Our approach to product strategy is as close as you can come to idea insurance. We leave no stone unturned when shaping product strategy, asking the right questions so you can be confident that what you’re putting out there achieves your goals as a business.

Of all the ideas in the world, why this one, and why now? Our dedicated Product Strategists ask the right questions to develop a clear objective so you can be sure that your product fulfills the specific goals of your business.

Most product roadmaps are overwhelming — they commit you to more work than you can chew. But your time is a precious resource. We help you prioritize your most impactful work, so that your investment is worthwhile.

We developed our product strategy offering after years of experience shipping work as designers and developers. We help our partners define success before investing in hours of design iterations, saving you both money and headaches.

Cocoon is defining the future of modern childcare. We worked to develop an e-commerce booking platform, Shopify app, and marketing site for their digital launch.

The result is a brand-new online presence, including a bespoke visual identity, Sanity Studio CMS, and Shopify app for back-end booking management—resulting in millions in memberships and bookings processed since launch.

We help our clients approach their product decisions with confidence, knowing they’ve chosen the right strategy, for the right audience, at the right time.

We’re not a traditional agency, and we don’t act like one. Our transparent process and flexible toolkit allow us to work just like an in-house product team.

Helping our clients bring the best possible product into the world.

Product Strategy

Your team is laser-focused on growing a business in today’s digital world. But your product needs love and maintenance to sustain that growth and the team is spread too thin to hire and onboard an in-house design team.

We embed our team with yours, working as closely and precisely as the in-house team you’d hire if you could. Together we form a tight-knit, coordinated effort to steward ideas from hunch, to definition, to production.

We can’t read your stakeholders’ minds. But by investing in the relationship between your people and ours, our dedicated Product Strategists cultivate comprehensive understandings of how to leverage future products to meet your business goals.

Our Product Designers take close direction from your team’s creative leadership, leveraging existing design systems and pushing work to prototypes and demos for approval.

In the end, your product needs to work well and look like it works well. When you work with Hydro, you’re gaining an expert product team with a finger on the pulse of contemporary culture and commerce. We bring a keen sense of color, typography and interaction to our work, which means fewer iterations before your product is ready for today’s consumers.

Cocoon is defining the future of modern childcare. We created an e-commerce booking platform, Shopify app, and marketing site for their digital launch.

Embedded teaming means you’ll always have us in your corner.

All the alignment of an in-house team, with none of the time spent hiring.

Embedded Teaming

As our world becomes more and more digital, we need products that promote clarity, accessibility, and fairness for users across demographics.

At Manhattan Hydraulics, we specialize in transforming complex problems into tactical product solutions for digital platforms of all shapes, sizes and scales.

What does it mean to bring a new product into the world today? Our dedicated product strategists ask the right questions in order to anticipate the needs of an ever-evolving culture, setting us up to design products with longevity and purpose in today’s — and tomorrow’s — market.

Product architecture is idealism manifest. Our designers build your vision into every choice a user makes, creating experiences that are intuitive, fluid, and precise.

A great product is more than a simple series of clicks or taps. Our designers are deeply entrenched in the semiotics and aesthetics of typography, color, and art direction, and we bring all of that together with products that look as nice as they work.

Swell needed a fresh documentation site to help developers power their e-commerce sites with Swell. 

We designed a powerful documentation site with an integrated search that helps developers find what they need quickly.

We design product experiences that make the world more navigable, beautiful, and accessible for all.

Designing interfaces and experiences with bold impact and deep care.

User Experience and Interface Design

The first marketing website, e-commerce booking platform, and Shopify app for Cocoon, the premier destination for families in NYC

Family’s second home in Tribeca

Cocoon

A fresh documentation site to help developers power their e-commerce sites with 

Documentation site for self-starting entrepreneurs

Swell

Black Socialists in America (BSA) is “a coalition of anti-capitalist, internationalist Black Americans / New Afrikans“. They came to us with a vision of a socialist platform for cooperative organizations that helps individuals create self-sustaining systems of economic democracy.

We worked with them to clarify their product strategy, define an overall vision, and define processes for designing with their community. The result is a platform that empowers individuals to organize, and accomplish change together.

The Dual Power App allows people to connect with other individuals, initiatives, and organizations in their community, creating decentralized groups centered around a particular value or goal.

These working groups provide structure to propose and execute projects. The app gives users access to essential infrastructures, making organizing, voting, and action easier.

BSA wasn’t looking for a typical agency, and didn’t like the traditional model of work where one group dictates what another might need.

We proposed an open design and build initiative, to document the process publicly and gather feedback, involving BSA’s community every step of the way. Every workshop recording is available below, with the accompanying Figma files.

With BSA, we’re designing the next generation of open and accessible organizing tools to mobilize progressives around the globe.

Since our first engagement, we’ve continued embedding with their team to build a new digital design system, sharing every step along the way here.

A refined product vision for a democratic digital organizing platform

A new platform for grassroots organizations, dedicated to building a directly democratic, ecologically sustainable, post-scarcity community and economy through mutual aid

The strategic foundations of the Dual-Power App, presently being develop as an open-source project by the BSA Open Tech Development community

Outcome

Product strategy, product design, organizational design

Role

Self-sustaining cooperative organization platform

Black Socialists in America

A streamlined map-based purchase interface for a premium carbon offset marketplace

Carbon offset marketplace

Hudson Carbon

Cocoon is a social and learning club in NYC that offers holistic, expert-led programming to help parents navigate family life. Hydro collaborated with Cocoon's founders on a comprehensive e-commerce website, including a redesigned brand identity.

The flexible design system and robust CMS tools allow Cocoon to present their memberships and hundreds of offerings clearly for their audience of caretakers and families.

The visual identity takes its inspiration from Cocoon’s Tribeca, NYC community hub, creating a cohesive ecosystem evoking a child-like wonder of discovery and creativity.

Cocoon came to us with a vision of selling hundreds, if not thousands, of bookable offerings for families: recurring events, one-off events, space tours, parkour classes, private birthday parties, and much more. Family life can be hectic and caregivers don’t need another thing to juggle, so our goal was to make the simplest, easiest tool possible.

We designed a flexible information architecture to support their diverse line-up, and enable a user-friendly e-commerce experience. The booking features make it fun to find the perfect offerings for one’s family, book events and courses without hassle, and manage activity schedules in one convenient place.

Managing a fast-growing business is hard; managing a booking-based business is even more challenging. Through market research, we found that most existing bookings platforms are clunky, and lack the flexibility and customization that Cocoon needed for all of their various offerings.

Instead of compromising on ease or features, we built our own Shopify App for high-growth businesses. Shopify Bookings takes away the headaches of managing e-commerce products, bookings, and resources, and will be available soon in the Shopify marketplace.

As we built out their web products, Cocoon realized that their design system was limited—they had an abundance of offerings and their visual identity needed to be flexible enough to support all of it.

We created a new visual identity to bring Cocoon's story to life, using an earthy color palette, a careful selection of open-source typefaces and a set of energetic illustrations made in collaboration with illustrator Ohni Lisle. Together these elements evoke the same warmth, liveliness, and play embodied in Cocoon's Tribeca headquarters.

Our initial work with Cocoon has helped them sell millions of dollars in memberships and bookings thus far. Now, they’re expanding to a second location to help families across New York City live happy and healthy lives. We continue to partner with Cocoon—collaborating with their founders to build on this strong foundation as the business and community grow, change, and learn.

An e-commerce booking platform, Shopify app, and marketing site to bring Cocoon to the public for the very first time

A brand-new digital presence, including a bespoke visual identity, Sanity Studio CMS, and Shopify app for back-end booking management—resulting in millions in memberships and bookings processed since launch

Product strategy, product design, branding

Swell is a headless e-commerce company that gives developers, agencies, and merchants around the world the tools and infrastructure to sell on the internet the way they want. We worked with them to design and build a documentation site that sets a new standard for documentation sites everywhere, containing all the tools and information developers need to start tinkering, implementing, and troubleshooting their ideas. Since then, we’ve continued our partnership to build tools, community features, and user-specific features to come.

Swell’s documentation needed updating, spread across disparate platforms. Our team’s first task was to complete a comprehensive audit of all existing materials and those from competitors, partnering closely with the Swell team to workshop this into a user-friendly information architecture.

Our search experience balances speed and exploration to help developers quickly find what they need while encouraging users to discover new content. In order to do so, we researched the best open-source search and analytics options in the business with our development partners at Sanctuary Computer.

Concepts from the documentation are tied to glossary and search results, helping our users develop links between complex concepts—literally and figuratively.

Swell collaborated with Faculty to create a new brand identity. We extended Faculty’s work and designed a documentation site that balances warmth and utility. The fresh look sets Swell apart from competitors in a sea of highly-technical products. Light and dark mode allows users to customize their experience based on their viewing preference—especially those that might be working with these documents at length.

We designed the site just as developers would approach it—building components into a modular design system that would serve as the foundation for our tailored and scalable CMS. This design system has served as the foundation for all our subsequent work with Swell, flexing based on our needs while keeping the brand universally aligned.

A fresh documentation site to help developers power their e-commerce sites with Swell

A powerful documentation site with an integrated search that helps developers find what they need quickly

Hudson Carbon is a mission-driven organization researching regenerative farming for climate change mitigation. They study how regenerative farming can maximize carbon capture, and sell carbon offsets directly to users from organic farms.

They had initial designs for their carbon-offset purchasing system, but it lacked clarity, and didn't work well on smaller devices. We designed a streamlined, cohesive experience that unified their desktop and mobile experiences.

Visualizing the impact of regenerative farming

While carbon offset markets are becoming more common, their tangible value is often unclear. We created an interface that makes the explicit connection between land parcels used for regenerative farming and the carbon offset by this land. 

When a user selects a parcel of land, they can see exactly how much carbon is offset by the plants grown there. By purchasing this parcel, they reward these ecological practices, further incentivizing farmers to pursue regenerative practices. 

The interface makes the scale of users’ environmental impact understandable in simple terms. They may also share more about their lifestyles to receive a more customized estimate. 

A novel design solution for selecting parcels of land and calculating carbon offsets

A unique, easy to use, map-based purchase interface for a premium carbon offset marketplace

Geneva is the only chat app that bring your digital world into the physical, empowering people to find likeminded communities in their cities.

 for Geneva with XXIX, with redefined positioning, and a new marketing site that demonstrates how flexible, actionable, and inclusive a chat app can be. It’s where your worlds can talk together.

Geneva is a chat app that can flex to the needs of any community. You can find whatever you’re into, wherever you are. We feature content from flagship Groups across cities right on the landing page.

While the landing experience demonstrates the emotional impact of Geneva’s ability to host a space where anyone can belong, the About page outlines the functional details of the app that makes it all happen. Visitors can get into the finer details of the powerhouse features that make Geneva so flexible with in-context examples of how they work in the app. We center the real people, friends, and communities that makes Geneva special, while creating a venue for the feature set to shine.

Groups are where the magic happens on Geneva. The Discovery experience on Geneva’s site works as a showcase for that magic. Users can quickly find their people via filtering by city and topic, and are immediately met with new opportunities, connections, and fresh starts. It’s a simple, yet hard-working system that makes discovery a seamless process that guides you right into the conversation on Geneva.

Geneva weaves together the digital and the physical via community conversations in the app that turn into IRL hangs. We use product UI across the marketing site as branded moments to showcase how real-life groups connect in Geneva. It’s an own-able and instantly recognizable way to show how intimately connected the URL is to the IRL.

The system of product UI allows us to create a layer of context that can represent different Groups’ topic, location, and personality. We’ve found that there are endless ways to translate this context layer in touchpoints, like out-of-home marketing or social face filters. Geneva meets you where you are.

A strategic brand refresh and new marketing site to promote discoverability and exploration.

A strategic refresh of the brand and new marketing site to promote discoverability and exploration. 

A rich and playful brand identity that utilizes elements from the product along with an expressive website experience that heroes individuals that use Geneva every day. 

Website design, brand strategy, brand identity

An app for groups for whatever you're into, wherever you are.

Geneva

Google

Hinge

Stripe

Pinterest

Workmade

MTTR

Zapata Computing

Aplós

Ironman Group

Magic Leap

Welcome to Chinatown

We’re here to make things that work. You can expect a beautiful and intuitive experience that performs, but more than that, you can expect a living, breathing digital product that allows you to learn on the fly, with a team that will help you adapt with the times.

Hydraulics works with XXIX and Sanctuary Computer to create digital products and web experiences of all scales. Whether you've got a napkin sketch or a successful product at scale, we'll help you launch a simple, intuitive experience.

Hydraulics turns complex ideas 
into tactical product solutions.

We’re a small team of product designers and strategists collaborating on outsized work. Our diverse backgrounds in library science, museum technology, data visualization, community building, and organization design inform how we approach product design, and make our conversations more interesting. 

You can find us working out of Index day-in and day-out, our community space and education center. Drop in for a coffee at 120 Walker in Manhattan next time you’re in the city.

Index

With XXIX, Sanctuary Computer, Seaborne, Index, and more, we make up garden3d, striving to make the best work humanly possible. Our unique organization allows us to stay agile while providing the impact of a full-service agency.

garden3d

We’re a small team of product designers and strategists collaborating on outsized work. Our diverse backgrounds in library science, museum technology, data visualization, community building, and organization design inform how we approach product design, and make our conversations more interesting.