Alternatives to Design Reviews

 I recently saw https://blog.nuclino.com/bike-sheds-and-ducks-or-why-most-design-review-meetings-are-time-wasters , and... well, i realized, we need alternatives.

Design Reviews dont work for all teams, in all places.  So, what are the alternatives?  Well, chances are if your reading this.. you've got an issue where your teams arent empowered to move fast enough.  The best thing you can do, is build great, empowered teams .  But if you cant do that, you probably have to think about how to unbeuracratize your large scale decision making.

I have no idea which one of these is right for you, but... these are the decision making processes that ive seen as alternatives to long boring silent reads.  

Secret Features

Ok so, this happens sometimes.  Nobodys proud of it but, sometimes someone just sneaks around and jams the bits needed for a feature into the codebase.  People start using the shadow feature, and... by heirem's law... that feature becomes a feature.   

Daily Design Whiteboarding Sessions until youve got a plan

Remember in the old days where people used to get into a room and design things on a whiteboard?  You're still allowed to do that.  And guess what - it's alot more fun then carpet bombing a google doc on people that theyve never even thought about.    Meet people where they are and iterate.    

Innocent until Guilty

Ive seen some organizations (gasp) just trust people to do the right thing.  I've seen that be wildly succesfull.  Ive seen 100,000,000$ business moved to the cloud, with documentation, and that business is still running today.   As I recall, this is also how the linux kernel, hadoop, and even arguably the original Cluster API (kris novas kubicorn) was built.   

Writing the doc together

If you know the database APIs were using, and I know the REST APIs, you and i can sit down in a room, and just write a google doc together, specifying the APIs in real time.  Then, we dont need a design review b/c the person verifying the database compatibility with the REST API, literally, helped write the database tables were using.  IMO, for API design, this is the modern equivalent of using a shared markerboard.  

Escalation Culture

This is my least favorite -but - lets be real here.  If a product makes a ton of money, and you've basically got it working - Ive seen folks just go nuclear and get a senior VP or PM or whatever to green light a feature at all costs .   

I'll add other alternatives as i think of them here.  Im not advocating any of these.