COD 2026-27

Every COD annual update is, on paper, the same exercise: read the new tech reference, diff the schema, update the import report mappings, retest. In practice it is the moment of the year where engineering, QA, implementation, and product all need to be looking at exactly the same row of exactly the same table at exactly the same time, or the cycle slips.

The hard part is almost never the requirement. The hard part is the communication. Getting twenty people on the same page about what changed, what stayed, what is cosmetic, and what is going to break a customer in production, that is the whole job.

So I built these. Five artifacts that turned the 26-27 COD cycle from a stack of PDFs into something people could actually point at. I shipped them to my team, and the feedback I got back was that this was what they were genuinely depending on during testing, not the spec.

Below are the artifacts, in roughly the order I would read them in if I were starting this cycle today.