Product design studio · Pacific Northwest
Zero-to-one products born from curiosity — the kind of idea you stumble onto talking with family at the dinner table, then can't stop building. We turn private hunches into things the world can actually use. Three are in flight right now.
Pick one to dive into its story.
We're a small group of product people out of the Fortune 500 zero-to-one world — B2C, B2B, and cloud. The kind of work that starts as a hunch and ends up in the hands of millions.
Kinatus is where our own curiosities get to grow up. Every idea here began as a real conversation with someone we love: a frustration, a "wouldn't it be nice," a problem we watched a friend wrestle with.
We don't trust decks to tell us if something works. You learn nothing from deliberation — you learn everything from people actually using the thing. So we build to learn, and release in the wild.
And every so often, someone we trust asks us to help someone they care about. That's the only kind of design and strategy consulting we take on.
A second mind for your ideas.
Creative people don't lose ideas because they're careless — they lose them because ideas arrive faster than memory can hold. Ardhanarishvara reads your own files and remembers for you: the half-thoughts, the references, the thing you wrote at 2am and forgot by morning.
Then it does the harder thing. It connects them — surfacing the thread between two notes you never linked, offering an abstraction you hadn't reached, reflecting your thinking back so you can see its true shape. Named for the form that is two halves of one whole: your mind, and its mirror.
Where AI transformation actually lands.
More than 70% of digital transformations fail on the people, not the technology.
Gartner reports over 40% of AI adoption projects get cancelled for the same reason: no real plan, no defensible ROI. Suncadia is for the people on the hook to deliver — systems integrators, program leads, planners. It helps them quantify the benefit and stand up agentic workloads with productivity gains an executive can actually defend.
Not replacing the workforce. Building the mechanisms for people to govern it: clear human-in-the-loop workflows, honest numbers, shared accountability. AI does the work; humans hold the wheel.
Turning small consumers into small creators.
Watch a kid in a restaurant or the back seat today. Five idle minutes and they reach for a screen to be fed content. We wanted to know: could the same screen make them the storyteller instead?
Spin-a-yarn is a COPPA-compliant iPad and iPhone app where kids invent — solo, or with friends and family. They build characters and worlds, make ridiculous voices, and spin stories. When they get stuck, the AI nudges — it never takes over. Every story they finish, a little more confidence.
The dream is simple: next time your kid asks for your phone, you find them giggling at a world they made themselves.
The best products begin as a personal frustration, not a market study. If we don't care about it, we don't build it.
A rough thing in someone's hands tells us more in a day than a quarter of deliberation. Time is the budget we can't refill.
"Automagical" is a promise on both sides: it should delight the person using it, and hold up under the hood.
We stay small on purpose — close to the craft, and close to the people the work is for.
I write about doing meaningful work inside big companies — and take a few people for one-on-one coaching when I have room.
We take on a small handful of product design and strategy projects a year, and only one way in: someone we trust asks us to help someone they want to help. If that's how you found your way here, we'd love to talk.
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