Four disciplines, one bench, one accountable party.
Capability described as coverage rather than as a roster or a headcount. What follows is the structure of the studio: what each discipline covers, and what having it in-house changes about the work.
- Disciplines
- Arrangement
- Subcontracted
What sits under one roof
- Design
- Engineering
- Quality
- Growth
Four disciplines, one payroll. A product does not move between a design agency, a development shop, a testing vendor and a marketing agency, and it does not lose a fortnight at each handover while four companies agree on what was actually agreed.
Quality is a standing function here rather than a task shared among developers, with both manual and automation testing in-house, and engineering includes a dedicated database and data-architecture specialist. Studios that subcontract their testing have neither. Both are invisible in a pitch and decisive in month six.
Interface decisions are made by the people who will maintain them, so a design system survives past the first release.
- Product design
- UX strategy
- User flows
- Design systems
- Brand and visual design
Web, mobile and data sit on the same team, so a feature does not stall at the seam between a frontend vendor and a backend one.
- Full stack web
- Angular and React frontend
- Cross-platform mobile, Android and iOS
- Database and data architecture
QA is a standing function with its own people, not a task developers squeeze in on the last afternoon before a release.
- Manual QA
- Automation QA
The people who have to acquire users are in the room while the product is still being shaped, not handed a finished app.
- SEO and performance marketing
- Social content and campaign execution
- App Store Optimisation
- Conversion rate optimisation
What this is actually worth to you.
Coverage is not the same as size. A larger studio that subcontracts its testing has less quality capability than this one does, because the people writing the test cases were not in the design review where the missing error state would have been caught.
The two roles worth singling out are the ones that never appear in a pitch: a dedicated automation QA engineer, and a database and data-architecture specialist. Studios that treat testing as something developers fit in around a release have neither. Both are invisible in month one and decisive in month six, when the regression suite is the only thing standing between a release and a rollback, and when a data model chosen carelessly starts charging interest.