You are about to send someone a document, and the question underneath every one of these pages is the same: what happens to it once it leaves your hands. Who opens it, what they open it for, and what it has to hold up to before anything moves forward.
18 kinds today, each with its own reason to exist and its own way of being read. Pick the one you are sending, and see what it has to do once it leaves your hands.
The proposal is where the deal gets decided, and most of that decision is made around the price.
See what it has to doA quote answers a question someone already asked, so nearly everything in it needs to be a number, not an argument.
See what it has to doA scope of work exists to settle an argument before it starts, and the boundary only holds if both sides interpret it the same way.
See what it has to doA contract holds up only if a cross-reference still points at the right clause after the tenth edit.
See what it has to doAn architecture document is read by someone deciding whether the design holds up, and a diagram pasted in as a picture stops being true the moment the design changes.
See what it has to doTechnical documentation is read again and again, months after it was written, by someone who was not in the room when it was decided.
See what it has to doA requirements document earns its keep once a team starts arguing inside it instead of over it in another tab.
See what it has to doAn RFC is written to be argued with, and the argument only helps if it ends somewhere everyone can find again later.
See what it has to doA client report is not judged the day it arrives — it earns a look again next month, against whatever came before it.
See what it has to doA project overview has to hold an entire launch on one page without flattening it into a single line that hides which part is actually behind.
See what it has to doA roadmap gets seen outside the room it was written in, by people who were not there for the argument about what got cut.
See what it has to doAn onboarding document is opened once by someone who has never seen your process before, then kept somewhere they can find it again.
See what it has to doA meeting is only worth having if what got decided outlives the room it was decided in.
See what it has to doA runbook has to survive a 3 a.m. read, by someone who is not the person who wrote it and does not have time to guess.
See what it has to doA release note gets opened by someone deciding whether to upgrade, long after whoever wrote it has moved on to the next version.
See what it has to doAn RFP response is scored against a sheet neither side wrote — the buyer's own questionnaire — and an answer out of that sheet's order costs marks before its content is even weighed.
See what it has to doA one-pager gets exactly the two minutes between two meetings, and it either lands in that window or it does not.
See what it has to doAn investor update carries a number and a request in the same breath, and it goes to a list of people, not one reader deciding alone.
See what it has to doEvery document opens in the editor, ready to build and send.
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