Most companies looking for a product development partner run into the same wall: the market is organized around firms, not problems. There’s an agency for strategy, a studio for design, a shop for engineering, a consultancy for AI, and somewhere between all of them, your product loses momentum, context, and budget.

We built Very’s engagement model around a different premise: you shouldn’t need a different firm for the next stage of your product. Whether you’re a founder sketching a first concept or an enterprise team scaling a connected platform, there’s an engagement built for exactly where you are, and the same partner stays with you as your product evolves.

The problem with the typical product development journey

After fifteen years and 1000+ delivered engagements, we’ve seen where product development partnerships break down:

• Agencies that deliver plans, not products. A beautiful strategy deck lands on your engineering team’s desk with no tangible solutions,
• A different firm for every stage. Discovery with one partner, design with another, engineering with a third. Context and continuity are lost at every transition, and you pay the ramp-up cost each time.
• Partners who understand half the problem. Design firms that don’t understand engineering constraints. Engineering shops that don’t understand the user.
• Scope that grows, timelines that slip, and no clear owner of the outcome.

Each of our engagements is designed to close these gaps. The measure of success is whether your product moves forward, not whether a deliverable was handed over.

The four Very engagement types

1. Sprints: fixed scope, predictable pricing, fast execution

The fastest path from decision to delivered work. Sprints are productized, tiered, fixed-price engagements with a defined deliverable and a short timeline, some deliver in as little as two to four weeks.

Our current spring offerings: :

• UX/UI Design Sprint (from $20,000) — From idea to shippable front end in one sprint: documented UX patterns, a complete design system, and real React components your team can build on. Not mockups, a working codebase.
• Industrial Design Sprint (from $20,000) — From early concept to production-ready form: editable CAD models, photorealistic renders, and design documentation at the fidelity your product needs, from investor pitch through design-for-manufacturing.
• AI Workflow Sprint (from $20,000) — From manual process to AI-embedded workflow, shipped live inside the platform your team already uses: Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot, on your tenant, validated on real data.
• Cloud Cost Reduction (from $50,000) — An outcome-based engagement that starts with a committed reduction target in dollars, then implements, deploys, and verifies the savings against your next invoice.

Sprints are the right fit when you know what you need to build and you want a known price, a known deliverable, and a fast start. If you’re testing whether Very is the right long-term partner, a sprint is also the lowest-risk way to find out.

2. Consulting: when the problem is still being defined

Not every engagement starts with a clear deliverable. Sometimes the hardest question is what to build, or whether the thing you’re building is salvageable. Consulting engagements give you flexible strategic and execution support, billed on time and materials, with senior engineers and designers who have shipped real products.

Consulting is the right fit when the problem (or the right solution) is still being defined. Once it is, consulting frequently converts into a scoped sprint or a longer program, with no context lost.

3. Product Partnership:  a partner through the full build

Some products need more than a phase. Product Partnership is a longer lens  embedded engagement where scope evolves alongside your product, from concept through volume production, across hardware, firmware, cloud, mobile, and AI. 

Some of our clients have been in a Product Partnership for years, through multiple product generations. The work is sequenced into committed phases with clear deliverables and checkpoints, because every phase should earn the next one.

Product Partnership is the right fit when your roadmap spans six months or more, the product has to ship to real customers in real environments, and you want a partner who is accountable for the outcome, not just the output.

4. Team Augmentation: a specialist inside your team

If you have a strong in-house team with a specific capability gap, a firmware engineer for a connected hardware push, an ML engineer, a migration architect, we embed a senior Very designer or engineer directly into your workflow. They join your standups, work in your tools, and report to your lead.

Engagements run a minimum of four weeks; most run three to six months, wrapping when the gap is filled or expanding naturally into a larger engagement.

Team augmentation is the right fit when you need senior, specialized expertise shipping alongside your people, not a parallel team working at a distance.

How to choose: a simple decision guide

And if you’re not sure, that’s what discovery is for. A 30–60 minute conversation, no commitment, no pitch deck, we’ll tell you which engagement type fits, and you’ll leave with a statement of work either way.

What stays the same across every engagement

The engagement types differ in shape. Five things never change:

1. Senior engineers run the work. The people scoping your project are the same people building it, engineers and designers with years of real delivery behind them, accelerated by AI tooling they know exactly where to point.
2. You own the IP. Full IP transfer is included in every engagement, no rights retained, no exceptions.
3. Outcomes, not outputs. The measure is whether your product moves forward.
4. Committed phases with real checkpoints. Work is sequenced so every phase earns the next, whether it’s a two-week sprint or a multi-year program.
5. One partner across the full arc. When your product reaches its next stage, you don’t start over with a new firm. The cycle continues, with a team that already knows your product.

FAQ

Do you work with early-stage startups? Yes. Sprints and consulting engagements are especially well suited to that stage.

What if our needs change mid-engagement? Expected and built in. A sprint can restructure into a Product Partnership; a consulting engagement can convert into a scoped sprint. The engagement model grows with you.

Can you work in regulated environments? Yes. We’ve shipped products under FDA, FCC, UL, ISO 13485, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001, with compliance built into how the work is designed, not bolted on at the end.

What disciplines does Very cover? UX/UI design, industrial design, hardware and software engineering, and data/AI. Most engagements draw on two or more.

Ready to move your product forward? Wherever your product is today, first concept, stalled MVP, scaling platform, there’s an engagement built for it, and a senior team ready to run it. Book a Meeting