We're not sure what we actually need.
Before you hire a team or commission an agency, it helps to understand the real problem. We work with you to get to a clearer brief.
Honest thinking for complex product problems.
We work with founders, CTOs, and product leaders who need someone to get alongside the problem and tell them honestly what we actually see. So the decisions that matter get made with more certainty and less noise.
Questions we often hear
We have a direction but it keeps slipping.
Ongoing advisory for product and digital leaders who need a thinking partner. Someone outside the organisation who stays close to what's happening.
How do we know we're building the right thing?
It's easy to move fast and still end up in the wrong place. We help teams get underneath the assumptions and find out what's actually driving outcomes before more is invested in the wrong direction.
We need someone to tell us honestly if this is right.
Not a gut feeling or personal opinion. We look at what the evidence actually says: what's working, what isn't, and what's being missed. Then we tell you plainly.
We need to level up how our team thinks about product.
Pre-IPO, scaling, or post-restructure: sometimes the problem isn't the product, it's how the people building it make decisions. We work with product leaders and teams to develop the thinking they need for what's coming next.
We're going through a big change and need someone to hold the thread.
Platform migrations, rebrands, team restructures. Complex transitions where the risk isn't the technology, it's losing sight of what matters to the people using it. We help keep that in view.
Selected clients
Work
Luxury retail · Platform migration
Embedded in a £500m ecommerce migration
A luxury skincare brand moving its entire digital platform at scale. We worked embedded within the team, leading on the design system and toolkit that held the product together through the transition.
Fintech · Design systems
Building a shared language for scale
A fintech startup with a growing product team and no shared way of working. We helped them find the foundations and the habits to move faster without pulling apart.
Health tech · Product strategy
Bringing clarity to a complex healthcare product
A healthcare platform with real ambition but an unclear path from concept to delivery. We took ownership of the product direction, aligning research, design, and engineering around a coherent whole.
Financial services · Behavioural design
Making complex financial decisions feel human
A pension platform with genuinely hard problems. How do you design for decisions people find confusing, daunting, or easy to ignore? Two years embedded in an innovation lab, applying behavioural thinking to the places it mattered most.
Government
Independent perspective on a government digital service
A fast-moving engagement requiring several pivots, responding quickly to feedback and changing direction when the evidence called for it.
Charity
Removing the friction between intention and action
A disability charity losing donations not through lack of goodwill, but through a process that got in the way. We identified where things were breaking down and what it would actually take to fix them.
Product leadership · Coaching
Building product thinking ahead of scale
A product team facing the step-change in rigour and pace that comes with rapid growth. We worked with leadership to develop the frameworks and habits they'd need, before they needed them.
Education tech
Eight weeks, one clear outcome
A complex platform migration with a tight deadline and a brief that needed questioning. We redirected the approach early, focused on what actually mattered, and delivered a working result, not a handover document.
About
Brignell Ltd is an independent strategic consultancy run by Ben Brignell, a strategist with over two decades of experience across product, UX, and digital organisations.
Ben is also the founder of principles.design, a widely-referenced open resource used by product teams worldwide.
Contact
Most engagements start with a single conversation. Tell us what you're dealing with. We'll give you an honest view and you can decide if it's worth taking further.
From there, engagements range from a focused short piece of work to ongoing advisory.