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Senior web & app development · 20 capabilities
oakstone.digital
Oakstone / team

Small enough to care. Senior enough to matter.

A distributed group of strategists, designers and engineers who would rather solve the hard version of the problem.

Jonathan Miller — Founder & Strategy at Oakstone

Jonathan Miller

Founder & Strategy

Founded Oakstone in 2017. Turns ambiguous commercial problems into briefs engineers can act on, and writes the diagnostic himself.

Ethan Harrison — Design & Content at Oakstone

Ethan Harrison

Design & Content

Design systems, interface states and the discipline of writing what a buyer actually needs to read.

Ryan Collins — Engineering at Oakstone

Ryan Collins

Engineering

Platform and data engineering. Believes the schema outlives every screen above it.

Thomas Mitchell — Commerce at Oakstone

Thomas Mitchell

Commerce

Storefronts, migrations and checkout work for merchants who count conversion daily.

Nicholas Scott — Platform at Oakstone

Nicholas Scott

Platform

Hosting, performance, accessibility and security — the work that keeps value from decaying.

In more detail

Who you actually
end up working with.

Two to four of these people will be on your engagement from the diagnostic through to handover. Nobody is swapped out once the proposal is signed.

Jonathan Miller

New York·with Oakstone since 2017

Deep in
DiagnosticsPositioning for build teamsMeasurement plans

Founded Oakstone in 2017 and still writes diagnostics rather than delegating them. Fifteen years turning ambiguous commercial problems into briefs engineers can act on, first in-house at two B2B software companies and then across forty-odd engagements here.

Something recent

Wrote the diagnostic that turned a requested rebuild into a nine-week navigation and content restructure, at a fifth of the cost the client had budgeted.

Ethan Harrison

London·with Oakstone since 2017

Deep in
Design systemsInterface statesContent architecture

Product design for complex tools, with a particular interest in the unglamorous work of making dense information legible under real conditions rather than in a case study screenshot. Also owns message hierarchy, because structure and copy fail together.

Something recent

Rebuilt a clinical intake flow around the states nobody demos — offline, partial, permission-denied — and cut abandonment by a third.

Ryan Collins

London·with Oakstone since 2018

Deep in
Platform architectureData modellingIntegration design

Platform and data engineering across finance and health systems. Believes the schema outlives every screen above it, and argues for that position early enough to matter.

Something recent

Designed the integration layer that let a client retire two internal systems without a big-bang migration weekend.

Thomas Mitchell

New York·with Oakstone since 2020

Deep in
Commerce buildsReplatformingCheckout and payments

Storefronts and migrations for merchants who count conversion daily, including three replatforms that moved without losing a single indexed URL.

Something recent

Ran a peak-season migration with a rehearsed cutover and a rollback nobody needed to use.

Nicholas Scott

Remote / Bristol·with Oakstone since 2019

Deep in
PerformanceAccessibilitySecurity and hosting

The work that keeps value from decaying: Core Web Vitals, WCAG 2.2 conformance, dependency hygiene and the boring hosting decisions that stop being boring at three in the morning.

Something recent

Took a marketing site from a failing Core Web Vitals assessment to passing on every page type, and wired the checks into CI so it stays that way.

How the team is run

Three rules we
do not bend.

01

The person who writes it, builds it

The senior who writes your diagnostic leads the delivery. It is the single rule that keeps recommendations honest, because nobody wants to inherit a promise they would not have made.

02

No pyramid

There is no junior layer funded by your project. That caps how many engagements we run at once, which is a constraint we accept rather than solve by hiring quickly.

03

Hired for judgement

We hire people who have shipped the thing more than once and who will say when the honest answer is smaller than the brief. Then we give them the context to make real decisions.

Small on purpose,
not on the way to big.

There is no junior layer being funded by your project and no account manager between you and the people doing the work. The person who writes the diagnostic is the person who leads the build, and they stay until the handover is signed off.

That limits how many engagements we can run at once — four to six, deliberately — which is a constraint we accept rather than solve by hiring quickly. When capacity is genuinely full we will tell you the date we can start rather than staff an engagement badly to fill a slot.

Specialists in accessibility, security and data join for the stages that need them and step off when they do not, so an engagement carries the depth it needs without paying for a standing capability it uses twice.

See how we hireHow the work runs
A better brief starts here

Ready to make the next move obvious?

Bring us the hard thing. We will bring a point of view, a senior team and a clear next step.

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