digital products
Anyone can ship an app. Making people keep it is the hard part. We start with your brand and the people who will use it. Then we build the product that earns its place on their home screen, and keeps living after launch.
Three sentences are enough. Our product team takes a first look and shares custom insights, drawn from our industry expertise. No form. No cost.
clients
We believe an innovative mind is shaped by breaking out of a single perspective. That’s why we love working with clients from early stage to late stage.
About
Rooftop is a strategy, design and engineering studio in Berlin and San Francisco. We decide what to build, then design, engineer and run it as one team: web apps, mobile apps, platforms and companion apps for products people actually hold. Small, senior, independent. The people you meet are the people who do the work: one senior team from the first thought on, and nobody hands you over. Less friction, less overhead, a stronger outcome.
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Building the best product.
A product launches once. It has to be opened every day after. What decides whether it works isn’t the launch. It’s the depth of research, data, behaviour, culture, design, performance and tech that sets you apart. So we build every product in one holistic workflow of five movements. The first one is always Think, and it brings all disciplines together.
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It starts with what no backlog can hold.
You arrive with an idea, or a product that has grown into a maze. We start with what no backlog can hold: your brand, the people who will use the product, and what would make them open it for years.
Then we re:think it against reality.
A vision, the result of Think, waiting to be proven. Before we design the first screen, we test it against reality: user research, PoC and MVP definition, business and pricing model, technical feasibility, roadmap and budget, each done by a specialist.
Then we make it real enough to test.
Within 3 weeks, the same team that shaped and validated your vision starts crafting your product, and you hold a testable version of it, not a deck about it. Every design decision is rooted in a strategic foundation backed by numbers, engineered to communicate your DNA and your product KPIs, not to decorate.
Then the same people engineer it, for version two, not for the demo.
No handover. The team that thinks, decides and designs also engineers the product: web and mobile, scalable architecture and APIs, LLM and data integration, cloud and CI/CD.
Launch is a release, not an ending.
Most agencies leave at launch. We stay, if you want us to.
When a brand truly connects with its users, it creates an emotional bond. That bond is the bedrock for growth. Combining it with the cutting-edge technical experience from our custom projects is what we stand for.
What you can hold us to
ai in the product
AI belongs in the product. Not as a chatbot.
Since 2025, every roadmap has an AI feature on it. Most of them are a chat window bolted onto a product that had nothing to say. Where language, generation or agents genuinely improve the experience, they change what a product can be. Whether yours works has little to do with the model. It comes down to your data and your judgement.
What changed
1 in 3
brands will damage their customer experience this year with premature GenAI bots, because nobody decided what the bot is for.
Aug 2026
since then, assistants must disclose that they’re machines and generated media must carry machine-readable labels.
3 numbers
every AI feature we ship has to report: what it answers, how often it’s wrong, what it costs.
The best feature is the one you didn’t have to build. Execution keeps getting faster; the leverage moved to judgement: what to build, what to leave out, how it should feel. That’s the part we’re paid for.
Every new trend brings out new experts, including some who have never shipped a product. We’d rather bring clarity: a first read of your product idea is free, and it’s honest.
The Vogue Innovation Conference needed to live beyond the room. The decision: turn it into a digital ecosystem, built for the people in the hall and the ones who weren’t.
talk
Tell us what you’re building. Three sentences are enough. Our product team takes a first look at the idea, the users and the numbers, then tells you what a product lead would ask.
Ask us anything ↗