Documentation standards
Documentation is not a side task.
If the reasoning behind a system change stays invisible, the team slowly drifts back toward memory, guesswork, and one person carrying too much context.
What good documentation should do
Good documentation should make a few things obvious:
- what the process is
- who owns which step
- what happens next
- what changed and why
- where the source of truth lives
What we try to document
For operational work, the most useful things to capture are usually:
- stage definitions
- ownership rules
- approval rules
- exceptions and edge cases
- the reason a given approach was chosen
- the next action when something gets stuck
What we try to avoid
- giant pages nobody revisits
- vague principles with no operational value
- “documentation” that is really just a dump of screenshots
- leaving the key decision in someone’s head
Public-safe versus private
Public-safe documentation can explain patterns, tradeoffs, and decision rules.
Private documentation should hold client specifics, internal access paths, operational details, and anything sensitive enough that publishing it would weaken trust or safety.
The standard we aim for
The team should be able to answer these questions without hunting:
- what stage is this in
- who owns the next step
- what are we waiting on
- where does the latest truth live
- why is the workflow set up this way
If the docs do not help answer those, they are probably not good enough yet.