Gears is a system for building software. It breaks delivery into five gears, each with one job, one input, and one output. Run the gears in order and software ships.

The five gears

  • Intake — how requests, feedback, and ideas enter the system.
  • Product — how intake becomes scoped, prioritized product work.
  • Research — how questions become evidence that informs design and development.
  • Design — how product scope and research evidence become buildable specifications.
  • Development — how specifications become shipped, reliable software.

Each gear is its own guide. Start with Intake or pick the one closest to the work you do.

Why gears

Gears separates concerns that usually blur together. Each gear has its own inputs, outputs, owners, and instructions, so the handoff between them is explicit instead of accidental. The result is a delivery pipeline you can reason about, debug, and improve one gear at a time.

This is the Gears overview. Detailed instructions for running each gear live on the gear’s own subdomain.