Most developers love writing code.
The problem is that code isn't where software projects usually fail.
Projects fail because the team builds the wrong thing, misunderstands the business problem, skips important requirements, or makes architectural decisions too late.
After working on production SaaS systems and studying how mature engineering teams operate, I have started changing how I approach projects.
Instead of opening my IDE first, I now start with documentation.
In this article, I will show exactly how I planned PulseOps, an Incident & Operations Management platform, before writing a single API endpoint.
Hopefully, it helps you build software with more confidence and fewer surprises.
The Project
PulseOps is an internal platform that helps engineering teams manage incidents.
Imagine this scenario:
→ A customer reports that your SaaS platform is down.
→ Support receives the complaint.
→ Engineering starts investigating.
→ Managers want updates.
→ Customers want answers.
Meanwhile, conversations are happening in Slack, emails, Jira tickets, and meetings.
Information becomes fragmented.
Ownership becomes unclear.
Incidents take longer to resolve.
PulseOps aims to solve that problem by providing a single platform where incidents are created, investigated, assigned, tracked, and resolved.
But before building any of that...
I needed a plan.
Why Documentation Comes Before Code
One lesson I have learned is this:
Code answers how. Documentation answers why.
Without documentation, you are making assumptions.
Without assumptions being documented, your implementation will eventually drift away from the business problem.
This is why many successful engineering teams invest heavily in design documents before implementation. Documentation helps align stakeholders, capture requirements, and reduce ambiguity before development begins.
Step 1 — Understand the Business Problem
Before discussing databases or frameworks, answer one question.
What problem are we solving?
For PulseOps, the problem statement became:
Engineering teams struggle to manage production incidents because communication is scattered across multiple tools, ownership is unclear, and there is no centralized audit trail.
Everything else grows from that statement.
Step 2 — Define the Product Vision
The vision explains what success looks like.
For PulseOps, the vision was:
Create a centralized engineering operations platform where software teams can collaborate to detect, investigate, resolve, and learn from incidents.
Notice that this says nothing about PostgreSQL, Node.js, or Docker.
Technology is not the vision.
Step 3 — Identify the Users
Every system exists for someone.
I identified the primary users before designing anything.
- Engineering Manager
- Engineer: Backend Engineer, Frontend Engineer, DevOps Engineer
- Support Engineer
- Customer Success
- Administrator
Each role has different responsibilities.
That naturally leads to permissions and authorization later.
Step 4 — Define Business Goals
Business goals answer a different question.
"What does success look like?"
Examples include:
- Reduce Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR)
- Improve incident visibility
- Standardize incident workflows
- Maintain an auditable history
- Improve collaboration across teams
Every future feature should support at least one business goal.
If it doesn't...
It probably shouldn't exist.
Step 5 — Create a Shared Glossary
One of the simplest but most overlooked steps is defining a common language.
For example:
Incident: An operational issue affecting one or more customers.
Tenant: A customer organization using the SaaS platform.
Responder: An engineer assigned to investigate an incident.
This avoids situations where different team members use the same word to mean different things.
Step 6 — Define Business Rules
Business rules describe constraints that the software must enforce.
Examples from PulseOps include:
- Only Engineering Managers can close incidents.
- Every incident belongs to exactly one project.
- Timeline events are immutable.
- Closed incidents cannot be edited unless reopened.
- Every assignment change must be recorded.
Business rules become validation logic later.
Step 7 — Identify the Core Domain
Only after understanding the business did I identify the core entities.
For PulseOps these included:
- User
- Role
- Organization
- Service
- Incident
- Assignment
- Timeline Event
- Comment
- Investigation Note
- Attachment
- Notification
- Audit Log
At this stage, I am still thinking in business concepts, not database tables.
Step 8 — Design the Database
Once the domain was clear, the Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) became much easier to design.
Instead of asking:
"What tables do I need?"
I asked:
"How do these business concepts relate to one another?"
That's a subtle but important difference.
Step 9 — Design the Architecture
Architecture should solve business problems.
For PulseOps I plan to document:
- System architecture
- Layered application structure
- Authentication flow
- Authorization model
- Incident lifecycle
- API boundaries
These diagrams will become the blueprint for implementation.
Step 10 — Plan the Work
Only after understanding the product did I create the backlog.
Instead of random tasks like:
- Login API
- Create Incident
- Add Comments
I grouped work into Epics:
- Authentication
- User Management
- Incident Management
- Notifications
- Audit Logs
- Reporting
Each Epic was broken into user stories and implementation tasks.
This approach keeps development aligned with product goals and makes progress easier to track. Breaking large initiatives into smaller work items is also a widely recommended project management practice.
My Documentation Checklist
Before writing code, my repository now contains:
- Project Vision
- Business Goals
- Scope
- Functional Requirements
- Non-functional Requirements
- Assumptions
- Business Rules
- Glossary
- User Roles
- Workflows
- Architecture Diagram
- ER Diagram
- Sequence Diagrams
- Activity Diagrams
- Use Case Diagrams
- API Design
- GitHub Project Backlog
I establish the important boundaries and invariants first, then use implementation to validate and refine the design.
Why This Matters
Will this take longer than jumping straight into coding?
Yes.
Will it save time later?
Absolutely.
Documentation reduces ambiguity, improves communication, and gives the entire team a shared understanding of what is being built. Treating documentation as a living artifact rather than an afterthought is a common practice in mature engineering organizations.
More importantly, it changes how you think.
You are no longer just writing code.
You are designing systems.
What's Next?
The planning phase for PulseOps is almost complete.
The next article in this series will focus on turning these documents into a production-ready backend architecture.
I will cover:
- Folder structure
- Domain-driven organization
- API design
- Authentication strategy
- Database design
- Technology choices
From there, I will start implementing the platform one feature at a time.
Follow along as we build PulseOps from idea to production ☺.
Top comments (3)
I strongly agree with starting from the problem rather than the technology. The business rules and shared glossary especially tend to prevent expensive misunderstandings later.
The one part I’d challenge is waiting until all of those documents are complete before implementation begins. Architecture diagrams, API design, sequence diagrams, and even parts of the domain model often change once the first vertical slice meets real code and real constraints.
I’ve found a useful middle ground is to document the invariants deeply — business rules, boundaries, terminology, security constraints, and key architectural decisions — while keeping implementation-level design deliberately lightweight until it has been validated by a small end-to-end slice.
Planning should reduce uncertainty, but there’s also a point where code becomes a discovery tool.
This is a great point, and I agree with the distinction.
My wording about “completing all documentation before implementation” was too rigid. The intent was to emphasize starting with the problem and domain, not jumping straight into code.
I like your idea of focusing on invariants while keeping implementation details lightweight.
With that in mind, a better approach is:
Stable: problem, goals, terminology, business rules, boundaries, and key architectural decisions
Evolving: API design, diagrams, and database details
Validated in code: assumptions tested through a vertical slice
Code as a discovery tool is especially important and early implementation often reveals flawed assumptions.
I will be adjusting my approach for the implementation phase accordingly.
Thank you
Glad it was useful! I really like the Stable / Evolving / Validated in code breakdown — that captures the balance much better. Looking forward to seeing how those assumptions hold up once PulseOps reaches the first vertical slice.