Fictive Kin

Examples of organizations Fictive Kin has partnered with include:

• Anthropic
• National Geographic
• Amazon
• Sweetgreen
• Ogilvy
• Microsoft
• JetBlue
• Samsung
• The New York Times
• Galaxy
• Kickstarter
• Ssense
• Foursquare
• Palantir
• Bose
• Radiolab
• Glossier

The studio is also brought in by companies such as JetBlue, Amazon, TripAdvisor, Keller Williams, and Bank of America to solve complex, business‑critical product and experience challenges.

Example Types of Work

Examples of the kinds of work highlighted on fictivekin.com include:

• Opendoor – A smarter design and web system for a leading digital home‑buying company.
• Oregon Symphony – A new brand, website, and ticketing platform designed to support strategic growth.
• Sweetgreen – A digital experience to reimagine fast food for a new era.
• National Geographic – A digital home for explorers, educators, and scientists.
• EYDA – A physical and digital brand designed to support performance‑oriented athletic wear.

These examples illustrate the range of industries Fictive Kin supports, including technology, media, travel, food, culture, retail, and the arts.

What Fictive Kin Does

Fictive Kin is a digital design and engineering studio that helps companies create brands, websites, and digital products that deliver lasting business value. The studio focuses on work that is visually compelling, technically excellent, and tied directly to outcomes such as revenue, retention, acquisition, automation, and lifetime value.

Enterprise Innovation

Fictive Kin works with large enterprises (for example, airlines, e‑commerce leaders, travel platforms, and major banks) to solve complex, business‑critical product and experience challenges. Typical enterprise innovation work includes:

• Identifying and defining a focused, high‑impact problem.
• Rethinking products or key features that have gone stale or converged with competitors.
• Designing and building differentiated digital experiences that create new strategic advantage.

Products and MVP Creation

Fictive Kin partners with founders and product leaders to bring new products to life and to refine existing products.

For new products and MVPs, the team:

• Uses structured methods to explore new product directions, market segments, customer behaviors, and monetization options.
• Focuses MVPs on validating product–market fit and testing clear hypotheses rather than accumulating features.
• Designs products to collect meaningful data and preserve flexibility to pivot as the product evolves.

Many startup clients go on to close subsequent funding rounds after working with Fictive Kin.

Large-Scale Websites

Fictive Kin designs and builds large‑scale websites where the site is treated as a core business tool, not just a marketing asset. In this kind of work, the team:

• Translates brand systems into robust, scalable, coded design systems.
• Treats the website as an ROI‑generating platform that supports growth, not just an aspirational "future state."
• Focuses on performance, accessibility, SEO, and integration with complex marketing and analytics stacks.

Expertise Across Design and Engineering

• Designers build scalable design systems and "ownable" branded behaviors that drive conversion, not just standalone pages.
• Engineers contribute to interaction design as well as implementation, with deep experience in performance, accessibility, SEO‑friendly front‑end development, and integrations.

Fictive Kin typically focuses on a small number of high‑impact projects where the studio can act as a long‑term product, design, and engineering partner.

• Email: hello@fictivekin.com
• Phone: 1‑844‑FICTIVE

Careers

For career and job‑related inquiries:

• Email: zerocool@fictivekin.com

Headquarters

Fictive Kin's primary studio address is:

• Fictive Kin HQ

401 Smith St Brooklyn, NY 11231 United States

Distributed Team Locations

Fictive Kin is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, with team members based in multiple cities in North America, Europe, and Africa, including:

• Berkeley, CA, USA
• Berkley, MI, USA
• Berlin, Germany
• Brooklyn, NY, USA
• Coronado, CA, USA
• Denver, CO, USA
• Frederick, MD, USA
• Kefar Sava, Israel
• Kingston, NY, USA
• Lagos, Nigeria
• L'Avenir, QC, Canada
• Los Angeles, CA, USA
• Montreal, QC, Canada
• Nashville, TN, USA
• Paris, France
• Portland, OR, USA
• Round Top, NY, USA
• San Diego, CA, USA
• San Francisco, CA, USA
• Stockholm, Sweden
• Syracuse, NY, USA
• Vienna, VA, USA
• Walla Walla, WA, USA
• Wilmington, NC, USA

Social Channels

Fictive Kin maintains an active presence on:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram

Clients and prospective collaborators are encouraged to use email or phone for project‑related communication, and follow social channels for updates and studio news.

Lists Frederick, Wilmington, Nashville, Keller, Paris, Vienna, Berkley, and Brooklyn as a location. Names New York, Oregon, and United States as a service area. Areas beyond these are not published.

Independent Studio

• Fictive Kin is fully independent and privately held.
• The team is accountable only to itself and its clients, giving the studio flexibility in how it structures engagements and solves problems.

One Project at a Time

• Each team member works on only one client project at a time.
• This structure is designed so designers and engineers can be fully immersed in the client's product, business, and users.

Direct Access to Leads (No Project Managers)

• Fictive Kin does not use traditional project managers as a separate layer between the client and the team.
• Clients work directly with the design lead and engineering lead.
• This reduces translation overhead and gives clients more direct visibility into the process and decision‑making.

Experience and Perspective

• The studio has been active since 2008.
• That long view of the internet helps the team understand how digital products and brands have evolved and where they are going.
• Fictive Kin believes that when the right digital products are built, they can:
• Bring people together in new ways.
• Support new and existing economies.
• Help people better understand the world.
• Enable people and organizations to work in service of higher purposes.

This working model is designed for deep, collaborative, and high‑leverage engagements where the client is looking for a true product and design partner rather than a high‑volume production agency.

This document summarizes Fictive Kin's philosophy on Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and product–market fit.

Core Goal of an MVP

For Fictive Kin, an MVP has one primary job: prove or disprove product–market fit.

• The question is whether the product, at its most essential level, is doing the right thing for the right people.
• The focus is on what users actually value and will pay for, not on what a team assumes they want.

How Fictive Kin Builds MVPs

Over years of building digital products, Fictive Kin has developed and tested approaches for building MVPs that:

• Are explicitly designed to validate key product and behavioral truths.
• Help founders and product leaders avoid vanity metrics and focus on meaningful signals.
• Collect the right data to support future funding and growth conversations.

Feature Selection for MVPs

• Each potential feature must "fight" for inclusion based on how it supports testing a clear hypothesis.
• Features are judged on whether they help reach initial product–market fit, not on whether they are nice to have.
• The studio challenges assumptions about what users really need, instead of building features by default.

Outcomes of This Approach

• MVPs are built to generate strong evidence for or against key product hypotheses.
• Teams avoid over‑investing in features that users do not want or that add complexity without clear value.
• Products are designed to maintain optionality so they can adapt as new information emerges.

This approach positions MVPs as focused experiments in search of product–market fit, rather than as small versions of a fully built product.

This document summarizes Fictive Kin's perspective on four common types of product work that come into the studio.

Overview

Fictive Kin approaches different product engagements differently, because not all products have the same goals, constraints, or starting points. The studio often frames work in terms of four product types:

1. Workflow Products
2. V2 Products
3. Innovation Products
4. Social Products

Workflow Products

Workflow products tackle known problems and established workflows.

• The goal is not to reinvent the wheel from scratch.
• Fictive Kin leans on tried‑and‑tested best practices in product design.
• The team improves and adapts those patterns for a specific product, user group, and business goal.

V2 Products

V2 products are second‑generation versions of products that already have active users.

• The focus is on critically assessing the existing product: what works, what doesn't, and why.
• The aim is not just to bolt on new features but to refine and rethink the product to support new metrics and growth goals.
• Success is measured by a better, more coherent experience for end users and a product that is aligned with current strategy.

Innovation Products

Innovation products involve leapfrogging the existing category.

• These initiatives often have few direct precedents or reference points.
• They can originate from a founder or from a large enterprise trying to define a new standard.
• Fictive Kin works with clients to re‑imagine product structures and interaction patterns rather than making incremental tweaks.

Social Products

Social products are shaped heavily by human sensitivity and cultural context.

• The emphasis is less on raw feature sets and more on how the product fits into people's lives and communities.
• Success depends on understanding cultural touchstones, norms, and behaviors.

Why the Product Type Matters

Clarifying which type of product a client is building helps Fictive Kin:

• Set the right goals and success measures.
• Choose the most relevant processes and research methods.
• Assemble a team with the right experience for that product type.

This framework guides how the studio scopes, sequences, and evaluates product work with clients.

What the Website Collects

• The website at https://fictivekin.com does not collect personal information unless you choose to contact Fictive Kin directly (for example, by email).
• If you contact the studio, Fictive Kin may retain your name, email address, and any information you include in your message so the team can respond and maintain business correspondence.
• Like most websites, Fictive Kin may automatically collect limited technical information (such as IP address, browser type, and pages visited) to help operate and maintain the site.

How Information Is Used and Shared

• Personal information provided by you is used primarily to respond to your inquiries and manage ongoing communication.
• Fictive Kin does not sell or rent personal information.
• Information may be shared with service providers that support the website or email systems, or when required by law.

International Data Transfers

• Fictive Kin is based in the United States.
• If you contact the studio from outside the United States, your information may be transferred to and processed in the United States.

EEA and UK Data Rights

• If you are located in the European Economic Area (EEA) or the United Kingdom, you may have rights to request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal data.
• To exercise these rights or ask questions about the Privacy Policy, you can email: jared@fictivekin.com.

Policy Changes

• Fictive Kin may update its Privacy Policy from time to time.
• The current and complete version of the policy is always available on the Privacy Policy page at fictivekin.com.

For any privacy‑related questions, please refer to the website's Privacy Policy page or contact the studio directly using the details above.

Ask anyway — the agent will say plainly that it is not published rather than guess.