§ 00.A

Northflank

I joined Northflank before it had raised a round. I was their first designer and the only one for the next two years, shaping the product, brand and design systems from the ground up. Six years later, the foundations are still in production.

ROLE

FOUNDING DESIGN LEAD

STAGE

PRE-SEED → SEED

YEARS

2019 — 2021

SCOPE

PRODUCT · UX · DESIGN SYSTEM · BRAND SYSTEM · MARKETING

STATUS

SHIPPED 2020 · STILL IN PRODUCTION

§ 01 / CONTEXT

Will and Fred had built a deployment engine that worked. Nobody outside the team could use it.

They had just come out of an incubator, had raised nothing, and were hiring their first designer.

There was no design team, no established product language and nothing to inherit. I had to help figure out what the product should feel like while the product itself was still taking shape.

§ 02 / PROBLEM

Infrastructure products looked like the terminals they were meant to replace.

You filled in a configuration form, submitted it, waited, then refreshed the page to find out what happened.

The technology was powerful. The experience made it feel harder than it needed to be.

So instead of looking at other developer tools for the answer, we looked outside the category.

§ 03 / DECISIONS

Games as the Reference

Games solve a problem infrastructure products also have: they put enormous amounts of state in front of you while you are under pressure. That became a design reference, and then a market insight.

Game studios and server operators were already buying infrastructure, but nobody in the category was speaking directly to them. We built the product experience and landing pages with that audience in mind. Multiplayer infrastructure in one click.

Games as the Reference

Games solve a problem infrastructure products also have: they put enormous amounts of state in front of you while you are under pressure. That became a design reference, and then a market insight.

Games as the Reference

Games solve a problem infrastructure products also have: they put enormous amounts of state in front of you while you are under pressure. That became a design reference, and then a market insight.

Legibility over Completeness

Most of my first year went into the parts nobody wants to design: service creation, configuration, build logs, commit history. These were the screens competitors treated as plumbing and shipped raw. I treated them as part of the product.

Inline editing became one of the patterns that made the interface feel less like a control panel and more like something you could actually work in. Will picked up on it in the first round of feedback and it became one of the conventions we kept.

Legibility over Completeness

Legibility over Completeness

Mobile with Everything Intact

Most infrastructure products treated mobile as a notification layer: check the status, then get back to a desktop. I didn't think that was enough.

If something breaks at 2am, you're probably not sitting at your desk. So the mobile product kept the actual workflows intact, including the actions you might need to take under pressure.

Mobile with Everything Intact

Most infrastructure products treated mobile as a notification layer: check the status, then get back to a desktop. I didn't think that was enough.

If something breaks at 2am, you're probably not sitting at your desk. So the mobile product kept the actual workflows intact, including the actions you might need to take under pressure.

Mobile with Everything Intact

Most infrastructure products treated mobile as a notification layer: check the status, then get back to a desktop. I didn't think that was enough.

If something breaks at 2am, you're probably not sitting at your desk. So the mobile product kept the actual workflows intact, including the actions you might need to take under pressure.

§ 04 / SYSTEM

There was no second designer coming. Whatever I built had to keep working after I left, so I wrote the system as rules rather than a component library: how dense a surface should get, how state should be shown, what takes priority over what. Engineers could extend it without needing me in the room.

§ 05 / SHIPPED

By the time I left, Northflank had a working product, a visual identity, a design system and a marketing site, all built around the same underlying language.

The company raised its seed round the following summer. In 2024, it raised $22.3M led by Bain Capital Ventures and Vertex Ventures US. Sentry and Writer now run production workloads on the platform.

§ 06 / NOW

I left Northflank in January 2021. Six years later, the interface and the system are still in production. Most product design gets replaced within a few years. This one didn't need to be.

"Erik played a fundamental role in shaping the early vision for Northflank, helping define the platform's product experience and interface from the ground up. Back in 2020, this approach was genuinely unique."

WILL STEWART / CO-FOUNDER & CEO, NORTHFLANK

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