A glimpse of the discovery documentation template I built for the enterprise company

70X Proven Design Discovery Documentation Template

How to document design discoveries on Confluence?

As a designer, I got told to document my design decisions early on in my career. Unfortunately, I didn't listen much to that advice because I was busy with execution. But spending just over five years as a tech product designer, I jumped into the world of documentation while working on a hybrid B2B + B2C company. I mainly designed low-code interfaces, conducted research, and churned out rapid iterations every week. All of the work I was doing had to boil down into a convergence point, and that's where a documentation format came into play.

Reasons for documentation

For me, these are some of the reasons I experienced before and after I decided to build my documentation template —

1. Documenting those decisions: Design documentation allows you to record all your past and present design decisions.
2. Room for more: Since design documents are open-ended, they can contain a lot of artifacts like past versions, supporting research, quotes from stakeholders, and learnings from past experiences.
3. Design influence: A good discovery template allowed me to build design influence uniquely across the team. I used this template for over 70 design discoveries and improved it whenever I got feedback.
4. Documenting changes: Documenting those pesky changes might be the most painful task of it all. But it is important to hand off essential projects to other team members onboard new product managers onto an existing project. It helps others understand why you had to make the decisions you took.
5. Building a portfolio of projects: When I documented over 70 projects in my last company, I influenced and created a massive wall of projects authored in my name. It allowed me to have a place to look back and revisit some of the design decisions. It also let me get known within various company circles. I saw many people I didn't connect with previously reaching out to me after they stumbled upon one of my design discoveries.
6. Taking charge: When I started documenting my design decisions, no one else wrote thorough product requirement documents (PRD), and all the information fell between the creeks. As a result…