You may not need a technical department. You may still need the expertise.
Most small businesses will never employ a backend engineer, UX designer, security reviewer, infrastructure specialist, data engineer, integrations specialist, and email deliverability expert. But a business may still need one or more of those capabilities at the right moment.
Start with what the business needs.
The technical discipline comes second. We look at the situation first, then determine which capabilities may be useful.
You don't hire the team. We assemble the capabilities the problem requires.
A simple project may need only one discipline. A more complex one may involve several. The goal is to use the right combination rather than add people or technology that the project does not need.
Business need
Start with the challenge, opportunity, workflow, or outcome the business is trying to address.
Identify disciplines
Determine which technical, design, review, data, or specialist capabilities are relevant.
Apply the right roles
Bring those specialties into the work only where their contribution adds value.
Human oversight
Business direction, priorities, approvals, and responsibility for outcomes remain human-led.
The purpose of this model is to give a small-business project access to the expertise it needs at the moment it needs it, without pretending every project requires a full technical department.
Specialized roles for different parts of the problem.
The core team covers the disciplines most often needed when SMG is planning, designing, building, testing, reviewing, and operating technology for a business. Not every project uses every role.
Mara Ellison
Mara turns larger ideas into structured technical work. She helps define what needs to be built, how the pieces fit together, and which specialists should be involved.
Complex ideas can be broken into a realistic plan before time and money are spent building the wrong thing.
Rafael Mendes
Rafael works on the server-side systems behind applications: business logic, databases, APIs, permissions, automation, queues, and other core platform behavior.
Repetitive processes, disconnected systems, and custom business rules can be turned into reliable workflows.
Sofia Marin
Sofia turns defined workflows and designs into the interfaces people actually use — dashboards, forms, tables, navigation, responsive screens, and interactive application behavior.
Internal systems and customer-facing tools can become easier to use instead of forcing people to work around poor interfaces.
Nina Park
Nina focuses on how people understand and move through a system — information architecture, workflows, interaction patterns, responsive behavior, and accessibility.
A tool can be designed around the people using it instead of expecting employees or customers to adapt to confusing software.
Quinn Mercer
Quinn independently checks whether the work actually behaves as intended, including regressions, edge cases, failure conditions, permissions, and negative paths.
Problems can be found before customers or employees discover them in production.
Victor Hale
Victor independently reviews sensitive technical work, focusing on authentication, permissions, data exposure, validation, secrets, logging, and implementation risk.
Security-sensitive decisions receive a separate review instead of depending only on the person or role that built the feature.
Elena Varga
Elena focuses on the environment where applications run: deployments, server configuration, connectivity, backups, release validation, rollback planning, and runtime reliability.
A useful system also has to stay available, deploy safely, and recover when something goes wrong.
The team structure lets SMG involve the disciplines that add value to a particular business problem while leaving unnecessary complexity out of the engagement.
Additional expertise, only when the work calls for it.
Some needs are highly specialized. These roles are brought into projects when email deliverability, analytics, reporting, APIs, or third-party integrations require deeper attention.
Dante Romero
Dante focuses on the technical systems required for reliable commercial email delivery, including authentication, sending domains, reputation, bounce handling, complaints, unsubscribe mechanics, and provider requirements.
Email campaigns are more useful when messages reach customers reliably and the sending setup follows good technical and compliance practices.
Iris Chen
Iris focuses on how operational and product information is structured, measured, checked, and reported — including analytics contracts, data quality, usage metrics, reporting, and tenant-safe data structures.
Instead of collecting data simply because it exists, reporting can focus on information that actually helps the business understand performance and make decisions.
Theo Bennett
Theo specializes in connecting applications with external platforms through APIs, webhooks, credentials, retries, idempotency, rate-limit handling, and failure recovery.
Existing systems can work together more effectively, reducing duplicate data entry and helping information move automatically between the tools a business already uses.
Plan. Build. Test. Review. Release.
Specialized roles matter, but so does how the work moves between them. The process separates planning, implementation, independent validation, sensitive review, and production release rather than treating everything as one undifferentiated task.
Define the work
Clarify the business need, technical direction, dependencies, and what successful implementation should accomplish.
Implement the solution
The relevant engineering and specialist roles work within their disciplines to build the required functionality.
Validate independently
Check requirements, regressions, failure conditions, permissions, and edge cases before release.
Examine sensitive risk
Security-sensitive work receives additional review around authorization, data exposure, validation, secrets, and implementation risk.
Deploy deliberately
Approved work moves through release validation, deployment, runtime checks, and rollback planning.
SMG's virtual roles expand specialized execution and review, while human leadership retains business direction, client responsibility, approvals, priorities, and final accountability.
You don't need to know which specialist you need.
Tell us what the business is trying to solve, improve, connect, automate, build, or understand. We can determine which capabilities — if any — make sense for the situation.