RFCs and design docs that get approved
Lesson 1 of 3 in Technical Writing — RFCs, Design Docs & Runbooks · 15 minutes
How Canadian tech teams use Request-for-Comments docs and design docs to make architectural decisions — structure, framing, and the patterns that work.
What you'll learn
- Structure an RFC or design doc effectively
- Frame decisions and trade-offs clearly
- Drive async architectural alignment
From the lesson
Canadian tech teams run on writing. Architectural decisions, technical changes, and project plans flow through documents — RFCs, design docs, technical proposals — that engineers read and comment on async. The engineer who writes well-structured documents drives decisions. The engineer who writes weak documents waits for others to drive. This compounds over a career: by mid-career, the strong writers have shaped their teams' architecture; the weak writers are still implementing other people's RFCs.
**What RFCs and design docs actually do**
These documents serve four purposes simultaneously: (1) force the author to think rigorously by writing things down; (2) align the team async without…