About Cirrabit
We take the whole programme, not a slice.
Cirrabit is a single technology partner for work most companies split across three vendors — software, AI, design, growth and the infrastructure beneath them. One engagement covers all of it, so nothing important is left sitting in the gap between suppliers.
The Position
Built against the seams.
Cirrabit exists because of a pattern that repeats in almost every digital programme. The software goes to a development shop, the interface to a design studio, the launch to a marketing agency, and the cloud account to whoever set it up first. Each of them does competent work.
The failures appear between them. A design assumes a data model the backend never agreed to. The product and the public site drift into two different brands. Nobody owns the integration, the analytics or the migration, so those land on the client — usually on one person who already has a full job.
So the company is built as one column rather than three: strategy, design, engineering, AI, infrastructure and growth in the same studio, under one contract. Bundling is not the point. The handovers are where the months and the money go, and this arrangement removes them.
It cuts the other way too. We are a poor fit for a brief that hands us one layer and then asks us to answer for the behaviour of the other two.
Vision
The stack is consolidating. Buying should too.
Three shifts are already visible in the work: more of a system is bought rather than built, more of the logic sits inside models, and the line between product and marketing has dissolved.
- 01
Composition over construction
More of a system now arrives as a managed service or an API. The value moves to judgement: what to buy, what to build, and where the boundaries are allowed to fall.
- 02
Models move into the plumbing
AI stops being a feature to launch and becomes a part you design around, with evaluation, fallbacks and a decided answer for the moment a model is confidently wrong.
- 03
The product is the marketing
Search, content and interface are one surface now. A page that ranks and a product that converts are the same engineering problem, and splitting them across vendors shows.
- 04
Contract for the join
The buying consequence is practical: name someone accountable for how the parts meet, and do it before the parts are ordered.
Approach
Being wrong should cost a week.
Every engagement opens the same way — get specific about the outcome, then keep the increments small enough that a wrong turn costs a week instead of a quarter.
- 01
The same group from scope to support
Discovery, architecture and delivery stay with the people who started, so context never has to be re-explained at a stage boundary or a staffing change.
- 02
Decisions written down
Architecture choices, the trade-offs behind them and the things we deliberately did not do live in a document you can read, argue with, and hold us to later.
- 03
Running software as the status report
Progress is shown in an environment you can open yourself. If a week produced nothing clickable, the update says exactly that.
- 04
An exit available at every stage
Repositories, environments, credentials and documentation are yours throughout. Leaving should be a decision about fit, never a negotiation about access.
Technology + Design
Design that knows what it costs.
The costly mistakes live on the line between a design file and a repository. Both sit inside one practice here, reviewed in the same room from the first sketch onward.
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Designers who read the data model
Interfaces are drawn against what the system can genuinely return, so a prototype never promises a query nobody can afford to run in production.
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Engineers in the critique
Build realities arrive while the design is still cheap to change — the only moment at which knowing a screen will be slow actually changes the screen.
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Defined once, consumed twice
Colour, spacing, states and component behaviour live in one definition used by both tools, so the library in the design file and the one in the repository cannot quietly drift.
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Accessibility in the component spec
Contrast, focus order, keyboard paths and screen-reader labels are decided alongside everything else about a component, rather than chased down after release.
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Performance is a drawing-stage decision
Image weight, font loading and animation cost get chosen while they are still opinions. After the page exists, they are a rebuild.
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Brand that holds inside the product
An identity has to survive a dense table, an error state and an overflowing label, which is a harder test than a launch poster.
Partnership
Good work needs a counterpart.
The engagements that go well share one trait: someone on the client side is allowed to decide. Here is what we ask of a client, and what we owe in return.
- 01
One decision-maker with authority
Not a standing committee that meets once a fortnight. Someone who can settle a trade-off quickly, because a decision left open stops more work than a hard no ever does.
- 02
Access to the people doing the job
An hour with the person who actually runs the process is worth more than a folder of requirements written about them by someone else.
- 03
Honesty about the constraints
Budget ceilings, internal politics and the system nobody wants to touch. Tell us early and we design around them rather than into them.
- 04
What we commit to in return
A point of view you are free to reject, work you can inspect at any point, and a direct answer when something we recommended turns out to be wrong.
Start with the hard part.
Send a short brief — the outcome you need, what is blocking it, and what already exists. We come back with what we would build first and what we would leave alone.