The Team
Independent product studio.
Small team, real systems.
Bobi Labs is an independent product studio, an LLC founded in 2025. PM-led, with a vetted bench of senior specialists brought in per engagement. We ship full-stack systems for founders and operators who need real software, not slideware. Built in two-week sprints, iterating until the work is actually done.
How we operate
Discover before you build.
Real user research, primary data, stakeholder interviews. We push back on premature feature requests until we understand what the system has to do.
Scope it before we start.
We pin down what ships, what's in, what's out, before the work begins. Pivots get scoped, not silently absorbed. Clarity protects the outcome and the timeline.
Build with leverage.
Small senior team. Modern stack (Next.js, Supabase, TypeScript). AI tooling where it earns its place. We ship at small-team pace without claiming to be a large agency.
Iterate or graduate.
End of a phase, you extend or take the work in-house with full documentation. We don't build dependency moats. Healthy projects ship and grow.
The team
Matthew Barta
Founder · PM-Builder · Sole point of contact · 16+ yrs
User-obsessed product manager with 16+ years across fintech, SaaS, enterprise non-profit, and blockchain. End-to-end ownership: discovery to launch, alignment to iteration. Builds full-stack code when the team is small and the work calls for it.
Sole client-facing point of contact on every engagement: calls, planning, weekly check-ins, deliveries. Specialist depth comes through the vetted bench below, but you only ever talk to Matthew.
- Product strategy: 16+ years across fintech, SaaS, enterprise non-profit, blockchain. PMC I-III, SAFe 5, CAL-T, AL-E. Roadmaps, discovery, phased engagement design.
- AI-augmented build: Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, Supabase, Tailwind. Ships full-stack systems with AI as a force multiplier.
- Studio operations: engagement design, scope discipline, phased delivery, weekly cadence.
- Specialty: PM-led builds where the spec is unclear and the team is small. Turning founder ideas into shipped software in focused phases.
Beyond Matthew, Bobi Labs runs on a vetted bench of senior specialists. They are brought in per engagement, per item, only when the work calls for their depth. That keeps client costs lean: you pay for the senior skill a phase actually needs, not a full roster sitting idle between them. The bench stays off client calls. Matthew is the single point of contact start to finish, so coordination never fragments across people.
Marcus
Senior Full-Stack Engineer · 8 yrs
Came up through startups. Joined a Series A fintech as engineer #4, stayed through a 40-person eng org, ran a small platform team for two years, then realized he missed shipping more than managing. Now contracting selectively. Lives for the messy 0-1 phase where the spec is three Slack messages and a Figma sketch, but has the scars to design for the version of the system that survives 100x growth.
- Backend depth: Go, TypeScript/Node, Python. Advanced Postgres (query plans, partitioning, RLS, materialized views).
- Distributed systems: event-driven architectures, Temporal/NATS, idempotent job pipelines, eventual-consistency tradeoffs.
- Infra & DevEx: AWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS), Terraform, GitHub Actions, OpenTelemetry/Grafana, cost optimization.
- Frontend: competent in React/Next.js, treats it as a delivery layer rather than craft.
- Specialty: turning vague product ideas into systems that don't collapse at scale. Technical due diligence. Legacy migration.
Nadia
Full-Stack Engineer · Product/design-eng · 4 yrs
Unconventional path: design school, a year at a creative tech studio building interactive marketing sites, then jumped into product engineering. Obsessed with perceived performance and the feel of an interaction. Will rebuild a button five times to get the easing right. Strong taste, not precious; ships fast and iterates faster.
- Frontend craft: React, Next.js (App Router), Tailwind, shadcn/ui, Framer Motion, GSAP, design tokens, accessibility.
- Prototyping velocity: Figma to deployed Vercel preview in an afternoon. Comfortable owning the design pass when no designer is around.
- Backend competence: Supabase, tRPC, Postgres (basic to intermediate), edge functions, lightweight API design.
- Tooling fluency: Figma at near-designer level. Motion design, Lottie, video and asset pipelines for marketing surfaces.
- Specialty: 0-1 product UX, onboarding flows, landing pages that convert, the demo that gets the round.
Priya
Senior QA / SDET · 7 yrs
Started in manual QA at a payments processor, where she learned the hard way that "looks right" and "is right" are very different statements when money moves. Self-taught her way into automation, then into a proper SDET role. Treats QA as a design discipline, best caught upstream in the requirements doc, not downstream in staging. Calm, deeply skeptical, asks the question everyone wishes they'd thought of.
- Test automation: Playwright (her weapon of choice), Cypress, Pytest, RSpec. Comfortable writing the framework, not just the tests.
- API & contract testing: Postman/Newman, Pact, REST Assured. Strong at boundary and negative cases.
- Performance & load: k6, Locust, Artillery. Reads flame graphs and APM traces.
- Exploratory testing: heuristics-driven, charter-based, risk-based session testing.
- Specialty: financial and transactional correctness, idempotency edge cases, reproducing the gnarly intermittent bug everyone else gave up on. Builds test-data factories and ephemeral environments.
Lukas
Database Engineer · 10 yrs
German, ex-Oracle DBA who saw the light around Postgres 9.4 and never looked back. Spent four years at a logistics company babysitting a multi-TB OLTP cluster, then went independent. Has the rare ability to talk to both the application team and the storage team without translation loss. Strong opinions about JSONB, weak opinions about ORMs, and a quietly held belief that 80% of "we need to scale horizontally" is "we need a better index."
- PostgreSQL deep: query planner, EXPLAIN ANALYZE, partitioning, logical replication, WAL tuning, vacuum strategy, RLS.
- Adjacent stacks: TimescaleDB (time-series), Citus (sharding), pgBouncer/PgCat, pg_stat_statements + auto_explain.
- Schema design: normalization tradeoffs, event-sourced and append-only models, migration strategy at scale.
- Cloud DBs: AWS RDS/Aurora, Supabase, GCP Cloud SQL. Backup/restore, PITR, DR drills.
- Specialty: rescuing slow production databases at 2am, designing schemas that survive product pivots, data modeling for financial and audit-trail correctness.
Esi
Platform / SRE Engineer · 6 yrs
Ghanaian-British, came up through a fintech SRE rotation, then platform engineering at a B2B SaaS during their scale-out years. Sees herself as a force multiplier: her job is to make everyone else faster and safer. Believes "you build it, you run it" only works if the platform team has made running it humane. Carries a pager without resentment and runs blameless postmortems with real teeth.
- IaC & orchestration: Terraform, Pulumi, Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD.
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Buildkite. Progressive delivery (canary, blue-green), feature-flag platforms.
- Observability: OpenTelemetry, Grafana stack, Datadog, structured logging discipline, SLO design.
- Cloud: AWS-primary (EKS, VPC design, IAM, cost controls), comfortable on GCP. Secrets management (Vault, AWS SM).
- Specialty: zero-to-prod platform setup for new products, incident response and on-call hygiene, cost optimization without slowing teams down.
Founder background
Sixteen years in product management before founding Bobi Labs. Track record relevant to contract engagements:
Founder · PM-Builder
Bobi Labs LLC
Founded the studio to formalize independent contract work. Concurrent engagements as PM lead and builder.
Product Manager
Neon One
Led the end-to-end overhaul of Giving Days (+15% engagement). Championed Chariot DAFpay integration. Modernized a legacy non-profit fundraising platform.
Product Manager
Solana Sanctuary
On-chain DAO tools, blockchain backend services, KYC protocols. Helped 15+ NFT communities reclaim and rebuild their digital infrastructure.
Project Manager → PMO Lead
Concora Credit (formerly Genesis Financial)
Built the Project Management Office from the ground up across PM, PO, BA, Scrum Master, SQA, Ops roles. Reduced sprint spillover by 30%. Led enterprise modernization of core lending systems.
Want to see if we're a fit?
60-minute call. We listen to what you're building, what's blocking, what your team can't get to. If we're a fit, we'll tell you how we'd approach it.