A small studio, on purpose

Northbound Works is six engineers and a designer who build web apps, storefronts and internal tools. Everyone who joins your kickoff call writes code on your project.

We started in 2017 when three of us left a product agency that had grown to 120 people. Projects there were sold by one team, designed by another and built by a third, and the knowledge leaked at every handover. We wanted a studio where the people who scope the work are the people who ship it.

We stay small so we can be selective. We take on four or five projects at a time, mostly for companies with 10 to 500 staff that have outgrown a template or a spreadsheet. We like problems with a number attached: a slow page, a leaky checkout, hours spent on manual work. We measure it at the start and again after launch.

Our defaults are dull on purpose: Postgres, server-rendered HTML, TypeScript, tests on the paths that touch money. We document as we go and finish every project with a handover week, because the best outcome is your team running the system confidently without us.