A product partner, not a supplier.
Shipyard Studios is a product studio in London. We work with founders and established businesses to take ideas from a sentence to something running in production.
We also run products of our own. Resoled and SyncLayer are live, with real customers and real payments. That is where our habits come from: plan for the failed payment, the redelivered webhook and the app store review before they happen, not after.
- Based
- London, United Kingdom
- Works with
- Founders, established businesses and product teams
- Sectors
- Marketplaces, ecommerce, retail software, fitness
- Since
- January 2026
What we hold to
Commercial before cosmetic
Every design decision is a business decision in different clothes. We would rather argue about the pricing model than the corner radius, and both conversations happen with the same people in the room.
Scope is the product
What you leave out of version one decides whether there is a version two. We spend real time on that decision instead of treating it as a formality.
Ship, then learn
A product in front of users teaches more in a fortnight than research does in a quarter. We get there quickly, then take the feedback seriously enough to change things.
You own the work
The repository, the design files, the master artwork. We build things to be inherited, because every engagement ends and somebody else picks it up.
AI-assisted execution
Faster to evidence. Not fewer engineers.
We use AI-assisted tooling in our own workflow, and we are specific about what it changes.
What it changes. The distance between an idea and something a real person can use. A prototype that used to take weeks can take days, which moves the expensive question, will anyone use this, to before the build budget is committed.
What it does not. The judgement needed to design a system, model data, handle failure, secure a payment flow, or decide what should not be built at all. Prototyping and production engineering are different jobs, and confusing them is how teams end up rewriting in year two.
When AI goes inside a product, we treat its permissions as product requirements. The SyncLayer agent is the worked example: what it may do, what needs confirmation, and what it must never touch are written down before any tool is built.
How the work runs
Six stages, in order. Scope changes; the sequence does not.
- 01
Discover
Understand the customer, the business and the problem.
We start with what already exists: the market, the competitors and the workarounds people use today. The aim is to leave this stage able to state the problem in one sentence that everyone agrees with.
- Problem statement
- Customer and market review
- Constraints
- 02
Define
Turn an uncertain idea into requirements you can build against.
Everything that could be built gets written down, then cut. What survives becomes the requirements, specific enough to estimate and ordered so the riskiest assumptions are tested first.
- Scope and requirements
- Prioritised backlog
- Success criteria
- 03
Design
Map the journeys, then make the experience real.
Journeys before screens, screens before polish. The flows with money, state and failure in them are prototyped early, so the hard decisions are made in a prototype rather than in production code.
- User journeys
- Prototype
- Interface and design system
- 04
Build
Turn the design into reliable software.
Built in working slices so there is always something running. The architecture is chosen for the load the product will actually see, and you own the repository from day one.
- Architecture
- Production build
- Integrations
- Admin tooling
- 05
Launch
Test it, ship it and put it in front of real users.
The unglamorous list: testing across devices, error handling, analytics, metadata, store submissions and deployment. Launch is a checklist, not a date in a calendar.
- QA
- Deployment
- Store submission
- Handover
- 06
Iterate
Watch what people do, then improve it.
Version one is a hypothesis. We look at what people actually do with it, talk to the ones who stopped, and feed that into the next round of work.
- Behaviour review
- Feedback
- Next-cycle roadmap
About the mark
The Shipyard mark is a Plimsoll line, the load line painted on a ship's hull. It shows how much a vessel can safely carry in real water, in real weather. It is a good description of the job: build things that carry the load they will actually see.