How to Write Architecture Decision Records That Actually Get Used

The Context Nobody Writes Down A few months ago, an engineer on my team wanted to change how we handled session management. Under normal circumstances, that's a week of investigation, a few conversations, a proposal, and then implementation. Instead, the engineer pulled up an ADR we'd written eight months earlier. It laid out what we'd considered, why we chose the approach we chose, and what constraints would need to change before a different approach made sense. The engineer read it, realized the original constraints still held, and saved the team two weeks of work on a migration that didn't need to happen. That's what ADRs are for. Not documentation theater. Not compliance artifacts. A system that prevents your team from relitigating decisions that were already made with full context. I wrote about why this matters from a leadership perspective … the bus factor problem, the knowledge that walks out the door when someone leaves. This post is the tactical companion. The template, the p