Understanding Internal RFCs in a Company Setting
An internal Request for Comments (RFC) is a structured proposal document used within organisations to facilitate thoughtful decision-making on technical or architectural changes. While inspired by the IETF RFC process, internal RFCs are adapted to suit a company's specific culture, workflows, and pace of iteration.
Purpose
Internal RFCs serve several key functions:
- Communication: They enable clear articulation of complex ideas or changes, ensuring all relevant stakeholders are aligned on intent and implications.
- Transparency: By documenting proposed changes in a central, reviewable format, RFCs promote visibility across teams and avoid siloed decision-making.
- Consensus Building: RFCs allow feedback from multiple perspectives, often leading to better-informed, more robust solutions.
- Documentation: Once finalised, RFCs become a permanent part of the technical record, useful for onboarding, audits, and future iterations.
Typical Structure
A company RFC generally includes the following elements:
- Title and Summary: A clear, concise overview of what the RFC proposes.
- Motivation: The problem statement and rationale behind the proposal.
- Proposal: Detailed explanation of the suggested solution, including diagrams, data models, and pseudocode if needed.
- Alternatives Considered: Brief evaluation of other approaches and reasons for rejection.
- Impact Assessment: Technical, operational, and organisational implications, including migration paths and risks.
- Reviewers and Approvals: A list of contributors and stakeholders who need to review or sign off.
Process
The RFC process typically follows these stages:
- Drafting: An engineer, architect, or team authors a draft based on an identified need.
- Circulation: The draft is shared for feedback — often via version-controlled documents or internal platforms like Confluence or Git repositories.
- Review and Iteration: Feedback is collected and revisions are made collaboratively.
- Approval: Once consensus is reached, the RFC is accepted and scheduled for implementation, or shelved with rationale.
- Archival: The finalised RFC is archived for future reference.
Benefits
When embedded effectively into a company's culture, RFCs drive better technical outcomes by encouraging deliberate design, collective ownership, and institutional memory. They are particularly valuable in distributed or fast-scaling environments, where alignment and clarity become more challenging.