Marta Vogel
Founder, strategy
Fifteen years between agencies and in-house product teams. Runs discovery and keeps scope honest.
About
About Northstar Digital
We are nine people in Berlin and Lisbon who design and build digital products for mid-sized European companies. Independent since 2014, deliberately small, and still run by the two people who started it.
Why the studio exists
Most of our clients have been through one failed rebuild before they call us.
Northstar Digital started in 2014 because two senior people were tired of being sold into projects they then never touched. The pattern was always the same: an experienced team wins the work, and a much less experienced team delivers it.
So the studio is built the other way round. The people in your first call are the people who do the work, and we cap the number of concurrent projects rather than the number of hours we can bill. It means we turn down more work than we take, and it is the reason clients come back.
- Mission Make digital products that a mid-sized company can own, extend and afford to run for a decade.
- Scope over speed We would rather spend two weeks proving the problem than six months building the wrong answer quickly.
- No growth for its own sake Nine people is a deliberate ceiling. Beyond that we would need managers between you and the work.
Values
Four things we do not negotiate
Small team, senior only
Every person on your project has shipped production work for a decade or more. Nothing is handed to a junior once the contract is signed.
Evidence over opinion
We instrument before we redesign. Decisions reference analytics, support tickets and user sessions rather than taste.
Plain language
No jargon in status updates, no surprise invoices, and a written summary after every workshop so decisions are traceable.
Built to be handed over
You get documented code, a design system your team can extend and a maintenance plan. Lock-in is not a business model we like.
By the numbers
Eleven years, measured
- 11 years Building digital products from Berlin
- 64 Projects delivered end to end
- 9 Senior specialists, no juniors billed as seniors
- 92% Of clients return within eighteen months
Team
The people you will actually work with
Four leads plus five specialists in engineering, design and content. Everyone bills their own work.
Ruben Dias
Founder, engineering
Backend and infrastructure. Has migrated more legacy platforms than he would like to admit in public.
Ines Kruger
Design lead
Interface design and design systems. Treats accessibility as part of craft rather than compliance.
Daniel Okonjo
Frontend lead
Performance, component architecture and the unglamorous work of making things fast on a mid-range phone.
History
How the studio got here
- 2014
Founded as a two-person studio
Marta and Ruben leave a large agency to build software for mid-sized German industrial firms, working out of a shared studio in Kreuzberg.
- 2017
First platform engagement
Atlas Logistics asks for a dispatcher tool rather than a website. The team grows to five and adds dedicated backend engineering.
- 2020
Design systems practice
Remote work pushes clients toward shared component libraries. We formalise the design system practice that now underpins most engagements.
- 2023
Performance and accessibility as contract terms
We start writing Core Web Vitals and WCAG conformance into statements of work, with budgets enforced in continuous integration.
- 2026
Nine specialists, two studios
Berlin and Lisbon, one delivery team. Still no account managers between you and the people doing the work.
References
Clients are happy to speak to you directly
Ask during the first call and we will put you in touch with two or three, including one project that was harder than expected.
They rebuilt the customer portal in four months and it has not needed a rescue since. The handover documentation was better than our internal standard, which was mildly embarrassing for us.
What stood out was how early we saw something real. There was a working staging environment in week three, and every decision after that was argued with data instead of slides.
Our booking flow went from a liability to the thing sales demos first. Accessibility was treated as a requirement rather than an add-on, which mattered a great deal for our public sector clients.
Next step
Tell us what you are building
A 30 minute call is usually enough to tell whether we are the right studio for the problem. No pitch deck, no obligation.
Next step
Tell us what you are building
A 30 minute call is usually enough to tell whether we are the right studio for the problem. No pitch deck, no obligation.