System-Design Thought-Process Deck
Twelve quick-hit cards that cover the core concurrent tracks senior engineers keep in mind when designing or building systems. Click a question to see the answer.
1. 1️⃣ Problem–Opportunity Framing: what’s the essence?
Restate the problem in business, user, and tech terms; get stakeholder buy-in and write one-sentence success criteria.
2. 2️⃣ Scenario & Constraint Surfacing: why bother?
Turns fuzzy goals into explicit SLIs/SLOs, limits, compliance rules, and edge-case scenarios that a design must satisfy.
3. 3️⃣ Quality-Attribute Radar: which ‘-ilities’ stay on the dashboard?
Scalability, reliability, operability, maintainability, evolvability, cost-efficiency, security—know which you’re privileging and why.
4. 4️⃣ Change-Resilience Thinking: what’s the tactic?
Identify high-churn areas early; create seams (interfaces, configs, feature flags) there while freezing stable cores behind clear contracts.
5. 5️⃣ Trade-off & Risk Ledger: what is it and why?
A lightweight record of options, decisions, and rationale so future teams understand ‘why we did it this way’ and can revisit when context shifts.
6. 6️⃣ Systems Thinking: how does it widen perspective?
Considers upstream/downstream systems, ops workflows, analytics, billing—preventing local optimisations that create global fragility.
7. 7️⃣ Operational Reality Check: key question?
"Can we run it at 3 a.m.?"—include instrumentation, health endpoints, safe rollout/rollback, capacity model from day one.
8. 8️⃣ Feedback Loop Design: what gets built in?
Feature flags, shadow traffic, A/B tests, error budgets, multi-layer tests, and CI/CD gates for rapid empirical learning.
9. 9️⃣ Developer-Experience Lens: why does DX matter?
Smooth builds, clear APIs, good docs multiply iteration speed and code ownership across the team.
10. 🔟 Ethics, Safety & Compliance: what’s the stance?
Treat security, privacy, accessibility, responsible AI as stop-the-line concerns—cannot be bolted on later.
11. 11️⃣ Communication & Narrative: secret weapon?
Clear storytelling (context → shape → phased rollout) plus diagrams that show data flow and failure modes align teams faster than perfect UML.
12. 12️⃣ Continuous Reflection & Craftsmanship: daily ritual?
Post-iteration checks: which tracks did we skip? Run micro-retros, code katas, design-debt reviews to sharpen judgment.