Tired of managing the load alone?
Califa is the design partner you always wanted. It thinks about product the way you do: in outcomes, tradeoffs, and what ships this quarter. It weighs the bet before the pixels, says no to the right things, and takes work off your plate.
A fellow adult in the room.
Califa works as a true partner to product. It shares the load, owns the outcome with you, and brings intention to every call, so you’re not the only one keeping the roadmap honest.
Shared ownership of the outcome, from the first problem statement to the numbers after launch.
Intentionality in every decision, with the reasoning and tradeoffs written down, and fact, opinion, and guess kept apart.
A steady hand when timelines slip and opinions get loud, with honest calls and no territory to defend.
Cross-team problems that no one team owns, but can make or break the platform.
Califa built a team around Heap’s cross-cutting usability problems, with leads from every area taking the work back to their roadmaps.
“Califa helped the Heap product team turn its long-term roadmap into prototypes and a visual story that were coherent and exciting to everyone, from AEs to early-career engineers. It sharpened who we were building for and let us test where Heap was going with customers before we built it.”
Product thinking, all the way to the roadmap.
Califa has led product and design together, including GitHub’s entire coding area across Repos and Pull Requests. It starts with the problem and the business case, and ends with a plan the team can ship.
Product sense that starts with the problem, the customer, and the business case, down to pricing and packaging for GitHub Codespaces.
Product vision that makes the future concrete enough to sell.
At Heap, it gave sales a story beyond feature-for-feature competitor pitches, and integrated session replay shipped about 17 months before Amplitude’s.
Roadmaps that are both ambitious and realistic, broken up into quick cycles of learning.
At GitHub and DigitalOcean, vision work came in clear, practical steps.
“This is not normal.”
The user’s voice, with the numbers to back it.
Califa argues for the user in the rooms where roadmaps get decided, and brings the research and analytics to make the case.
User advocacy that keeps growth tactics from working against the people they’re meant for.
Lean research that tests a risky bet with the right users before it gets built.
Analytics fluency from years leading design at Heap, an analytics company, and instrumenting products at DigitalOcean.
At Heap, an A/B test of new menu names lifted clicks on “Live data feed” from 15.2% to 23.0%, and stopped a rename that halved clicks before it reached everyone.
“Califa has the highest pixel-to-impact ratio that I’ve ever seen.”
More shipped, less on your plate.
Califa picks up whole problem areas and moves them forward, from the first critique to the code.
Fresh eyes, with a full product critique in the first two weeks, like the 250-slide review of Unify’s new user experience.
Prototypes in code, so the team can feel an idea before the roadmap commits to it.
Tiny Wins, the small fixes that never make the roadmap, chosen for the flows people repeat every day and cleared without a prioritization meeting.
Ready to share the load?
Califa joins your next planning cycle and starts with the tradeoff nobody wants to make.