decision-record

Decision record

A skill for creating structured decision records for design system choices. Covers component decisions, token architecture choices, tooling selections, governance policies, and any other decision worth recording so future contributors do not have to reverse-engineer the reasoning.

Context

Design systems accumulate decisions faster than they accumulate documentation. The result is a system where the current state is known but the reasoning is not — which means the same debates recur, constraints get ignored because their origin is forgotten, and new team members spend weeks learning by collision what a thirty-minute conversation would have covered.

A decision record does not need to be formal. It needs to be findable and honest. The format below is lightweight enough to write in under twenty minutes and structured enough to be useful when someone reads it twelve months later.

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Step 1: Clarify the decision

Ask for or confirm:

• What was decided? (One clear sentence)
• When was this decided?
• Who was involved in making the decision?
• Is this decision already made, or is it still in progress?

If the decision is in progress, the record still gets written — just with an open status. Decision records for in-progress decisions are often the most valuable, because they capture the thinking before it is lost in the gap between discussion and resolution.

Step 0: Decision trigger checklist

Before writing a record, confirm this decision warrants one. Not every choice needs a formal record — but more decisions warrant records than teams typically capture. Use this checklist:

Create a decision record if any of these are true:

• The decision affects more than one consuming team
• The decision involves a trade-off where reasonable people could disagree
• The decision will be referenced during future contribution reviews
• The decision changes a naming convention, token architecture, or API contract
• The decision deprecates or removes something from the system
• Someone asked "why do we do it this way?" and the answer was not documented
• The same question has come up more than once