Building a culture of architectural decision records (ADRs)

We adopted Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) about a year ago for our core infrastructure services, and it's been pretty transformative. Before, critical design decisions were buried in Slack threads or confluence pages that no one could find, leading to a lot of 'why did we do this?' questions months later. Now, any significant architectural choice, like migrating from our custom RPC to gRPC or changing our global load balancing strategy, goes into an ADR. We keep them lightweight: context, decision, alternatives considered, and consequences. The biggest win was integrating them into our PR review process for architectural changes. It forces early thought and makes sure everyone on the team is aligned. Getting buy-in was key. We started with a few tech leads championing it, demonstrating the value by referencing old decisions. The main pushback was around what *really* counts as an architectural decision versus just a regular design choice. We settled on anything with significant impact on performance, reliability, cost, or long-term maintainability of core services. It's not perfect, but way better than before.