Every feature at Closot starts with a document — not a ticket, not a chat thread, not a meeting. A document. We call them Feature Briefs, and they're the single most impactful process we've adopted.
Why docs first?
Writing forces clarity. A chat message saying "we should add dark mode" is vague. A Feature Brief forces you to answer: Who wants this? What problem does it solve? What does "done" look like? What are we not building? What are the technical risks?
These questions surface disagreements early — before anyone has written code they're attached to. We've avoided countless wasted sprints by catching misalignment at the doc stage.
The template
Every Feature Brief has five sections: Problem (who is affected and how), Proposal (what we're building), Non-goals (what we're explicitly not building), Technical approach (how we'll build it), and Success metrics (how we'll know it worked). It takes 30-60 minutes to write. That investment saves days of rework.