> Making thoroughly informed decisions and iterating on a decision doc before committing to a direction and plan is better than every alternative I’ve ever observed in my career.

My last company did this. It usually devolved into a design-by-committee full of compromises to make various stakeholders happy and often yielded a worse artifact.

It became more effective once people got burnt out on the process and most stakeholders stopped caring and started rubber stamping, allowing the one or two people willing to put in the energy to come up with something coherent.