A short record of a decision after it's been made. Companion to decision-memo.md: the memo is for making the decision, the log is for remembering it.
The point of a log entry is to keep teams from re-litigating settled questions every two months. New people join, context fades, the rationale gets forgotten — and someone re-opens "should we kill X?" in a leadership review without realizing it was decided in March. A two-paragraph log entry, searchable, prevents that.
Save log entries as docs/decisions/YYYY-MM-DD-<short-slug>.md so chronology is visible from the file name.
[One line. The decision in plain language. "Pause the SSO migration until Q3." Not "SSO migration update."]
[YYYY-MM-DD when the decision was made.]
One of:
- Strategic — direction, positioning, scope of the bet, kill / continue / pivot
- Tactical — execution approach, which framework, which tool, how to ship
- Operational — process, cadence, ownership, day-to-day mechanics
What prompted the decision? (2–4 sentences.) New evidence, missed milestone, leadership ask, customer escalation, market change.
The decision itself, one sentence. What's now true that wasn't yesterday.
Minimum two. No alternatives means it wasn't a decision — it was a default.
For each:
- Option A: [...]
- Option B: [...]
- Option C (chosen): [...]
Why this option, in two or three sentences. The argument that won.
What's now harder, slower, or worse because of this decision. Be honest. "We're accepting in exchange for ." Future-you will thank present-you for naming the cost.
- Decision: [Name, role]
- Consulted: [Names, roles]
- Decision memo (if any)
- Strategy doc this connects to
- Pre-mortem / risk analysis
- Customer / data evidence
A specific trigger — a date, a metric threshold, a milestone. "Revisit at end of Q3 when migration is complete" or "Revisit if churn in segment X exceeds 8% in any quarter."
If the decision is strategic and you can't write a revisit trigger, name that gap explicitly. Strategic decisions without revisit triggers tend to ossify into "the way we do things" long after the conditions that motivated them have changed.
- Write at the time of decision, not later. Memory degrades within days.
- Keep entries short — half a page is plenty. A long log entry signals the decision wasn't actually made.
- One entry per decision, not one per meeting. A meeting can produce several decisions or zero. Log the decisions, not the meetings.
- Search before you debate. When a settled question gets re-opened, the first move is "is this in the log?" If yes, link to the entry and ask whether anything has changed enough to revisit. Often nothing has.
The log is institutional memory. Treat it that way: contributors should be able to read it cold and understand why the team is where it is.