Fractional Product Team.

A senior product team operating as your team. Same people every sprint, same Friday demos, same Teams channel. Not a pod that rotates, not a junior team supervised from elsewhere.

• 01
  Senior PMPatrick or a designated senior. Owns the roadmap, runs sprint planning, sits in your standups when it helps.
• 02
  Senior engineerFull-stack capable. Picks up tickets, ships features, owns the technical decisions. AI tools accelerate first drafts; every line is reviewed and owned by the engineer who shipped it.
• 03
  Senior designerProduct + brand. Marta leads design across engagements — component libraries, design tokens, the visual language that runs through your product.
• 04
  Weekly Friday demos11am Eastern. You see what we shipped that week. No quarterly status reports, no slide decks.
• 05
  Quarterly strategic reviewPatrick joins for a 90-minute reset every quarter. What's working, what's not, what to prioritize next.
• 06
  You own everythingCode, designs, documentation, accounts. We don't lock you into our tooling. You can pause, end, or hire away the team.

A predictable operating cadence — borrowed from how good in-house teams actually work, not from agency theater.

• Mon
  Sprint planning30 minutes. Review the backlog, scope the sprint, commit to outcomes. Yours to attend or skip.
• Daily
  Async standup in TeamsThree lines per person: yesterday, today, blockers. Posted by 10am Eastern.
• Wed
  Mid-sprint check-in15 minutes. Catch scope drift early. Optional — we hold it whether or not you attend.
• Fri
  Demo & retro11am Eastern. Show what shipped. 10-minute retro after. Recording sent to your team.

The retainer isn't priced à la carte — capabilities show up where the work calls for them. A Microsoft-stack engagement, a design-systems push, an automation sprint, a compliance review: all included, all senior-led, all reviewed and owned by the person who shipped it.

• + 01
  Design & workflow automationComponent libraries, brand systems, design tokens, motion principles. Plus internal automations that replace manual coordination — Asana, Teams, calendar, Power Automate, lightweight scripts. Marta leads design; AJ leads automation. Both pull in when the work needs them.
• + 02
  M365 & SharePointMicrosoft 365 architecture, SharePoint sites, Power Platform, Entra ID, Teams app development. AJ brings 18+ years on the Microsoft platform. If your stack is Microsoft-first, this is the rare fractional team that won't try to talk you off it.
• + 03
  Cloud architecture & AzureIdentity, storage, deployment automation, AI & LLM workloads on Azure. Microsoft Partner certifications. The Azure Gov side is available when projects need it.
• + 04
  Compliance & risk reviewBen advises on regulated builds — financial services, healthcare, fintech. Pulled in when the work touches a regulated stack or sensitive data. Inside engagements only.

For the record: ACM is a Microsoft shop that ships with Claude. Microsoft platform on the build side, Claude Code & Cursor on the development side. Both, every day.

The retainer fits when you have direction but not a team. Specifically:

• +
  Post-Discovery teams ready to keep shippingYou finished a Discovery Sprint or a Pilot Sprint with us and want to extend the engagement.
• +
  Founders between first engineer and full teamPast prototype, before you can justify three full-time hires. The retainer bridges the gap.
• +
  Growth-stage teams with capacity gapsYou have a team but a critical workstream needs senior bandwidth your full-timers can't cover.
• +
  Foundations and operators with steady build volumeHelios ran on this shape — predictable monthly cadence, clear deliverables, no hiring overhead.

Where the retainer is the wrong shape — saying so saves everyone time.

• —
  Pre-validation foundersIf you don't know what to build yet, start with a Discovery Sprint. Retainers are for execution, not exploration.
• —
  Companies hiring in 30 daysIf you're about to bring on an in-house team, a retainer creates the wrong overlap. Stay project-based instead.
• —
  Pure maintenance workWe build new things. If you just need someone to keep the lights on, a managed services firm is a better fit.
• —
  One-off launchesFor a single deliverable on a fixed timeline, an AI-Accelerated Sprint is cleaner.