Practical Applications of System Design

Overview

There are two core benefits as your technical knowledge around system design grows:

1. Enhanced partnerships: Your ability to partner with cross-functional teams effectively will exponentially increase as you plan and manage risks with them.

2. Driving trade-off decisions: when design problems arise, you will be well-equipped to facilitate technical and challenging trade-off decisions.

Enhanced partnerships

Your knowledge of system design principles will amplify your ability to partner effectively with engineering and product managers. By understanding the technical requirements and constraints of a system, you can:

• Work with engineering managers and software engineers to ensure that the system is designed in a way that considers the many system design principles we previously covered.

• Work with product managers and designers to ensure that the system is designed to meet the business and user requirements.

• Work with legal or security to ensure the solution is designed to consider nuanced details around user safety and consent.

• Work with many other domain experts where their contributions are necessary to create a viable solution.

Planning and risk management

There are two primary areas where your technical depth will enable you to be a high-performing technical program manager through partnering with others:

1. Planning: You can identify the many cross-functional teams beyond engineering and product that need to be involved, such as legal and security. Doing this gives you the right inputs for a more realistic path forward.

2. Risk management: you can anticipate potential issues and plan for them ahead of time, reducing the likelihood of costly delays or failures.

For example, let's consider the principle of scalability.

Knowing how to design a system to scale ...