Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
49 lines (34 loc) · 2.69 KB

0018-engineering-design.md

File metadata and controls

49 lines (34 loc) · 2.69 KB

18. Better expectations for engineering designs

Date: 2023-03

Status

Accepted

Context

We are in a trend of continuously improving our product and engineering ways of working. We currently define the problem space in product initiatives. Once the problem space has been defined, a solution is designed and delivered.

For product discovery,the initiative template represents the organisation-wide agreed guidance and common baseline that any discovery should have. For engineering discovery, we haven't yet set that org-wide baseline, meaning that depending on the initiative, we could end up in different states on things that matter to us.

At the same time, this matters to us has not always been a static interpretation varying on the nature of our company. For example, we have seen how in second half of 2022 what matters to us meant delivering features to enhance sales demos. Whilst 2023 we are more looking for more stable, enterprise-ready part of our product. This involves, for example, a change in the priorities for non-functional requirements.

With the aim to set that organisational-wide expectations for the engineering discovery we raise this ADR.

Decision

In order to align around engineering discovery, we take the following actions:

  1. To record in this ADR that one of our strategy goals for 2023 is product consolidation where non-functional requirements are as important as functional.
  2. To support 1), to provide set of baseline topics that we consider each design should consider as baseline. We add them through our existing templates:
    1. ADR template
    2. RFC template
    3. Teams might use other templates but suggested to cover the topics indicated in them.
  3. Add a section in the product initiative template to link product and engineering design to help with discoverability.

Consequences

Given that we have linked product initiative and design docs, we are a step closer to make the product initiative the single source of truth that any stakeholder looking for a holistic picture of it could find.

Leveraging templates, we are able to make more explicit the priorities at any point of time.

Given that we have guidelines and a common baseline to help us in our development process:

  • Guidelines help us to get started when in a consistent manner.
  • A common baseline allows consistency across initiatives and any stakeholder is able to find the information which is relevant for them.