Design Review Readiness Checklist

The fastest way to waste a design review board is to arrive with a design only you can understand. My test for “ready” is to imagine three readers, each picking up the document cold.

The UI developer

• What UI is being built? Wireframes or mock-ups, not just prose.
• Where does it live: which app, which route, which existing components?
• Which APIs does it call, and what do the payloads look like?

The API developer

• What storage is involved, and what’s the data model?
• What are the endpoints called, and how will they be consumed? Give context on the screens and flows that call them.
• What payloads are expected in each direction?
• What business logic applies, and where should it live?

The tech lead from another team

This is the design review board member who has never seen your project.

• Is there enough context for someone unfamiliar with the domain? A few context slides up front save twenty minutes of questions.
• What are the alternatives, and why this one?
• When are end-to-end and regression testing planned? It’s the question that gets asked every time, so answer it before it’s asked.
• What are the risks, and what would make you change course?

Tools

Whatever your organisation already uses: a diagramming tool for architecture, a whiteboard tool for wireframes, slides for the board itself. The tool matters far less than the three readers.

Why it works

Each reader catches a different class of gap. The UI view catches missing states and awkward API shapes. The API view catches vague data models and hidden logic. The outsider catches assumptions so familiar to the team that nobody wrote them down.

In practice

I started using this checklist while preparing a feature design for a workflow platform. The design had several priority tiers and touched templates, configuration and device support. Running it past the three imaginary readers before the real board turned a likely “come back next month” into an approval with minor actions. Once a decision is made, it belongs in an ADR (Architecture Decision Records). And the skill of pitching designs to mixed audiences is in Communicating with Stakeholders.