How to provide feedback on documents.
At Carta, we recently ran a reading group for Facilitating Software Architecture by Andrew Harmel-Law. We already loosely followed the ideas of an architectural advice process (from this 2021 article by the same Andrew Harmel-Law), but in practice we found that internal tech spec and architecture decision record (ADR) authors tended to exclusively share their documents locally within their team rather than more widely.
As we asked authors why they preferred sharing locally, the most common answer was that they got enough feedback from their team that they didn’t want to pay the time overhead of sharing widely. The wider feedback wasn’t necessarily bad or combative. It just wasn’t good enough to compensate for the additional time it cost to process. This made sense from the authors’ perspectives, but didn’t work well for me from the executive perspective, as I was seeing teams make misaligned decisions due to lack of cross-team communication.
As one step in reducing the overhead of sharing documents widely, I wrote up and shared this recommended process for providing feedback on documents:
Before starting, remember that the goal of providing feedback on a document is to help the author. Optimizing for anything else, even if it’s a worthy cause, discourages authors from sharing their future writing. If you prioritize something other than helping the author, you are discouraging them from sharing future work.
Start by skimming the document to understand its structure and where various kinds of topics are addressed. Why? This helps avoid giving feedback on ways the document’s actual structure diverges from how you imagined it would be structured. It also reduces questions about topics that are answered later in the document.
Both of these sorts of feedback are a distraction during a discussion on a tech spec. In general, it’s better to avoid them. If you notice an author making the same significant structural mistake over several ADRs, it’s worth delivering that feedback separately.
After skimming, reread the document, leaving comments with concerns. Each comment should include these details:
- What your suggested change or concern is
- Why you believe this is meaningful to address
- How important this seems (from ignorable nitpick to critical)
If you find yourself leaving more than three or four issues, then you should either raise your threshold for commenting or you should schedule time with the individual to talk over the feedback. If the document is unreasonably weak, then it’s appropriate to nudge their leadership to dig into what’s happening on that team.
The most important idea behind these steps is that your goal as a feedback giver is to help the document’s author. It is not to protect your team’s strategy or platform. It is not to optimize for your goals. It’s to help the author. This might feel wrong, but ultimately optimizing for anything else will lead to an environment where sharing widely is an irrational behavior.
As a final aside, I think the user experience around commenting on documents is fundamentally wrong in most document editors. For example, Google Docs treats individual comments as first-order objects, similarly to how old version control systems like CVS tracked changes to individual files without tracking an overall state of the project. Ultimately, you want to collect all your comments into a bundle, then review that bundle for consistency and duplicates, and then submit that bundle as commentary, but editors don’t support that flow particularly well.