Our best collaborations and partnerships happen when:
- You have products and features on your roadmap that have a dedicated team assigned (or soon will)
- You’ve tried to make a design system before but it didn’t take and you’re not sure why
- You have skilled and humble teams that want guidance on how to sequence and execute excellent product and systems work
- You’ve done your homework already and know that SuperFriendly is who you want to work with
We help teams strategize, plan, and execute actual products—we call these pilots, as in piloting a design system through real product work—that leaves your team fully equipped to do this work the future without us.
Our minimum level of engagement is 1 quarter (~3 months), though we strongly prefer at least 2 quarters of working together. Less than that amount of time is often difficult to get real traction. In that time, we like to work on as many pilots as we can; that number is usually 1½ pilots at minimum and 3 pilots at the max.
During that time, we need a team for 20–30 hours/week that contains these roles (one team member may fulfill multiple roles):
- At least 1 senior-level UI designer
- At least 1 senior-level brand designer
- At least 1 senior-level engineer for each platform (iOS, Android, etc)
- At least 1 senior-level front-end web engineer
- At least 1 senior-level back-end web engineer
- At least 1 senior-level content strategist or writer
- At least 1 senior-level product manager
The price for our involvement starts at $300k/quarter, depending on the complexity of the work and the level of design system coaches we need to bring to the engagement.
Still with us?
If everything we’ve described above sounds like just what you’ve been looking for, we’d love to chat! Drop us a line at inquiries@superfriendly.com and let us know what’s on your mind.
Need a starting point for your message? Here’s the kind of email that gets us all giddy. Feel free to copy this as a starting point and modify at your leisure.
Hi SuperFriends!
My name is [Lindsay Fünke], and I’m a [product manager] at [Marvel Studios]. I love the work you did with [United Airlines]. I’d love to hire you to help us with a design system project.
We’ve been tossing around the idea of [making/evolving] a design system so we can [bring the magic of our movies to our digital experiences]. When I asked around, my friend [Bob Loblaw] recommended I get in touch with you.
We’d like to launch it by [the end of the year] so we can [announce this at Comic-Con]; let us know if you think that’s reasonable. We already have feature teams lined up that we could partner with, so we could move pretty quickly.
Full disclosure: you’re at the top of our list and the first agency I’m reaching out to. I plan to talk to a couple more agencies for due diligence but would be happy to stop the search if we’re in the right ballpark.
I’m happy to provide any other detail you need. If you’re interested, let’s set up a time to chat. How does next week look for you?
Thanks,
Lindsay
If you write emails like that, you’re already our favorite. We’d love to hear from you.
For Procurement & Legal
To get a headstart on onboarding us, here are our standard Services Agreement and Statement of Work templates so you can see the kinds of terms we like working under. We’re not fans of playing negotiation games as it’s a distraction and obstruction to the getting underway on the important work of creating customer value, so we strive to strike an agreement that is fair and just for both you and us from the start. Our best partnerships are ones where we and our clients share the risk 50/50.