Frontier · Design brief

Frontier builds technology for companies pursuing net-positive impact on people, customers, and the business.

A design brief for our Principal and Product Engineer roles — and a window into the work itself. Read it, pick what excites you, send us what you'd build.

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What Frontier is

A new practice for companies reimagining how they run with AI.

Frontier is Substantial's new practice. We work with companies to reimagine how their businesses run with AI — through a mix of strategy, software, and people, deployed against outcomes that matter.

Every engagement moves at least one of four things: revenue, team capability, product or service quality, or operations. If it doesn't move one of those, we've failed.

Underneath the work, we're building two compounding capabilities: software factories that let small teams ship AI-native software at the pace a business actually needs, and an intelligence layer that turns scattered institutional knowledge into something a company can see, use, and build on. The tools we bring get sharper with every engagement. The tools we deploy for clients get more useful the longer they run.

That's the bet. The job is to make it real.

The brief

Frontier delivers across a value chain.

Each stage has friction software could remove, and work we could do with more leverage if we built the right infrastructure.

01
Discover

Find the leverage point. Understand what's really going on inside a business.

02
Strategize

Frame the bet. Decide what to build, in what order, and why.

03
Build

Ship working software into production. Weeks, not quarters.

04
Operate

Run the systems we shipped. Tune, evaluate, expand. Keep the work useful.

05
Compound

Make the next engagement easier than the last. Make every customer's system smarter the longer it runs.

The brief, in one paragraph
Pick one or more stages of the value chain. Show us the systems you'd build to give Frontier and our customers more leverage there. Tell us what you'd build, why, and how it changes the work over time.

You're free to choose what to focus on. Hold the whole value chain in your head while you do.

Hard questions worth working on

Wicked problems sitting underneath the work.

Questions clients pose to us, and that we pose to ourselves. Use them as starting points for what your brief could address. Pick the ones that pull at you — you don't have to answer all of them.

  1. 01

    How does a company become legible to itself — able to see how it actually runs, where its knowledge lives, and where its judgment is buried?

  2. 02

    How do we encode the way a company's best people think into software that helps the rest of the company think the same way?

  3. 03

    What does software look like when it follows from a good strategy — rather than strategy decks written to justify software decisions?

  4. 04

    How do we automate work without losing the judgment, taste, and tacit knowledge that made the company distinctive in the first place?

  5. 05

    How do we help teams adopt new ways of working — supporting them through the change, not just shipping a tool and walking away?

  6. 06

    How does the software we build get better the longer it runs, in ways that compound for the customer and for us?

  7. 07

    What does it take for a small team to deliver work that would normally require a much larger one — without compromising the work?

What we're looking for

What a strong response looks like.

  • ·A clear read on the situation, including what you think the real problem is.
  • ·Product thinking. What to build, in what order, and how it compounds for Frontier and clients over time.
  • ·A view on the consulting value chain. How Frontier delivers, and how the systems you build change the work.
  • ·A piece of work that lands. Something we can act on, and that you can defend when pushed.
What to produce

Whatever best shows your thinking.

A prototype in whatever form fits — a clickable mock, a real piece of software built with Claude Code or similar, an interactive diagram. The closer it gets to something working, the better. A written readout and a static diagram are fine if that's what serves the work best, but we want to see something we can react to.

Include enough context that we can follow your thinking.

Constraints

Keep it small.

  • ·Plan for roughly four hours. Spend more if you want, less if you can.
  • ·We're looking at your thinking, not how much you produce.
  • ·Format is your choice. Written, slides, prototype, mixed.
  • ·Include a short paragraph on what you prioritized, what you cut, and what you'd do with more time.
The session

90 minutes with two of us from Frontier.

If the work warrants going further, we'll set up a session that runs like this.

45 min
Block · 01
Walkthrough

You walk us through what you've made.

30 min
Block · 02
Q&A

We'll push on assumptions and ask what you'd change.

15 min
Block · 03
Open

Open conversation.

This brief is itself something we could build better. If your work suggests changes to the brief, or if you'd rather send us a better version of it, that counts. The job is to find leverage. The brief is fair game.

References, if useful
Send us your work

When you're ready.

Send us what you've built, and one paragraph on where to look first.

Send us your work  → Ask a question