Design systems and product strategy for growth stage teams.
Nordlean works with growth-stage product teams on foundations that compound. We build systems that hold up as teams grow, and the strategy that decides what's worth building on top of them
Better product decisions, built into systems that scale with the team and hold up as AI takes on more of the execution layer
Product strategy
Deciding what's worth building, what should stay, and what shouldn't ship. Strategic direction shaped by the specifics of the work
Design systems
Designing or refactoring the systems your team and AI tools build on. Foundations engineering can trust, designed to extend cleanly as the team and the work grow
Web & product surfaces
Product, web, and marketing surfaces designed on-system. Brand, story, and product feel consistent from first touch to deep use.
Led by Vas Frolik, Principal Designer & Founder
A decade in product design across scaling B2B companies, with the last few years focused specifically on design systems and product strategy. Past work includes Sage and Rosetta AI, where the system became the foundation for three products
Vas worked with teams at:
Sage
Maturing a design system at scale
When a design system reaches the size of Sage's—spanning multiple product suites and growing teams—the parts most likely to fragment under growth are the components, tokens, and patterns that get reused most. The work at Sage focused there: refactoring Figma libraries, building WCAG 2.2-compliant components designed for reuse across multiple suites, and standardising tokens so the system stayed maintainable in code. The cross-team nature of design systems work meant most decisions ran through engineering, design managers, and the wider design team—narrowing the gap between design intent and what shipped.
"If you’re looking for a contractor who can seamlessly integrate into an existing design team, look no further than Vas.
He’s efficient, collaborative, and gets the job done with excellence.
Over the past year at Sage, I was consistently impressed by his ability to quickly adapt, communicate his ideas effectively to stakeholders, and deliver complex design patterns.
The sheer volume and quality of his work were remarkable, and the Sage Design System wouldn’t be as mature or robust as it is today without his contributions."
Luke Emmerson-Finch, Sage
Rosetta.ai
Building a system from zero, then three products on top
When a small team needs to ship multiple products in parallel without fragmenting the experience or accumulating rework, the system has to come first. At Rosetta AI—an e-commerce personalisation platform using AI for product recommendations—that meant establishing the design system before the product surfaces, then using it as the foundation for three products: a suite of merchant-facing plugins, a web app combining a plugin builder with preference and conversion analytics, and the marketing site. The work spanned the strategic and the executional—deciding which products to build, how they connected, and what the system needed to support before any of them shipped.
