Two-person senior practice

Insight, design, and shipping for
complex digital products.

The hardest product problems don’t get solved by adding people — they get solved by insight. You get two senior operators who’ve shipped: a 25-year founder-builder, and a senior product leader from Zoom and Omnicom. Together we go deep on strategy, UX research, prototyping, interface design, and AI — no junior layer, no agency overhead. Hand-off ready for your engineering team.

See recent work → Meet the team

Scoping Q4 2026 engagements · Discovery sprints available sooner

Studio

Two senior practitioners

Founding Partner — Build & Design

Sándor Cárdenas

Sándor leads build and design at Smartflex. 25 years shipping complex digital products — first at Wireless Knowledge (the $100M Qualcomm/Microsoft mobile venture), then at Elan Pharmaceuticals, where he rebuilt the rep ordering platform and uncovered significant procurement waste.

Founded Smartflex in 2004 around FlexEdit, an on-page website editing platform still in production two decades later. Built out the infrastructure to run as one of the early fully remote-first software companies, growing to a ten-person studio. Transitioned Smartflex from an agency model to a senior consultancy as the website and hosting market shifted. Since then, working on products across the spectrum — among them civic data platforms, a handheld toxicology device, and now a tool for tracking and optimizing AI model usage.

Platform engineering Interface design Rapid prototyping AI implementation

Partner — Product & Strategy

Aminah Cárdenas

Aminah leads product and strategy at Smartflex. Concurrently she co-leads product on Omnicom’s AI Audience Creation platform — the system planners use to build advertising audiences in minutes instead of days — owning vision and roadmap with engineering, UX, and data science.

At Zoom she turned an unrealistic single-product timeline into two shipped flagships, Production Studio and Session Branding, aligning five engineering teams without direct authority — both still flagship three years on. At Intuit she replaced a deployment sign-off bottleneck that cost teams hours per cycle with a Slack-native workflow and zero new infrastructure. Earlier: a genomic research platform at Viridos used by dozens of researchers, Nobel laureates among them, and an account portal serving 1–2M aging adults and caregivers.

aminahcardenas.com → LinkedIn →

Omnicom Zoom Intuit Viridos

Aminah leads product and strategy; Sándor leads build and design — but those are leads, not fences. He has carried product vision as a founder since 2004; she has designed at the highest professional level. Work hands off between them in either direction, and the same problem gets two styles instead of one blind spot — the overlap that makes a four-to-twelve-week engagement feasible for two people. Best on hard product problems: complex, data-heavy, regulated. Founder-led teams. Internal tools that earn their keep.

Process

Frame, prototype, validate, commit

Frame

Get clear on the actual problem before designing an answer. Stakeholder interviews, constraints, success criteria. The brief that arrives is rarely the brief that gets shipped — senior product judgment, not template discovery.

Prototype

Build the answer fast enough to argue with. AI in the loop compresses what used to be weeks of design work into days, so we can test more directions before committing.

Validate

Test the prototype against reality. Real users, real data, real constraints. Where are the load-bearing assumptions? We answer the hard questions before engineering commits to production code.

Commit

Document the validated answer specifically enough that engineering — yours or ours — can build without re-discovering the decisions. Hand-off ready by design, upstream of an engineering house, not a replacement for one.

Engage

Three ways to work together

2 weeks

fixed fee

Discovery sprint

Frame the problem. Validate direction. Scope the build. For when the brief isn’t fully formed yet and you need senior judgment before committing to a longer engagement.

Stakeholder interviews
Validated problem framing
Prototype or wireframes
Scoping recommendation

4–12 weeks

Embedded engagement

Research, design, prototype — alongside your team or as the standalone product team. Work hands off cleanly to engineering, or we deliver end-to-end on self-contained projects. The standard practice engagement.

UX research & framing
Interface design & prototypes
Front-end & AI experiments
Engineering hand-off package

Ongoing

monthly retainer

Advisory

A senior product and build sounding board. Reviews, hiring input, second-opinion calls — for founders and product leaders who need senior judgment without a full project commitment.

Monthly retainer
Async + sync touchpoints
Reviews & feedback
Hiring & team input

Work

Selected work

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01Product UX

DAISI

Full UX and design for an analytics platform that surfaces meaningful insights for nonprofits, researchers, and government agencies — without requiring SQL or statistics.

02Product UX & Strategy

Sempra Energy

Multi-year embedded engagement on a remote workforce tool used by field staff across the utility. UX research, product strategy, and interface design — contracted through Smartflex.

03Product UX & Data Viz

The US Wealth Map

Information architecture, data visualization, and interface design for The Data Center — regional wealth data made legible to researchers, policy makers, and the public at once. A continuation of our engagement with them on DAISI.

04Pre-launchStudio · Developer tool

Pitwindow

Watches an AI coding session’s health — context bloat, cache thrash, output decay — and calls it: keep going, wrap up, or start fresh. Reads Claude Code, Codex, and local-model transcripts on your machine, and puts a dollar figure on the waste each problem quietly runs up. Open source.

05ExperimentalStudio · Open source

Bricca

A brick-building CAD app — built solo by Sándor as an AI-driven fork of the open-source LeoCAD. It adds Jolt rigid-body physics that actually runs motors, roller coasters, and Great Ball Contraptions; a first-person walk-and-drive mode that turns a build into a place you move through; and a from-scratch Metal renderer with physically based lighting.

06Pre-launchStudio · Mobile

Tag Time

A place-memory app — people leave tags at real-world locations that build a layered, lasting record of a place, even ones that no longer exist. On-site AR discovery, interest-based map exploration, and followable journeys, over a location-gated privacy model. Designed and built end-to-end by Aminah on React Native + Supabase.

07Market research & UX

Tox Detective

Market research, proto-personas, journey mapping, and search strategy for Tox Detective — Sage Analytics’ portable cannabis pesticide screener, built on a US Army field toxicity test. The research said the market wasn’t there yet; the work was figuring out what to do about that. Our third engagement with the company.

View case study

0821 years liveStudio · Platform

FlexEdit

The studio’s own publishing platform — clients edit the live page itself while the markup stays designer-controlled. On-page editing years before the industry got there; thousands of sites built on it, including affiliate offerings for the largest personal-training organizations. Original proof of practice; 21 years live.