Essay · 6 min read

There's Nothing Functional about a Functional Spec

37signals · Getting Real (37signals) Free Beginner

The healthy counterweight to over documenting. 37signals argues that a thick spec creates false agreement (everyone reads the same words differently) and locks you in before you have learned anything. Their fix maps onto our answer perfectly: write a short one page story in plain language, then move to rough sketches and real screens. It frees you from thinking a good spec has to be long.

  • A one page plain language story beats a thirty page document
  • Long specs create the illusion of agreement, not the real thing
  • Move from the story straight to sketches, do not polish the doc
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The question it answers

  1. How do I write a spec for a developer when I'm not technical?

Read with it

  1. Basecamp's battle-tested, opinionated system for shipping meaningful work in fixed cycles without endless backlogs, a primary... Basecamp / 37signals Book · free online book Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters Ryan Singer
  2. Michael Seibel, who ran YC, makes the blunt case for shipping something almost embarrassingly simple and learning from real... Y Combinator Startup Library Video · ~10 min video How to Build an MVP Michael Seibel
  3. Figma's free plan is genuinely enough to design, tweak, and export a full logo set (SVG for print, PNG for the web) without... Figma Tool · Ongoing tool Figma (free plan) Figma
  4. The creator of Shape Up talks through fixing the time and cutting the scope, which is exactly the discipline that keeps an MVP... Lenny's Podcast Podcast · 90 min A Better Way to Plan, Build, and Ship Products (Shape Up) Ryan Singer
  5. This is the clearest statement of the exact idea in our answer: a spec describes how the product works entirely from the user's... Joel on Software Essay · 10 min read Painless Functional Specifications, Part 2: What's a Spec? Joel Spolsky
  6. Part 2 tells you what a spec is, this one covers who writes it and how they build agreement without authority, walking through... Joel on Software Essay · 12 min read Painless Functional Specifications, Part 3: But... How? Joel Spolsky
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