What does one or two days a week actually look like?

Fixed days, in your Slack, in your planning and review meetings. A typical week has one design review, one planning or roadmap touchpoint, one-to-ones with your designers if you have them, and focused time on the design system or on hiring. You always know which days we are on.

Is this design work or design management?

Leadership. Priorities, reviews, direction, the system, hiring. When production work is needed it runs through the Senior Designer Subscription or a fixed-scope project, so the leadership days stay leadership days. Many teams bundle both.

We have no designers at all. Does this still work?

Yes, and it is a common starting point. In that case the first quarter is usually the audit and priorities, a design system foundation, and either hiring your first designer or pairing the role with a subscription designer from Masterly.

How is this different from an agency retainer?

A retainer buys hours of production. This buys a person accountable for the design function: what gets designed, in which order, to what standard, and by whom. The output is a design team that works.

Vlad Hrynchuk, Masterly's founder, who has led design on 40+ B2B SaaS products in fintech, healthtech and AI. It is not delegated to a junior.

What is the minimum commitment?

Three months, because the first quarter is where the priorities, the review rhythm and the system get set. After that it runs month to month with a quarterly review.

How much does it cost?

A monthly retainer quoted after the intro call, depending on cadence and whether production capacity is bundled. It is a fraction of a full-time head of design's cost at this stage.

Can we start with something smaller?

Yes. A Trial Week on one concrete problem is the usual first step; it shows how we think and produces something useful whether or not you continue into the fractional role.

A Fractional Head of Design, One or Two Days a Week

Start your project

Masterly's founder as your head of design, one or two days a week. Priorities, reviews, the design system, hiring.

Trusted by funded B2B SaaS teams

Portfolio

Case Studies

A few of the products we've shaped.

Real-time risk analytics platform, from alpha to investor-ready in three weeks. Backed by IOSG Ventures and Zee Prime Capital.

Product redesign for a funded fintech analytics company.

Embedded design team inside Gigs' sales pipeline: enterprise eSIM launches with Santander and Motorola closed in 2026.

Embedded marketing and sales design for a funded telecom platform.

A reusable component system for a Series B procurement platform. Product pages went from 6% to 15.1% of all site sessions.

Marketing site, product pages and component system for a Series B SaaS.

PROJECTS

More Projects

How It Works

The First Quarter

The role has a shape from day one, so you know what you are paying for each month.

Audit and Priorities

Month 1

We review the product with our 6-Layer UX Audit, interview the team, and read the roadmap and the metrics. Out of that comes a short design priorities document: the three things design should change this quarter, why, and how we will know.

Typical outputs:

A design priorities plan
The 6-Layer UX Audit findings
What we will leave alone this quarter
The metric we are designing against

What the role covers

What a day a week buys you

One or two days a week of senior design leadership, on your calendar and in your tools. No delivery load, so the time goes on decisions.

A design priorities plan
The product read against our 6-Layer UX Audit, the team interviewed, and the roadmap and metrics in front of us.
Short enough that your CTO reads it in one sitting.
A weekly review that ends in decisions
Work in progress looked at on a fixed slot, decisions made and written down where the team can find them.
Fewer surprises the week before a release.
Design system stewardship
The system scored with our Design System Readiness framework, then the gaps that cause the most rework closed first.
Measured again each quarter, so you can see it move.
Hiring you can defend
The role written, portfolios reviewed, design interviews run, and the person onboarded once they sign.
We are hiring our own replacement, and we say so.
A lead for the designers you have
Your designers get someone senior to escalate to, review with, and grow against.
The reason mid-level designers stay.
A quarterly report and reset
Progress against the priorities set in month one, and the next quarter's priorities set with the team.
Including whether the fractional model still fits.

Product design services

The right design support for where your product is now.

From focused MVP improvements to full redesigns, design systems, and ongoing product design support.

A new product or module
For teams turning an idea, an internal prototype or a rough MVP into something real users can trust.
- New B2B SaaS products
- AI features and agent workflows
- Investor-ready product stories
- A first design system
- Founder-led MVPs
- Prototypes that need a production path
An existing product
For teams with a live product that grew feature by feature and now feels inconsistent or harder to use than it should be.
- SaaS dashboards
- B2B platforms and admin tools
- Complex workflows and data tables
- Onboarding and activation
- Fintech and healthtech compliance flows
- Design debt cleanup
Ongoing product work
For teams that need senior design every sprint without hiring, or a design lead one or two days a week.
- Fast-moving product teams
- Engineering-led teams with no designer
- Roadmap and feature support
- Design system stewardship
- Activation and adoption work
- Design leadership and hiring

Industries We Work With

B2B SaaS first, with most of our work in fintech, healthtech and AI products.

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Fintech

AI finance, fintech SaaS and B2B financial tools. Trust, density and compliance in the same screen.

Healthtech

Healthtech SaaS and compliance platforms, designed under HIPAA and OSHA constraints.

SaaS

B2B products moving upmarket, with design debt to pay down before the next release.

AI & ML

AI features that have to survive an enterprise demo: uncertainty, corrections, audit trail, failure states.

Why Masterly

Why teams take a fractional head of design

A full-time head of design is a year of salary and a hiring process. Most teams at this stage need the judgement more than the headcount.

Senior judgement on day one: A full-time head of design takes three to six months to hire and another three to become useful. The fractional role starts in two weeks with someone who has done this on 40+ products.
Decisions get written down: Design direction in most early teams lives in Slack threads and the founder's head. Weekly reviews with written decisions mean engineers stop guessing and rebuilds go down.
The design system becomes an asset: Left alone, a design system at this stage decays into a folder of screens. Owned properly, it becomes the thing your engineers, and their AI tooling, build from consistently.
Your designers get a lead: One or two designers without a lead either stall or burn out. A weekly one-to-one and a clear path changes both, and usually shows up in what ships within a month.
Backed by a whole studio: When a quarter needs more hands, Masterly's team is already familiar with the product and the system. No onboarding a new agency from scratch.
It ends well: The goal is a design function that runs without us. When you are ready for a full-time lead, we help you hire them and hand over a design function that already runs.