Why Every Technical Decision Should Be a Published Document

Most teams make hundreds of technical decisions each quarter. Architecture choices, library selections, API designs, deployment strategies — each represents accumulated thinking that shapes the product for years. Yet the vast majority of these decisions live in Slack threads, meeting notes, or worse, nowhere at all.

The Problem with Undocumented Decisions

When technical decisions go unrecorded, teams pay a compounding tax. New engineers spend weeks discovering why things work the way they do. The same debates resurface every six months. Institutional knowledge walks out the door every time someone leaves.

A 2023 study by Stripe found that developers spend 42% of their time dealing with technical debt, and a significant portion of that debt stems from decisions made without documentation. The cost is staggering — estimated at 85 billion dollars annually across the industry.

What Makes a Good Technical Document?

Not every decision needs a 20-page design doc. The most effective technical documents share a few qualities:

1. Context Over Conclusion

The decision itself is often less important than the reasoning behind it. Why did you choose PostgreSQL over MongoDB? What constraints drove the architecture? What alternatives were considered and rejected?

Good documents capture the decision-making process, not just the outcome. This matters because constraints change — and when they do, teams need to know whether the original reasoning still applies.

2. Minimal Viable Structure

A useful technical document does not need to follow a rigid template. At minimum, it needs:

• Problem statement: What situation prompted the decision?
• Decision: What was decided?
• Rationale: Why this approach over alternatives?
• Consequences: What trade-offs were accepted?

This four-part structure, inspired by Michael Nygard Architecture Decision Records, has proven effective across organizations of every size.

3. Discoverability

A document that cannot be found is as useless as one that was never written. The best teams treat their documents like a product — with search, metadata, and quality standards.

The Publishing Mindset

There is a meaningful difference between writing a document and publishing one. Writing is private. Publishing is a commitment to clarity.

When you know something will be published and read by others — possibly years from now — you write differently. You eliminate jargon. You add context. You structure arguments logically rather than chronologically. You include references.

This is not about perfection. It is about raising the baseline quality of technical communication from ephemeral to enduring.

How Lightweight Publishing Works

The barrier to publishing needs to be as low as possible. If it takes more than five minutes to go from markdown to a permanent URL, the process will not survive contact with real workloads.

The ideal workflow looks like this:

1. Write your document in markdown (the format you already use in READMEs and PRs)
2. Publish with a single API call or CLI command
3. Get back a permanent URL, quality score, and metadata
4. Share that URL anywhere — Slack, email, PRs, wikis

The published document becomes a canonical reference. It has a permanent URL that will not break when you reorganize your wiki. It has a quality score that encourages thorough writing. It has author attribution that builds accountability and reputation.

Quality as a Feature

One of the most underrated aspects of a publishing platform is quality feedback. When a system can analyze your document and tell you:

• Your structure could be improved (add more headings for navigation)
• Your substance is thin (the document is too short to be useful)
• Your attribution is missing (no references to prior art)
• Your tone is inconsistent (mixing formal and informal styles)

...it creates a positive feedback loop. Writers improve over time. The corpus of published documents becomes more consistently useful.

This is not artificial gatekeeping. It is the same principle behind code linters — automated feedback that raises quality without blocking progress.

The Compound Effect

Publishing technical decisions is not transformative on day one. The value compounds over time:

• Month 1: A few documents exist. Useful, but limited.
• Month 6: Engineers start linking to published decisions in PRs and design discussions.
• Year 1: New hires can self-serve most of their onboarding questions.
• Year 2: The organization has a searchable, quality-scored knowledge base that reflects its accumulated technical wisdom.

This compound effect is why the barrier to publishing must be low. You need volume before you get network effects.

Getting Started

If you are considering adopting a publishing practice for your team, start small:

1. Pick your next three decisions — they do not need to be big. Library choices, API naming conventions, and deployment procedures all count.
2. Write them in markdown — use the four-part structure (problem, decision, rationale, consequences).
3. Publish them — make them discoverable by your team.
4. Reference them — link to published documents in PRs, Slack discussions, and onboarding guides.

The habit of publishing builds on itself. Once your team sees the value of having permanent, searchable, quality-scored references, the practice becomes self-reinforcing.

Conclusion

Every technical decision your team makes is an investment of collective thinking. Publishing those decisions — making them permanent, discoverable, and quality-scored — transforms ephemeral knowledge into institutional memory. The tools to do this are simpler than ever. The only question is whether you will start.

References:

• Stripe Developer Coefficient Report, 2023
• Michael Nygard, Documenting Architecture Decisions
• Joel Spolsky, Things You Should Never Do
• Paul Graham, Writing and Speaking