About us
Poet & Scribe was founded in 2022 by Sandra Ibañez — senior quality specialist & product lead — and Jonathan Stephens — principal designer & product/tech director.
We work directly with your team, alongside agencies, or teaming with indie partners, depending on need.
What we do
We specialize in design operations and organizational leadership — whether you're establishing foundations, scaling what's working, or untangling what isn't.
Design systems
Fixing disjointed user interfaces? Improving internal efficiency? Building resilience into products? We've got your back.
We create all types of design systems that're comprehensive and clear, delivering compounding value to users & your bottom line.
Currently available for short-to-mid-term projects.
Organizational Leadership
We’ve worked in product development throughout our careers — from decades of scaling an international enterprise to consulting agencies, start-ups, and governments.
Each organization is unique, with their own rhythms of growth and scale. We focus on understanding your context, co-creating paths forward together.
If you’re looking for direction, scaling yourself, or scaling your team — we offer consultancy & coaching sessions to support you.
Can’t find what you need?
We’re happy to chat, even if the topic doesn't align exactly with what's listed above. We have breadth of skill & experience that can be put to use.
If we are unable to help,
Who we’ve worked with
We’ve built our careers working with digital product teams of diverse compositions & missions, including:
- Booking.com
- United States' Space Force
- Leantime.io
- Strategi Consulting
- Trailmarks HQ
- Smashing Boxes
Our approach
Poet & Scribe isn't just our name, it defines how we work.
Poets take what’s hard to express and find language for it. They're sense-makers of meaning, giving form to abstract thoughts & feeling.
Scribes preserve knowledge, translating it into collective memory. They're context-builders, shaping how humans gather & scale beyond any one individual's contribution.
Design leadership, is much of the same: translating research into strategy, strategy into systems, and systems into delivery practices — weaving alignment throughout.
We help teams build that capacity.
We work to understand where you’ve been, what you’ve learned, and what you’re actually trying to build. Then, we map potential paths to keep moving forward.
Guiding principles
If you want to work with disruptors, trend-setters, wand-wavers, rockstars, or thing-breakers — that's not us.
These are more us ↓
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Coalitions over competition. Collective power through intentional collaboration instead of individual genius.
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Spectrums over binaries. Context and gradation instead of either/or thinking.
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Curiosity over assumptions. Asking questions and staying open, seeking suitabke soltuons instead of prescribing answers.
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Care over exploitation. Protecting wellbeing and sustainability instead of maximizing extraction.
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Transparency over obscurity. Making decisions and processes visible instead of keeping them hidden.
Let’s talk
If you’re interested in the support we offer, we’d love to chat
Email us at: