Comment by huntaub

It's interesting, after my time at Amazon (8 years) -- I struggled to visualize decisions without a document, because you get so used to reviewing things in that way. However, it's EXTREMELY heavy-handed. People will give you comments on the structure of your document (to "raise the bar") instead of the content of the document, and often you can't get documents reviewed until they are aesthetically in the right place for people to digest them. Ultimately, I think it makes sense when you're at a large organization with high attrition (such that you need to keep track of all of the decisions which are made), but otherwise, it's probably not worth it to do a formal document writing process.