Sometimes, putting a bit of thought and planning into your family design well lead to far better results than simply ‘diving in there’.  The following post shows a list of such requirements.  Essentially, you write a ‘brief’ for your family, and then seek to meet the requirements of that brief.

Example at this link

However, at times I do things the complete wrong way about – like modelling them inplace, then converting them to component families and trying to figure out the origin and constraints later on – very messy and definitely not best_practice 🙂