Healthy engineering organizations make a lot of technical decisions. Many of those decisions impact multiple teams (Frontend, Backend) and functions (Engineering, Product, Customer Success, Finance). It’s normal to either feel like you’re moving too slow (“too many stakeholders in every decision”) or that your reckless pace creates frequent rework as issues are discovered late (“this problem would have been obvious if you’d just talked to Security first”). (View Highlight)
Successful organizations make an explicit tradeoff between quick and comprehensive technology decisions, and the Tech Spec is a key tool for documenting and facilitating that tradeoff, along with reviewing your Tech Specs in some sort of Tech Spec Review. (View Highlight)
As you think through using Tech Specs, remember that while all engineering organizations have a Tech Spec template, the template itself is specific to each organization. Earlier stage companies may find this template too heavy, whereas larger companies may find that it ignores many key topics (View Highlight)
At many companies, the Tech Spec format gets overloaded with too many concerns. A project once blew up cloud costs, and now every project has to detail their projections for future cloud costs. Being succesful depends on maintaining a thoughtful balance between navigating and ignoring bureaucracy, and what specifically makes sense for your company will vary a bit. (View Highlight)
