Part 3: From Theory to Results What happened when one team put Document as Code into practice Setting the Stage Last year I joined a consumer health and wellness startup as part of their AI transformation — about twenty people, moving fast, shipping constantly. The kind of product where getting the user experience right is existential, not aspirational. Our setup was typical for the stage. PRDs in Confluence. Design mocks in Figma, linked in tickets but never exported or versioned. Code in...

Part 2: Making It Real The practical guide — what it looks like, how to get started, and what's actually hard about it Another Misalignment Story In Part 1, I told the Chegg story — how a disconnect between the product brief and the codebase led to building the wrong thing. I wish that were an isolated incident. More recently, I was advising a team building an automated AI quality evaluation system. The brief was clear: the system needed to serve two use cases. First, offline evaluation...

Part 1: Why Co-Location Changes Everything The strategic insight — what's broken, why AI changes the math, and why product leaders should care A Good Idea Whose Time Has Come Document as Code has been around for years. The concept is simple: treat your documentation the same way you treat your code—version-controlled, reviewed, and living right alongside the software it describes. For most teams, though, it's stayed optional. A "nice to have" for disciplined engineering orgs, something that...