You have a model, a thesis, and a deadline. You don't have three months to hire a designer. This is the compressed version of what I did at Veltrix AI as sole designer from zero to launch.

The core loop of your product — not every screen, the ones that decide whether someone stays. Typically that's onboarding and first-value, the main working surface, and the AI interaction itself: how it asks, answers, shows its confidence, and admits when it's unsure.

Week 1 — Sharpen. Kickoff, competitor teardown, user and job definition, IA and flows. We agree on the one sentence the product has to be true to. Everything downstream gets tested against it.

Week 2 — Design. Wireframes to high-fidelity UI for the core loop, plus a lightweight design system — type, color, spacing, core components — so your team can extend it without me.

Week 3 — Prove and hand off. Clickable prototype for demos and user tests, revision round, dev-ready Figma with specs and components, and a walkthrough with your engineers.

I'm not learning your category from scratch. AI analytics, AdTech, health, esports — the failure mode is always the same: the model works and the user still doesn't know what to do. I design for that first and let everything else follow.

One decision-maker available for a 30-min sync twice a week. That's the only real dependency. Slow sign-off is the one thing that breaks the timeline.