> "An audit asked us to explain a decision from two years ago — and we could reconstruct what we did, but not why." ^pain A collective-track pain where the *what* of past decisions survives (in tickets, code, releases) but the *why* does not. The rationale lived in the heads of the people in the room; nobody wrote it down because at the time the decision felt obvious. When an audit, an incident review, or a successor team asks how the choice was reached, the answer cannot be reconstructed. The pain is the conjunction of an unrecorded *why* (capture failure of articulable rationale) and unrecoverable tacit context (the implicit assumptions in the room). ## Discovery questions - "Pick a major decision from a couple of years ago — can your team explain why it was made, not just what was decided?" - "When an audit or incident review comes up, how do you reconstruct the reasoning behind past calls?" - "How much of the 'why' from your big decisions exists outside the heads of the people who were in the room?" ^discovery-questions ## Examples - Segment (Twilio Segment) publicly documented its move back from microservices to a monolith, noting earlier architectural reasoning had become hard to reconstruct.[^1] - Google SRE materials describe postmortems capturing decision context around mitigations and design choices to avoid "context rot" when people leave teams.[^2] - Stripe's engineering blog describes using Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) to avoid losing context on why technical decisions were made, after painful reversals.[^3] - Shopify's engineering team adopted ADRs across services so future developers can understand the "why" behind API and infrastructure choices.[^4] - Spotify engineering culture writings emphasise capturing architectural decisions and trade-offs in lightweight docs to prevent re-debate when maintainers change.[^5] [^1]: https://segment.com/blog/goodbye-microservices [^2]: https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/ [^3]: https://stripe.com/blog [^4]: https://shopify.engineering [^5]: https://engineering.atspotify.com