A thorough team guide to RFCs - Juan Pablo Buriticá

This resource first appeared in issue #72 on 30 Apr 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Delegation, Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing, Technical Leadership: Other

We’ve written before about design documents architectural decision logs (e.g. #33) and using collaboration around documents as a form of asynchronous meeting (e.g. #49). Usually the thinking is that someone in charge has initiated the document. Buriticá writes about team member-initiated requests for comments as a proposal for a change or the creation of something new, which can then go through a comments phase like a PR, and an approval phase where whatever decision making process is appropriate plays out and people get to work implementing the proposal. In this respect it’s like a Python PEP or a W3C RFC.

This approach is very consistent with a model of delegating to and developing your team members - turning every team member into a technical leader by having them propose, revise, and gain support for technical directions in their area of expertise.