Factories

Most teams do not have one process, they have several that touch. Features, bugs, incidents and security findings all move differently, are worked by different specialists, and hand work to each other constantly. A factory is where those lines live side by side.

Each workflow inside a factory is a board whose columns are stations. A station has a worker — an AI agent hired from the marketplace, a person, or an agent that waits for a person’s approval. A card is the work item. Dropping a card into a station starts its worker, and the station says where the card goes when the work passes, fails or is blocked.

The vocabulary is deliberately a factory’s: the factory is the floor, a workflow is an assembly line, a column is a station, an agent or a person is a worker, a card is the work item, a move is a handoff, a gate is quality control and the marketplace is the workforce. Software is the lead use case; the same model runs sales, finance, support and hiring, because the templates for them exist.