How to Write Design Docs ✏️Why they are the most important tech docs, and tips and templates to create great ones.
Writing docs belongs to that category of dev tasks that everybody knows they should do, but nobody wants to do anyway. It’s an exclusive club with other illustrious members, such as writing tests, estimating tasks, or updating JIRA. The natural restraint towards such tasks is often dismissed as laziness. But laziness carries meaning. When devs don’t want to do something, what they are really saying is:
People have a small ROI calculator in their head, which is saying that the ROI is negative. This version of laziness is useful and has driven important conversations in the past:
The goal of this article is to have the same conversation on tech docs to make them 1) less of a hassle, and 2) more worthwhile. This is what we are going to cover:
Let’s dive in 👇 📖 Types of tech docsThis is the first source of confusion. Many times you hear people asking “do we have the docs?” — but what docs? It is useful to organize them into three main types:
In my experience, everybody understands the difference between the product and the tech stuff — that is, between the first type and the other two. It is easy because those are usually created by different people: PMs and designers on one side; engineers on the other side. On the contrary, the difference between design docs and tech specs is tricky. In my opinion, 80% of the time what you really need is a design doc rather than a tech spec. That is, you need to record your decisions rather than describe what’s live. To understand this better, let’s cover what design docs are and why you should write them. ✏️ What are design docsA design doc illustrates the tech design and implementation strategy for a given initiative. It is meant to be created before you start writing code, and to be shared with other stakeholders to converge on the solution. You write it for several reasons:
In that respect, a design doc is useful throughout the whole lifecycle of a project.
So, what goes into a design doc? 👇 📋 Structure of a design doc...Subscribe to Hybrid Hacker to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Hybrid Hacker to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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How to Write Design Docs ✏️
Thursday, 6 November 2025
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