SkillsFrame
Career intelligence for senior professionals.
Live · paying users · Stripe-integrated career intelligence.
Match score87%
“Senior operator who ships AI products.”
● Open for Q3Founded 2026
BlackBear
Small batch. Serious craft.
Milan · Barcelona
A senior product team that ships— Q2 2026
— BlackBear Studio
We design, build, and operate AI-native products.
Built to ship, not to pitch.
Currently building Glacier (private beta) and Ambrogio. SkillsFrame live with paying users.
- Stellantis
- Ferrari
- Prada
- Vodafone
- Edison
- Springer Nature
- Status.im
- Gitcoin
— What we ship
Products we own & operate.
Every product is ours — designed, built, and run in-house. No client work, no handoffs.
Glacier
AI-native workspace for technical teams.
MCP-first · invited beta · on-premise option for enterprise.
Backlog
Auth integration
Dashboard v2
In progress
MCP connector
Search API
Done
Initial setup
NanaShift
Shift management that runs on WhatsApp.
WhatsApp-native scheduling · no app install · in build.
N
NanaShift BotHi Rosa! You’re scheduled Tue 08:00–16:00. Confirm?
Yes, confirmed ✓Marco requested a swap on Thursday. Accept?
Sure, works for meAmbrogio
Your AI butler for marketing and growth.
WhatsApp-delivered morning brief · Claude API · in build.
A
AmbrogioBuongiorno. Here is your Monday brief.
● Urgent — Competitor launched new pricing. Summary ready.
● Reddit · 142 upvotes — Thread on r/ExperiencedDevs. Draft reply ready.
Approve allReviewA studio, not an agency.
Every product starts with AI as infrastructure, not feature.
BlackBear is a permanent core of senior builders — direct access to the people who build, no layers, no handoffs, no account managers.
We move fast because we build with discipline — test-driven, lean, and AI-accelerated. Each product starts small, ships early, and earns its way to scale.
Small batch. Serious craft. That’s not a tagline — it’s how we operate.
— How we build
Explore. Build. Operate.
One loop. Three modes. Same team end-to-end.
01 — Explore
Find the real problem.
We start with the problem, not the solution. Deep domain research, fast prototyping, and direct access to the people who'll use it.
02 — Build
Ship early, iterate fast.
Test-driven, lean, and AI-accelerated. We ship early, get real feedback, and iterate fast — without accumulating debt.
03 — Operate
Stay with what we ship.
We stay with what we ship. Monitoring, support, and continuous improvement — not just a handoff.
— How a typical engagement runs
| Week 0 | Discovery call | 30-min conversation. Frame the problem. No commitment. |
| Week 1 | Problem framing | Deep dive on the actual problem behind the brief. Ends with a written framing doc. Go/no-go decision. |
| Week 2–4 | First shippable build | Smallest version that earns feedback. Test-driven, lean. Real users from day 1. |
| Week 5–12 | Iterate with users | Weekly ship cadence. Demo every other Friday. Direct user feedback loop. |
| Ongoing | Operate | Monitoring, support, continuous improvement. We stay with what we ship. |
This is a default shape — every engagement adapts. Some compress to 4 weeks total, some run 6 months. The shape stays the same; the duration follows the problem.
— How we think
Principles we actually follow.
I.
Validate first.
Every product starts as an experiment with real users before any significant investment.
II.
Test-driven by default.
TDD, continuous integration, collective code ownership. We ship fast because we build with discipline.
III.
Flow over ceremonies.
Kanban, WIP limits, pull systems. No standups for the sake of standups.
IV.
AI-accelerated.
Claude Code as primary dev tool. Specialized sub-agents for code review, test generation, and exploration.
V.
Kill early.
Ideas that don't earn the right to continue get killed. No sunk cost attachment.
— Who builds
Who builds.
Diego Franciosi
Co-Founder · Builder
Twenty years teaching teams how to ship. Now I build the tools I wish those teams had.
Led transformation programs for Stellantis, Ferrari, Prada, Vodafone. ICF PCC coach. Designs product strategy at BlackBear.
Andrea Franz
Co-Founder · Builder
Twenty years building production software. The systems behind every BlackBear product.
Engineering Lead at Gitcoin. Distributed systems at Status.im. Open source tools with thousands of GitHub stars. Production code in Go, Ruby, Elixir, TypeScript.
Based in Milan & BarcelonaFounded January 2026
— Journal
Thinking in public.
What we think while we ship.
Build notes, manifestos, retros.
Last shipped 6 days ago — glacier
— Latest
Ship log.
What shipped, when. Updated as we go.
Apr 28, 2026glacierGlacier v0.8 "Threshold" — auth courtesy page + persistent diagrams
Apr 28, 2026nanashiftNanaShift v0.1 — orgs, shifts, WhatsApp keyword loop, lifecycle scheduler
Apr 22, 2026glacierGlacier v0.7 "Sketch" — mermaid diagrams in docs
Apr 20, 2026ambrogioAmbrogio v0.4 — stability and polish
Apr 16, 2026glacierGlacier v0.6 "Dialogue" — annotations and inline suggestions
— Follow the build
We ship
in public.
Follow BlackBear on LinkedIn, or reach out if you want to talk.