was locked before they entered the room
You can't tell your board what design investment actually produced

AFTER

One relationship that accumulates context – and gets more valuable the longer it runs
Your design thinking shapes direction before budget is committed and constraints are set
You walk into every quarterly review with conversion rates, task completion, UX ROI and NPS tied directly to design decisions

Trusted by product teams across industries

Here's what clients say about working with us.

Allan Wilson

President - Team Alert

"I was really impressed with how much they cared about our product."

Jerome Defillon

Chief Technology Officer – Novolyze

"We were impressed with their capacity to embrace an unknown domain and challenge the strong assumptions presented."

Norbert Baumann

VP R&D – Sonnen

"They treat the customer portal as their product and this resulted in the high quality of their work."

Fabio Zecchini

Chief Technology Officer – Musement TUI Group

Boldare delivers results that meet our standards and expectations."

Christian Jennewein

Head of Engineering – BlaBlaCar

"Their customer-focused, Agile approach inspired us, and we discovered that we shared a similar mindset."

Head of Software Development

Prisma

"They had a very short ramp-up time and were dedicated to delivering."

Zvonko Grujic

Director Digital Engineering – Maxeon Solar Technologies

"I feel that my opinions and observations matter and that the team will adjust their actions based on our feedback."

See more on Clutch

4.8 / 5.0
58 verified reviews

Every review independently verified by Clutch.

Why enterprise CPOs choose Boldare as their design thinking consulting partner

Boldare has been building digital products for enterprise and scale-up clients since 2004. The Outcome-Driven Design Partnership draws on that delivery depth and combines it with a named engagement model: one senior experience strategist, embedded at leadership level, accountable to your business metrics.

We bring delivery context, not just strategy
Most design consultancies operate at arm's length from the product team. Boldare's experience across 300+ products means our strategists have sat in the same rooms as your engineering leads, product managers, and stakeholders – and know where strategy breaks down in delivery. We bring that context to every discovery session and stakeholder workshop.
We work inside your organisation, not alongside it
The partnership model is built on presence, not reports. Your dedicated strategist attends discovery sessions, challenges scope before it's locked, and facilitates alignment across product, engineering, and commercial leadership. The work happens in your process, not in a separate workstream that lands as a slide deck.
We tie design decisions to the metrics your board tracks
Conversion rate, task completion, NPS, design velocity – we track these from day one and present them in the language of your quarterly reviews. Design investment becomes a line item with a measurable return, not a cost centre that's hard to justify
The model is built to accumulate value over time
Each engagement phase builds on the previous one. The audit produces the strategic frame. The partnership embeds it. The advisory retainer keeps it aligned as your product and organisation evolve. Context doesn't reset – it compounds.

Not sure where to start? That's what the audit is for

Book a call with our design team. We'll map where design is losing ground in your organisation and tell you within the first conversation whether the Strategic Design Audit is the right entry point – or whether something else fits better.

Customer DevelopmentAleksandra Krzyżakbusiness@boldare.com

One partner from idea to launch

430+ client relationships. One full-stack team

You own it from day one

Documented, structured, and handed off so your team can maintain and extend it without us. We build for independence, not dependency.

Design and code in one team

We eliminate the handoff gap. Designers and developers work in parallel, not in sequence. What you see in the design file is what ships in production.

AI-native by default

Built to work with your AI tools. We structure and document what we build so tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Figma Make generate output that stays within your standards – not outside them.

Built for your stack

We work with the tools and frameworks your team already uses – or we adapt to them. What we build fits your team, not the other way around.

Fixed price. No surprises

Every engagement starts with a clear scope and a fixed price. You know what you're getting before anything begins.

One source of truth. For everyone

Designers, developers, and AI tools all work from the same source. No parallel versions. No guessing which one is current.

Governance included

Nothing we deliver drifts without ownership. Every build includes a clear model for who decides on changes, how they're requested, and how things evolve as your product grows.

430+ client relationships

Every product we've built required decisions about what to standardise and what to keep flexible. That experience shapes everything we deliver.

Frequently asked questions about design partnership model

Technical and commercial questions about how the engagement works, who it's for, and what to expect at each phase.

A senior designer executes within your existing process. A design partnership changes where design enters that process – upstream, at the point where product direction, scope, and budget are still open. You're not adding capacity to your team; you're adding a strategic layer above it.

Design consulting services to drive the outcomes you need

Who has benefited from Boldare's expertise?

Why project-based design keeps failing enterprise product teams