🔗 How to get meaningful feedback on your design document

You’ve spent weeks carefully writing a design document for your software project, but what happens next? How can you get useful feedback about it from your teammates? How do you prevent your design review from dragging on for months?

I’ve been through many design reviews in my career as both the author and reviewer, and I have a special fondness for effective reviews. Through trial and error, I’ve learned techniques that help the review process move smoothly and yield material improvements to the design.

• Goals of an effective design review process
• Write an introduction that makes sense to everyone
• Make it easy for reviewers to give you feedback
• Invest effort in clear diagrams
• Give reviewers time to read independently
• Start with a single reviewer
• Address feedback in the doc itself
• Aggressively resolve comment threads
• Resolve contentious issues in a focused meeting
• Conduct a design postmortem
• Summary