Hi fellow High Growth Engineer, Jordan here 👋
I’m excited to share two things with you today:
WriteEdge is live and ready for you!
6 high-quality templates you can use as an engineer and a full template library.
Let’s jump into it!
✍️ WriteEdge helps you write better docs
WriteEdge turns your rough ideas into polished design docs. It saves you time by handling the structure, tuning to audiences, and considerations for you.
Here are the highlights of what’s available:
A templates library. Feel free to suggest ones to add. If you have ones you’d like us to add to the library, we can cite you as the source too.
Create high-quality technical design docs and 1-pagers in less than 60 seconds.
A full editor experience similar to Cursor IDE with AI edits and diagram creation.
Finally, you can join the community to chat with us directly and share feedback or feature suggestions. We highly value your feedback.
Let’s jump into the 6 templates for you as an engineer!
1) Technical Design Doc
Purpose: Get feedback on a technical approach, alternatives, milestones, and risks.
These docs are the most common, but also one of the most difficult to write. You typically write this after you know you’ll work on a particular feature, but need to align on the implementation approach, milestones, risks, etc.
📄 Access the template here: Technical Design Doc Template
Since it’s so common, it’s the first use case we supported on WriteEdge. You can click “Use this template” at the top of the template and have a ready-to-go design doc almost instantly. Try it out!
2) Feedback template
Purpose: Give feedback in a non-judgmental, constructive way to help the other person improve.
Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of Hubspot, suggests dividing feedback into 4 categories based on “hill dying status”—or how much you really care about the suggestion you’re making.
FYI: It's really not a big deal, but I'm letting you know just in case
Suggestion: I’m fairly confident this would help, but I can live without it
Recommendation: This could be holding you back
Plea: It’s almost at the breaking point if it’s not already there
My manager introduced me to this framework and I think it does a great job of making it clear what type of feedback you’re giving.
On top of this, when giving peer feedback, you normally get questions like, “What are the positive aspects of working with this person?” or “What are the areas this person can improve?” For these questions, I like to refer to the IC guidelines.
For example, if the guidelines at this person’s level include technical decision-making, I’d write the strength like this:
Strength - Technical decision making: < example of where they made good technical decisions >
Similarly, for improvement areas, I’d do the same thing. If they meet all the criteria at the current level, I’ll review the guidelines for the next level and suggest what could help them achieve that level.
Improvement area - Scope: < how I think they could be even better if they invested more in this area >
📄 Access the template here: Feedback Template
3) 1-Pager Proposal
Purpose: Propose a project idea or technical solution and get buy-in.
A 1-Pager lets you propose an idea without spending too much time on implementation details. It’s more focused on the “why” and only on the high-level of the “how.” 1-Pagers are the opposite of design docs, which are mostly focused on the “how.”
I use this template to propose ideas, like a mini-product Manager, pointing out problematic code areas and suggesting ways to improve them. One example is highlighting an area where we could improve our performance by prefetching, showing the potential impact, and explaining why we should work on it. This doc helped me get cross-functional buy-in and build influence across teams.
📄 Access the template here: 1-Pager Proposal
4) Pull request template
Purpose: Clearly describe the changes you made and why.
Using a good template for your pull requests makes your reviewers have
The biggest mistake I see here is jumping into “what the change does” without the “why.” Sure, I can see that your change updates the request rate limit number, but why? Did we have customer complaints, was it an ask from above, or is this preemptive?
The “why” helps your reviewer provide feedback on what could be a better approach in the same way we as engineers always talk about knowing the why from your product manager before starting implementation.
📄 Access the template here: Pull Request Template (kudos to
)5) 1-on-1 Template
Purpose: Clear agenda for 1-on-1s. Avoid getting sidetracked and show the other person you’re taking it seriously.
Another great one from Lenny’s Summit is the 1:1 template, which can be reused for other meetings too.
Decisions: Decisions that should be made by the end of the meeting
Action items: Action items decided on during the meeting
Topics: Topics to discuss (bi-directional)
Updates: Updates to share with no action needed (uni-directional)
I’ve been using this template for most of my 1:1s, particularly with my manager and mentors. The template builds clarity and has resulted in efficient, high-value 1-on-1s.
📄 Access the template here: 1-on-1 Template
6) Brag doc + Weekly Update Template
Purpose: Don’t lose track of what you did. It makes writing your performance review 10x easier. Plus, you can use it to keep your manager up-to-date with what you’ve done recently.
For me, this template doubles up as a way for me to track what I did but also to share what I did with those who need to know—particularly my manager. I talk more about this in
In short, it’s a 2 column table with what I plan to do for that week and what I actually did. Here’s what it looks like:
You can also “tag” each of what you write using Google Doc Variables. I have variables for each IC attribute like “Mentorship” or “Impact” and then add the variable next to what I did. Later, you can quickly find all instances of that variable and see all the places you tagged “Mentorship” or “Impact” for example.
📄 Access the template here: Brag Doc + Weekly Update Template
📖 TL;DR
View the full template library here
👏 Shout-outs of the week
How I got promoted with constant re-orgs on
— Great article by Junaid and Gregor with practical tips for handling reorgs as an IC.Why I use Cline for AI Engineering on
by Addy Osmani — Addy deep-dives into all the ways you can use an AI helper for writing code. Cline is nice in that it integrates directly into VSCode. It’s on my list of tools to try.Developer Productivity Metrics: Education Necessary on
by Kent Beck — Kent, a frequent questioner of engineering productivity metrics, has a deep conversation with the CEO of DX, a productivity metrics company 😄. It’s a funny combo and a fun discussion to read.
Thank you for being a continued supporter, reader, and for your help in growing to 80k+ subscribers 🙏
You can also hit the like ❤️ button at the bottom of this email to help support me or share this with a friend to get referral rewards. It helps me a ton!
I like the format of the 1:1 template and the brag doc! I'm going to update the ones I have with those formats. Thanks for sharing, Jordan!
I love the brag doc - often times when writing self-reflections I’ve forgotten what I’ve done for the past X months 😅