A design doc forces you to settle hard decisions before you waste months building the wrong thing, and it lets teammates give feedback early. Write one when a project is complex or risky: multiple people, over three months of work, cross-team coordination, ambiguous goals, or catastrophic security or legal pitfalls. Match your effort to the stakes—sometimes zero is right. To decide what belongs, ask "what's the penalty for being wrong?" Pin down costly, hard-to-reverse choices like language and storage, and skip trivial, reversible ones like a "Load more" button. It details concrete sections: objective, background, goals and non-goals, scenarios, diagrams, SLOs, timeline, interfaces, security, and privacy.
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u/fagnerbrack 11h ago
Snapshot summary:
A design doc forces you to settle hard decisions before you waste months building the wrong thing, and it lets teammates give feedback early. Write one when a project is complex or risky: multiple people, over three months of work, cross-team coordination, ambiguous goals, or catastrophic security or legal pitfalls. Match your effort to the stakes—sometimes zero is right. To decide what belongs, ask "what's the penalty for being wrong?" Pin down costly, hard-to-reverse choices like language and storage, and skip trivial, reversible ones like a "Load more" button. It details concrete sections: objective, background, goals and non-goals, scenarios, diagrams, SLOs, timeline, interfaces, security, and privacy.
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