Let's chatEight stages. Twelve-week blocks. One Notion workspace your hiring manager, Design Ops, and your agency share. Used with design teams at companies like Coinbase, Roblox, Instacart, Affirm, Salesforce, and Robinhood. Free to start.
Free forever · Pro and Agency available · Instant Notion template delivery
Used with design teams at companies like these.
Most design contractor programs fail the same few ways. Procurement blocks sourcing. The candidate review goes silent after the portfolio call. Nobody knows where the PO stands. The contractor falls into the client’s Slack and loses the thread back to the agency.
The Forge Staff Aug OS addresses all of it. Not with documentation. With a live Notion workspace — databases, forms, views, and automations — that runs the engagement from intake to offboarding in one shared environment.
We’ve been running this system for five years, across $9.5M in placements. This is the first time we’ve published it.
Rules watch the live data and act. When runway drops or risk turns red, the right person gets pinged.
Spin up week 4, 8, and 12 check-ins, or a full offboarding checklist, in a single click.
PO burn, gross margin, and weeks remaining, tracked block by block.
A clean conversion record, with the fee computed from first-year salary.
We structure every Forge engagement identically. That’s what makes the OS transferable — not Forge-specific, not client-specific. The stages enforce the same disciplines regardless of who’s running the program.
30 minutes. Scope, level, rate band, timezone, and start date locked in writing. Not over Slack. The brief doesn’t advance until it’s documented.
Forge drafts the SOW. The hiring manager engages procurement to issue the PO. Sourcing does not begin until the PO is received or explicitly waived in writing. This single gate eliminates the most common cause of placement delay.
Talent Pool first — warm, vetted, screened in the last 12 months. Targeted outbound supplements. We don’t cold-LinkedIn-search on day one.
Every candidate gets a 30-minute 1:1 before they reach you. We verify scope fit, leveling, rate alignment, availability, communication, and cultural signal. About 1 in 4 sourced candidates clear our bar.
3–5 curated candidates presented in a shared Candidate Tracker. No email PDFs. No LinkedIn link dumps. The client reviews async and leaves notes in thread.
Portfolio review. Forge introduces both sides and hands off — the assessment is between the hiring manager and the candidate, not a Forge-mediated call. 24-hour debrief rule: silence drops our placement rate 30%+.
Forge owns rate, terms, and negotiation. The hiring manager does not discuss comp or terms with the candidate. One negotiating surface. One set of standards.
Contractor onboards to Forge systems. Client Design Ops onboards to the client stack. Handoff data block to Design Ops within 24 hours of accept.
Introducing the Forge Engagement Health Score
Every engagement in the OS carries a live score: the Forge Engagement Health Score (FEHS). It’s a composite of five weighted signals, calculated automatically, surfaced as a single status — Healthy, Watch, At Risk, or Critical.
You don’t interpret a dashboard of raw numbers. You see where you stand, right now, in every engagement.
The full scoring methodology is published openly. It ships in all tiers — Free, Pro, and Agency. We believe in legible systems: if you’re running the OS, you should understand why the score moves, not just what it says.
One-time purchase. Updates delivered as links — no automatic overwrites of your workspace. Updates & Support subscription is optional; cancel any time. All purchases delivered instantly via Lemon Squeezy. Global sales tax handled.
Forge embeds senior product designers into your team, L5 through L8, with in-house experience at companies like Meta, Google, Coinbase, Roblox, and Instacart, working in your tools and shipping from week one. We're not a staffing agency. We're your team, extended.
Get in touchYes. Pay-what-you-want means you can pay $0. You’ll get the full core OS, FEHS scoring, and sample data. No sales call. No expiration.
The free tier is delivered through Lemon Squeezy with a $0 minimum. You can choose to pay more to support the work — or not. Up to you.
Free is built for a design leader running one engagement at a time who needs the core process. Pro adds the Rate Card DB, PO Log, block accounting, and a multi-engagement architecture for teams managing several roles at once.
Staffing agencies and boutique design studios running the program on behalf of multiple clients. It adds the Talent Pool, client-facing Candidate Tracker, and sync architecture for managing candidates across client workspaces.
No — Notion template duplicates are static copies. When we ship updates, Pro and Agency subscribers with the Updates & Support subscription receive a link to the new version. You decide what to adopt and when.
Yes. Duplicate into your workspace and share freely with your internal team.
Reply to your confirmation email or go to help@forge.is. Same-day response.