a designer's workflow.
a founding product engineer with a designer's workflow: vision, build and iterate, end to end. unparty.app is the proof, built by one person working the way a team does. this is that work, measured, next to teams who build the same kind of thing.
vision. what it should do and how it should feel, decided first.
build. design and code in one pass: issues in, pull requests out.
iterate. measured, then changed, until it holds.
one person, at a small team's pace.
the months. since august 2026, when unparty's work moved into pull requests.
team size. the number beside each name is how many people did the work: 5 or more merged pull requests each.
what's counted. merged pull requests, added up. their size differs from repo to repo.
the site runs on its own content. every page is one editorial system, so a new page is data, not new layout.
nothing required up front. a copy runs with no accounts and no database.
where the hours go now.
the roles, as companies hire for them in 2026.
fractional. a part-time technical lead for founders, often $8–25K a month.
the role everyone's hiring. forward deployed engineers embed with a company to put AI to work in its systems. postings grew about eightfold in a year (techcrunch, cnbc).
the same skills, pointed smaller. most small businesses can't hire one. unparty is the delivered version: a whole product, built that way, that its owner keeps.
why it may become the norm. when one person with AI ships at a small team's pace, a product can be delivered instead of staffed.
solo, so far. these roles look for work with others: reviews, a product partner, a client. that's the next thing to show.
the sources. mostly job boards and recruiters, so the pay and demand figures are rough ranges, not facts.
the comparison: merged pull requests from GitHub, measured 2026-11-05 (npm run measure:comparisons)