Product Artifacts

Here are a few product artifact (documentation) templates that we use in the Login.gov program. They’re all related in that they’re forms of documentation for sharing out ideas, but have different intended use cases.

1-Pagers

Brief explanatory documents. Not actually restricted to one page.

When to Use

  • Providing background information on a topic
  • Documenting a problem or an issue that users experience
  • Building alignment around a problem that we might want to solve or communicating potential work
  • Ideally used when building consensus

RFCs

“Requests for Comments” or Pitches

When to Use

  • For internal, behind-the-scenes work
  • In-depth engineering plans

SBARs

SBAR is a document format. It’s short for Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation, which are the four sections of the document.

When to Use

  • Collecting feedback from leadership on proposed changes
  • Weighing multiple choices to solve a problem
  • Ideally used when you have high urgency, or something which requires a timely decision (eg. production user impact, upcoming deadline, etc)

Other Documentation Templates