Your engineers love to code, but hate writing documentation

What would you do?

👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. Welcome to my weekly newsletter where I share lessons, and stories from my journey to help you lead with confidence as an Engineering Manager.

You are in the middle of reviewing some PRs when you get a message from one of your senior engineers:

“This feature is done. Can we skip writing docs for now to move fast?”

This is not the first time you've heard this. It feels like speed is used as an excuse to not write any documentation.

There is no documentation about virtually anything and this specific scenario happens a lot on your team. They’ll build great features relatively fast, but when it comes to writing documentation, it’s like pulling teeth.

You know why this matters.

• New hires struggle to understand how things work.

• Architecture design decisions become harder and harder.

• Product managers ask the same questions repeatedly.

Let’s talk about it.

Outline

- 🔒 What are your options?
- 🔒 Breaking down each approach
- 🔒 What I would do (and have done) in this situation
- 🔒 Takeaways
- 🔒 Some useful links from me

---

If you enjoy posts like this, consider supporting my work and subscribing to this newsletter.

As a free subscriber, you get:

• ✉️ 1 high value post per week

As a paid subscriber, you get:

• 🔒 50 Engineering Manager templates and playbooks (worth $79)

• 🔒 The Engineering Manager’s Field Guide (worth $29)

• 🔒 A weekly "What would you do?" scenario & breakdown from real challenges EMs face

• 🔒 The complete archive

---