Fractional Design Leadership

Senior judgment, without the headcount.

Head of design work for companies that need executive decisions without a senior hire. Strategy, design systems, hands-on shipping.

Start a conversation

How it works

You hire a senior design leader for the slice of time the work actually needs.

Two days a week. One month at a time. Through a specific deliverable. Whatever shape fits. The cost is a fraction of a Director hire. The judgment is the same person you would have recruited.

Engagement shapes

Embedded

1 to 3 days a week, ongoing

Sit on the leadership team. Run design decisions in real time. Hire and coach the in-house designer when you're ready to make the full-time hire.

Project

fixed scope, fixed duration

Design systems. Product redesigns. UX audits with handoff. Specific deliverable, defined start and end.

Advisory

weekly office hours + async review

For in-house teams that have a designer but need senior calibration. Critique. Roadmap input. The set of opinions you only get from someone who has built and shipped at scale.

Who this is for

●Seed and Series A companies that need design leadership without committing to a Director hire.
●Growth-stage teams between Heads of Design who want continuity while they hire.
●Established teams shipping a critical product or rebrand that benefits from outside experience.

What you get

Strategy

Roadmap clarity, prioritization, the framing arguments executives need to make calls. Direct input on what to build next and what to stop building.

Design systems

Component libraries, tokens, documentation, and the adoption guide that makes systems actually get used. Audit-and-rebuild or fresh-from-scratch.

Hands-on shipping

Pixels in Figma, specs into Linear, commits in the repo when useful. The seniority of a director with the willingness to stay in the work.

Team building

Hiring rubrics, calibration, onboarding plans. So when you do hire your first or next designer, they walk into a function that already works.

Start a conversation.

Tell me what you're trying to build and the shape of the gap. I keep one to two engagements live at a time, so the answer is either now or a near-future window.

hello@nwgreen.com