Why Halaska has changed what Halaska hands over

For three years we've worked with founders in two ways.

Some came for a project. A brand, a website or a first version of a product, with a start and an end. We'd finish with a design system in Figma, components in code, some documentation and a walkthrough call.

Others kept us on month to month. We'd work alongside their team, iterating on the product until it reached a point worth calling done: a release, an MVP, a version they could raise on. Then we'd roll off, usually because they'd hired someone in-house, and move on to the next thing.

I've been watching what happens after both, and it's the same.

After a project, the files show what we decided. They don't say why, or what to do on a screen we never drew.

After a long engagement it's harder to spot, because we were there the whole time. The reasons existed. They were in my head, in Slack threads and in a hundred small calls made on the way to a release. When we rolled off, the new designer inherited the product without any of that. They'd do good work, and it would slowly become a different product.

This used to matter less. New screens got built slowly enough that someone noticed when one didn't fit. Now a founder can make a landing page before lunch, and an engineer can ship a new flow with an AI tool in an afternoon. I think that's a good thing. But each of those is a handful of small design decisions, made without the reasons behind the original ones.

Nobody did anything wrong. Both ways of working were built around our time, and the thinking left when we did.

So we've changed what we hand over.

You still get the brand, the product and the site. Alongside them you get the decisions: every rule we set, the reason for it and an example, kept in one place and written so your team and your AI tools can both work from it. We're calling it Halaska OS.

We've changed how the work runs too. We work in sprints now, each with one clear outcome. The system gets set up in the first one, so it fills in as we design. Nothing waits for a handover that keeps getting pushed back by the next release.

I should be honest about where this is. It's new. We're building it on our own studio first, rebuilding our brand and site through it, and I'll write up what works and what doesn't as we go.

If your team is already building with AI and the output doesn't feel like you, I'd like to hear what that looks like.