Emily Sinclair.
Leads Northframe and Meridian, and the discovery work that turns shadow spreadsheets into products.
Head of Product
At the studio since 2019
What Emily does at the studio.
Emily leads product for Northframe and Meridian, the studio's operations and project-billing products. Their method starts on the floor: sitting with night desks and producers, reading the workbooks people actually use, and writing down the policy nobody has documented.
Emily joined at the studio's founding and has run discovery for most of its commissioned work, including the freight and creative-studio engagements that became the catalog. The consistent finding is that the first requirement is hiding in a spreadsheet.
Emily writes about adoption, interface design for tired people, and the ninety days after an internal tool ships, when the real product begins.
Posts by Emily.
Is this internal tool worth building? A worksheet for operations leaders
Before you commission software, put a number on the workaround. A five-step way to decide whether to build, buy, or leave the spreadsheet alone.
By Emily Sinclair, Omar Farouk
Handover runbooks: writing for the 2am case
A runbook is not documentation of the happy path. It is a letter to the person who is alone, tired, and looking at something odd.
By Daniel Whitfield, Emily Sinclair
Change orders are the product: notes from building Meridian
Project-shaped firms do not sell seats. They sell scope that moves. Software that ignores this ends up as a parallel spreadsheet.
By Emily Sinclair
The shadow spreadsheet is your best requirements document
Every private workbook is a specification written by the person who does the work. Read it before you write a single ticket.
By Emily Sinclair
Designing operator interfaces for people who work after midnight
Dashboards designed at noon fail the night desk. The night desk is where the product is true.
By Emily Sinclair, Mohamed Hasan
The first ninety days after you ship an internal tool
Launch is the easy week. The product starts when the unofficial spreadsheet is still open.
By Emily Sinclair
More authors.
Layla Haddad
Principal Engineer, Payments Infrastructure
Designs the gateway architecture behind StablePay: state machines, indexing, and signing boundaries.
Daniel Whitfield
Staff Engineer, Platform & Reliability
Owns webhooks, PostgreSQL, deployment, and the operational habits that keep self-hosted software boring.
Omar Farouk
Engagement Lead, Services
Scopes and leads selected client builds, and helps startups and agencies decide what to build first.
Mohamed Hasan
Design & Frontend Lead
Leads interface design and frontend engineering across the catalog, with a focus on dense, calm operator UIs.
Mohamed Saad
Smart Contract Developer
Works on the on-chain side of payments: token transfers, event interfaces, and contract review for products that touch a chain.
El Sayed Abd Almohaymen
Mobile Developer
Builds mobile experiences that put approvals, queues, and payment status in the hands of people who are not at a desk.
Have a system like this to run?
Explore the catalog, or write down the problem and the constraints. We respond when the fit is real.