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Gregor Ojstersek's avatar

Love this Ryan! One of the things I look at when I’m assessing the potential of people.

The person who actually writes down the plan has been able to get everyone on the same page within different opinions. This is very valuable and a sign of high potential.

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Wiley Marques's avatar

Completely agree! Writing things down helps me understand what I need to solve.

If I don't do this, I feel I'm solving an issue I don't understand.

The difficulty is that we usually don't have a proper time set to do it carefully.

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Mark Hardy's avatar

I love this article I am learning as I move up this is necessary to even gain confidence in you and your perspective. I think I’ve been afraid to show the concepts but allowing people to see the evolution is critical as you move up.

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Star Chaser's avatar

Do you have an example of a written plan? We all want to dump our mind on paper. But we are too buried in the template of the doc, what should be basic must haves. Concerns are - what if someone says - this is not a good plan, not written well. etc., Basically we are too worried about the outcomes that we don't intend.

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Ryan Peterman's avatar

That's a fair concern. You can check your writing with people 1:1 first before publishing it widely to avoid that (process described here: https://www.developing.dev/p/backchannel-alignment).

Publishing an example is a good idea, I'll consider it for a future post. For now, I do have some templates that you can use to structure your thinking:

Direction doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CAvwd6IaaThBWU_MiYKgtt3S7h8psAdNNkbKeYExR0k/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.67pyboai2u34

Design doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WMG_gt67eW9RYl33R02KEv2RxFvuMldg1s_TcM0Sn2M/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.psi98t855m9r

These are from my templates post earlier: https://www.developing.dev/p/6-software-engineering-templates

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Star Chaser's avatar

These are cool. Thanks Ryan!

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