Decisions & Product
Never relitigate an architectural choice.
Engineering teams make 5–10 significant architectural decisions per quarter. Within 18 months, the people who made them have left, been promoted, or forgotten the context. Cognition preserves the reasoning, not just the outcome.
Architecture decisions
WhenSimilar problem surfaces again
We chose React Query over SWR: better devtools, stale-while-revalidate semantics match our refresh pattern. Reconsidered Q3 2024 — still correct. Next review: scaling to 10M events.
Decision re-evaluated consciously, not re-made from scratch.
Rejected feature directions
WhenSomeone proposes a feature that was killed
Real-time collab rejected Q2 2024: WebSocket infra cost + increased latency for 97% of sessions. Would revisit if DAU > 100K. Tagged: revisit-at-scale.
Teams don't waste sprints re-building rejected work. Context survives the team.
Customer commitments
WhenRenewal call or feature request
Account A: committed to SSO by Q3. Account B: no third-party analytics per DPA. Account C: requires on-prem option — flagged for enterprise tier.
No missed commitments. Agents surface the right constraint before a call.
Competitive positioning
WhenCompetitor comes up in a call
vs. Notion AI: we have decay tracking, they have search. vs. Linear: we capture decision rationale, they capture tickets. Positioning that landed: 'we make judgment portable.'
Every rep sounds like the founder. No outdated battlecards.