Quang NguyenStudio
What follows is the working document I send every prospective client after the first email. Not a pitch deck, not a vague "design thinking" flowchart — the literal sequence of decisions, deliverables, and revision rounds from kickoff to ship. The same document I hand to a seed-stage founder hiring their first senior designer, and the same one a Series A team uses to scope a dashboard rebuild. Read it the way you would read a contract: line by line, looking for the parts that don't add up.
There are four phases. Each one has a fixed scope, a published timeline range, a written deliverable list, and a single price tier. No hourly billing. No scope creep. No juniors being looped in at 11pm because someone on a Slack channel said "agency." If anything below reads as ambiguous, that is a bug — book a portfolio review and I'll answer it on the call.
The week most engagements go wrong or go right. Scoping is a synchronous working session plus a written output. You leave with a one-page brief that names the surfaces, the success metric, and the trade-offs the team has already accepted. Nothing moves forward until that document exists in a shared folder.
A working session — not a discovery demo. We walk through the current product, the user you are actually designing for (not the user on the slide), the metric that matters this quarter, and the constraints I have to design inside. You leave with the recording and a follow-up note within 24 hours.
A short document — typically 6–10 pages — comparing your product's current state against three categories of competitor: direct, adjacent, and aspirational. I pull screenshots, annotate what is working, and flag what your team should explicitly choose not to copy. Founders tell me this is the single most useful document in the engagement.
The one-page brief that governs everything downstream. It names the surfaces in scope, the surfaces explicitly out of scope, the success metric, the timeline range, the price tier, and the revision cadence. No work begins on Phase 02 until this document is signed. If we cannot agree on scope, you keep the audit and we part ways — no invoice.
A short checklist of what I ask every first-time hirer to have ready before wireframes start: current product access, analytics read-only access, the three competitors they respect, the one metric they are accountable for, and an honest paragraph on what they are afraid the redesign will surface. None of these are deal-breakers if missing — but the engagement moves faster when they are present on Day 1.
Strategy becomes tangible. The abstract scope brief from Phase 01 is converted into lo-fi screens that can be argued over, marked up, and rebuilt in a single sprint. Everything in this phase is in Figma. Nothing leaves Figma. If your team lives in another tool, that is part of the conversation in Phase 01 — not a surprise in Week 2.
A single Figma frame listing every screen in the product, grouped by user job-to-be-done, with arrows showing primary navigation paths. The map is the index the rest of the phase refers back to. Founders typically print this one and pin it to a wall.
Black-and-white frames at desktop and mobile breakpoints. No visual polish — the point is to argue about hierarchy, not pixels. Delivered as a single Figma file with comments open. You get one full revision round, written as inline comments, before we move to visual system work.
Three end-to-end flows — signup-to-aha, core action, and the billing edge case — captured as connected Figma frames with short annotations explaining each decision. These are the flows engineering will reference when scoping the build.
A 45-minute working call to walk the wireframes with founders and any key stakeholders (PM, eng lead, occasional early design hire). The goal is a single yes-or-no on the structural decisions before visual system work begins. If the answer is "mostly, but…," we either revise inside the same week or we renegotiate the scope brief — we do not push into Phase 03 with open structural questions.
Every engagement runs on the same three written commitments. They are not negotiable per-project and they are not aspirational. They are the operational floor the practice has held since 2013.
Any message sent Monday through Friday, 09:00–18:00 ICT, gets a substantive written reply within 72 hours — usually inside 24. Weekend messages get a Monday reply. There is no shared inbox and no triage layer; replies come from me, not a studio manager.
Every deliverable in every phase includes one full written revision round before the next phase begins. Additional rounds are available at a published per-sprint rate and are quoted before work starts. "Just one more small thing" is the most common way solo engagements quietly double in cost — the published rate keeps the conversation honest.
The designer who pitched the work is the designer who ships the work. No junior staff, no subcontracted motion work, no "the team will get back to you." If I am sick, the engagement pauses by mutual agreement and resumes when I am back — I have never silently delegated a deliverable in 12 years.
Pricing is published so founders can self-qualify budget before booking a call. The four tiers map to the four most common engagement shapes I have shipped since 2013. If your project does not fit any of them, the portfolio review call is the place to find out whether a custom scope makes sense — about one in seven engagements falls into that bucket.
| Tier | Scope | Timeline | Phases included | Price (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Landing Sprint For pre-seed founders validating an idea | One high-conversion marketing page · mobile + desktop · copy collaboration with your team | 3.1 weeks average | 01 · 02 · 04 | $4,800 |
| MVP Build For seed teams shipping their first usable product | Up to 8 product surfaces · auth, core loop, settings · mobile-responsive web | 5.2 weeks average | 01 · 02 · 03 · 04 | $14,400 |
| Product Redesign For Series A teams rebuilding an existing product | Full product audit · up to 24 surfaces · visual system library · engineering handoff | 8 to 10 weeks | 01 · 02 · 03 · 04 | $28,800 |
| Dashboard & Data Surfaces For B2B teams rebuilding the dense screen | Up to 6 dashboard surfaces · chart system · table patterns · role-based variants | 9 to 12 weeks | 01 · 02 · 03 · 04 | $38,400 |
All tiers include the 72-hour weekday response guarantee, one full revision round per phase, direct designer access, and a fixed quote written into the scope brief. Average engagement value across the last 40 projects: $18,400. Largest single engagement to date: $94,000 (Series B dashboard redesign, 2023). Custom scopes are quoted per project after the intake call and are not listed here.
Not testimonial quotes, not selection-bias screenshots. The four metrics below are computed the same way every quarter and reviewed against the engagement archive. They are the numbers a reasonable founder should expect on a typical engagement, not the best-case ceiling.
Additional verified figures on request: $140M+ in disclosed funding raised by portfolio companies within 12 months of redesign; 4.97/5 average across 62 verified Clutch reviews; featured in Mobbin's Designers to Watch 2024 and NN/g's Independent Practitioners Worth Hiring list.