S1E7 - Peat Bakke on Operationalizing Decision Records

When Peat Bakke sits down for breakfast with engineering leaders, the conversation inevitably turns to the same frustrating pattern: talented people leave, and with them goes critical context about why systems work the way they do. Not just the technical details—those live in the code—but the reasoning behind architectural choices, the problems those choices solved, and crucially, the alternatives that were deliberately rejected.

This isn't a staffing problem masquerading as a documentation problem. It's an organizational memory problem that compounds as companies grow. As Peat explains from 25 years of helping organizations through transitions and hypergrowth, "What you didn't decide to do—that's the organizational lore that gets lost when people move around."

The solution isn't just writing more things down. Decision records only create value when they're accessible, digestible, and tied directly to the tools teams use every day. The most effective organizations treat decision context as infrastructure, not paperwork. They understand that the goal isn't comprehensive documentation—it's ensuring that when someone inevitably gets "called in when a company is going through hypergrowth" or when they need to "reduce expenditures in painful ways," the reasoning behind past choices is available to inform new ones.

In this episode of Velocity's Edge, Peat and host Nick Selby explore how to build decision records that actually help teams move faster rather than creating bureaucratic overhead. They tackle essential questions: How do you determine when a decision is significant enough to document? What's the "after-the-fact test" that reveals whether your documentation is genuinely useful? How can AI help make years of accumulated decision records searchable and actionable without introducing hallucinations into critical business decisions?

The conversation reveals a fundamental truth: the companies that scale successfully aren't those that document everything—they're the ones that capture decision context so future teams can make informed choices about what to change and what to preserve.

Peat Bakke is a seasoned engineering leader with over 25 years of experience helping companies navigate significant transitions including reorganizations, mergers and acquisitions, hypergrowth, and cloud migrations. He has held senior engineering roles at eBay, Kickstarter, and Peek, where he led a team of 70 engineers through a Series C funding round. Peat is the founder of Refactor Management, specializing in helping engineering leaders build high-performance teams through systems thinking and psychological safety.

As in all our episodes, we speak in plain, executive-summary business terms, framing complex business and technology strategic challenges in context, using language that makes them more accessible and actionable.