Technical Design

High-level technical planning that bridges a design document to task decomposition. The input is a design document with a decided solution. The output is a technical design that maps the decision onto the codebase without prescribing implementation details.

Why Technical Design Matters

A design document decides WHAT to build and WHY. But before work can be decomposed into tasks, someone must map the decision onto reality: which components are affected, what tools are needed, in what order things should change, and what risks exist.

Without this step, task decomposition operates on abstractions. Tasks like "implement the new cache layer" appear without clarity on which modules are involved, what dependencies exist between changes, or what the technical approach looks like. The result is tasks that are either too vague to act on or too detailed to have been created without actually doing the implementation work.

The technical design is the map between the strategic decision and the practical work breakdown. It scopes the territory so that task decomposition can divide it.