At Looply, design reviews end in work rather than a document

Looply ran design reviews the way most product companies do: a room, a deck, forty minutes of good discussion, and a note-taker producing a summary that was accurate, thorough and read by nobody.

Counting the leak

They did an audit that is worth stealing. They took six months of review documents, extracted every decision and every action, and checked what had actually happened to each one.

Just over a third of the actions had shipped. Another third had been re-decided later, sometimes the opposite way, by people who did not know the first conversation had happened. The last third had simply evaporated.

Reviewing inside the page

Now the artefact under review is a Margin page, and the review happens in its margin. When somebody says a flow is wrong, they leave a note beside that flow, in the meeting, in about four seconds.

By the end of the review the page carries between eight and twenty notes, each attached to the thing it is about. Assigning them is a pass down the margin that takes two minutes, and nobody retypes anything.

The doc writes itself

The summary document still exists — an agent drafts it from the notes and the page's edit history. It is better than the hand-written one because it links every decision to the block it was about.

But almost nobody reads it, and that is the point. The work is already on a board with owners on it. The document is the record, not the mechanism.

• Review to shipped: three weeks to four days, median
• Actions that shipped: 36 per cent to 91 per cent
• Decisions re-litigated later: down by roughly four fifths