Keep every person and agent building the same product.
Agents let your team produce orders of magnitude more work. They also multiply the chances of quietly building a different product. Headwater makes your principles, decisions, and rules machine-readable — so every change is checked against the same canonical state, and conflicts become team decisions instead of accidental drift.
An agent checks its change
check_change {
intent: "Rename Project to Workspace",
artifacts: { termsIntroduced: ["Workspace"] }
}
{ "status": "requires_authority",
"rule": "terminology.project",
"current": "Project", "proposed": "Workspace",
"reason": "This changes canonical product
terminology.",
"authority": "product.organization" }
The team decides in Slack
Sarah proposes: Project → Workspace
Reason — Workspace better represents the new collaboration model.
Current decision — Project is the canonical product
term.
Why Headwater
Design systems prevent component drift. Headwater prevents product decision drift.
A designer asks an agent for a locally reasonable variation. An engineer asks a coding agent for a slightly different implementation. A PM introduces new terminology in a prompt. Each choice makes sense in isolation. Together, they slowly create a different product.
Decisions with rationale
Every rule carries the why. Agents don't just hear "you can't do that" — they learn the intent behind a constraint, so they can solve the task within it.
Authority, not permission sprawl
Asking an agent to change a screen is not the same as authority to change the rules that govern the product. Headwater knows the difference — and escalates to the people who hold it.
Exceptions over rigidity
Strong product organizations deviate on purpose. Deviations become scoped, owned,
and expiring — checkout/promo can use its campaign button without
rewriting the rule.
Decision history that survives
Who made this decision, and why? Headwater answers from the canonical record — through reorgs, departures, and every new agent you onboard.
How it works
One lifecycle: guide, govern, reconcile.
Agents start from canonical state
Over MCP, agents retrieve the principles, decisions, rules, and exceptions relevant to the task — not your whole corpus, just what applies.
Changes are checked, not hoped
Every change is evaluated: aligned, conflict, or requires authority. Conflicts adapt. Authority questions become Slack proposals — approve, deny, or table.
Drift is observed, then decided
Not every change flows through an agent. Headwater watches Figma and Git for divergence, and brings it to the team as evidence — accept an exception, propose a change, or dismiss.
Rules discover themselves
Connect a repo and Headwater mines your established patterns —
Organization 44× vs Company 5× — and asks one question:
make it canonical? No governance taxonomy to fill out.
A weekly integrity report
Decisions recorded, drift observed and resolved, rules added, exceptions granted, and what's worth discussing — one Slack digest, no dashboard to check.
Surfaces
No new workspace. Headwater comes to you.
Agents already use MCP. Your team already lives in Slack. Headwater connects those worlds — the console exists only for setup and billing. Governance happens where the work happens.
MCP, for agents
Five small tools. Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP-enabled agent builds against the same source of truth.
get_context what applies here? check_change aligned · conflict · requires_authority explain why does this rule exist? propose_change challenge a decision request_exception deviate on purpose
Slack, for humans
Proposals with the actual artifact — the diff, the frame, the evidence. Decisions in the thread, recorded in the log.
Approve · Deny · Table · Discuss Accept exception · Propose canonical change Headwater Weekly — the integrity digest
Pricing
Early access
Working with design partners
Headwater is in early access with product and engineering teams using Figma, GitHub, and Slack alongside coding agents. Tell us about your team and we'll set you up.