About

I'm Vas Frolik. I run Nordlean — a small, principal-led design practice working with growth-stage product teams on design systems and product strategy.

Most of my career has been in product design at scaling B2B and enterprise companies. The work has spanned the early days of startups (where I was usually the first or second designer figuring out what to build) through to enterprise contexts like Sage (where the design system became the foundation that hundreds of designers and engineers built on top of).
The through-line has been the same kind of question, asked at different scales: what should this team build, and what does it need to be built on?

The last few years have been spent specifically on design systems—partly because the discipline matured into something coherent enough to specialise in, and partly because it sits at the intersection of the things I find most interesting. Systems work sits between engineering, taste, and organisational psychology. It's the layer where design decisions become structural, where good judgement compounds, and where bad judgement compounds faster.

Nordlean is the studio version of this. It exists because most growth-stage teams need senior systems thinking and strategic judgement together, and that combination is hard to hire for in one full-time person. A defined engagement—three months, six months, however long the work takes—is often a better fit than a permanent senior hire.

The practice is principal-led on purpose. Buyers paying senior rates should be working with the person whose judgement they're paying for, not handed off to juniors. Specialist collaborators come in for specific scopes (engineering, motion, brand) when their depth adds something I can't provide. There's no agency layer above that.

If you're at a scaling B2B SaaS company and the design system is starting to creak, or product direction is the bottleneck, or both—that's the kind of work I'm built for.