A frontier IA agent to organize any mess.
Replace your product's complexity with intuitive mental models that make sense to any user.
Our landmark product suite
We don’t see the design process as one thing. We see it as everything.
Mitigate risk by ensuring early and lasting understanding of what you’re solving and who needs it.
Ensure lasting impact via a holistic, long-term, critical lens that includes everything from tech implementation to pricing & packaging.
Increase adoption by defining and organizing your system primitives in ways that will be intuitive to new users.
Make your product obvious to anyone by adopting the right language and crafting every moment.
Increase retention and reduce future work by optimizing top workflows, putting things where users can find them, and connecting relevant parts of your system to each other.
Ensure system completeness and reduce future support tickets by managing and delivering on UI requirements.
Learn by shipping quickly and often without compromising on a long-term system design.
Nail your rollout with thoughtful positioning and storytelling driven by a true understanding of your user needs.
AI is changing the speed and methods with which these are handled, but not the need for deep thinking in all these areas.
“Califa is the full stack design solution for technical products. It understands the systems under the interface, can handle heaps of cognitive load, and ships quality systems.”
Solve your top problems
We’ve seen it all. Our solutions are time-tested, flexible, and applicable to almost every system problem you’ll run into.
- High PMF, low NPS.
- Building siloed features too rapidly to figure out how they connect to each other.
- A tendency to reflect technical implementation and company organization, often to the detriment of your interfaces.
- An inherent tension between power users and most users.
- Configuration hell to accommodate dozens of unique workflows.
- Introducing too many or too few new mental models.
- Defining the wrong system primitives.
- Building system foundations in ways that won’t scale to future needs.
- Misunderstanding the core user problem, or forgetting about it mid-project.
- Only seeing what’s next, never what’s possible.
Reduce complexity
Removing loops and concepts for pass-through variables transformed Unify’s then-clunky workflows into something incredibly powerful and easy to set up.
154steps153 connections
Catch interface edge cases
Rapid prototyping with real data gives your engineers specs they can experience, and surfaces problems before customers feel them.
Look beyond the pixels
Califa’s product evaluations are expansive and take a holistic approach to your product offerings.
4 min read
82 slidesGo deep to go the distance
Technical and product deep dives result in tested strategies that ensure success.
18 min read
“Califa is without question the best strategic thinking design model I’ve tested.”
Plan long-horizon work from day 1
Take your feature from MVP to MVP with Califa’s Managed Milestones.
Product is a long game and many of these ideas have only recently shipped.
Use Left and Right arrow keys to change slides, or click the left or right half of the slide. Press Home or End for the first or last slide.
A redesigned GitHub pull request for Microsoft/vscode, Allow list widget icons to inherit foreground color: a file tree on the left, the diff in the middle and a review comment thread on the right. (Overview). Slide 1 of 71.
Product is a long game and many of these ideas have only recently shipped.
7 min readWhat happens to work that doesn’t ship.
Shipping tiny systems at GitHub scale.
Systems Califa designed for pull requests and repositories are used daily by over a hundred million developers, and probably even more agents.
Defining a standard code review syntax.
Giving reviewers the ability to propose change directly inside a comment, and authors the ability to apply it in one click. GitLab and others in the industry subsequently adopted Califa’s proposed syntax.
The first step towards a more nuanced review flow.
Early explorations into [WIP] pull requests led to the first version of Draft PRs, a concept built so developers could share unfinished work without worrying about unwanted merges or reviews.
One button for every way to engage with the code.
Califa was tasked by Scott Guthrie to build a more robust “Clone” button in advance of the Codespaces launch. The one-week-turnaround “Open with X” project became today’s “Code” button.
A deep dive into cloud dev environment ephemerality.
How long a codespace should live, what it’s called, and how many you can keep. Structured explorations that defined the product & packaging.
Stacked pull requests, years early.
Califa explored how stacked pull requests could work more than five years before GitHub released them in July 2026.
Use Left and Right arrow keys to change slides, or click the left or right half of the slide. Press Home or End for the first or last slide.
Cover: Stacked Diffs. Enabling a popular development workflow on GitHub. (Title). Slide 1 of 55.
Simplifying contributions across forks.
Upstream contributions and comparisons sucked until Califa picked them apart and put them back together.
Contribute without a fork.
A vision for replacing the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad concept of forking as a method of contribution with something much more intuitive and enjoyable. Left as a Loom with an @everyone on Califa’s last day.
Make your system make sense.
Califa maps the model, specs the edge cases, and designs the interface your system needs.