Andrej Koelewijn

Paul Buchheit has another good example why you shouldn’t completely design new products in design documents in his post Communicating with code:

From that day until launch, every new feature went live immediately, and most new ideas were implemented as soon as possible. This resulted in a lot of churn — we re-wrote the frontend about six times and the backend three times by launch — but it meant that we had direct experience with all of the features. A lot of features seemed like great ideas, until we tried them. Other things seemed like they would be big problems or very confusing, but once they were in we forgot all about the theoretical problems.

Designing new products is a learning process, you really need to test your ideas to get the best result.