Comment by sdeframond

I share your feelings.

Regarding design reviews, we used to have them at my current job. However we stopped doing both formal design documents and design reviews in favor of prototyping and iterative design.

The issue with the design phase is that we often failed to account for some important details. We spent considerable time discussing things and, when implementing, realized that we omitted some important detail or insight. But since we already invested that much time in the design phase, it was tempting to take shortcuts.

What's more, design reviews were not conducted by the whole team, since it would be counter-productive to have 10-more people in the same room. So we'd still discover things during code reviews.

And then not everyone is good at/motivated to producing good design documents.

In the end, I believe that any development team above 5 people is bound to encounter these kinds of inefficiencies. The ideal setup is to put 5 people in the same room with the PO and close to a few key users.