Free Lesson
How to Defend Any System Design Decision in 6 Questions
30 min
Apr 29, 2026 2:00 PM
Virtual (Zoom)
In this video
What you'll learn
Evaluate any system design decision in 30 minutes
Name the top 3 trade-offs, state what each gains and loses, and make a written recommendation — on the spot
Write an ADR a VP can read without engineering context
Produce a one-page Architecture Decision Record that a non-technical stakeholder can follow and act on.
Run a back-of-envelope capacity estimate from scratch
Calculate users, requests/sec, storage, and bandwidth — and
use the numbers to find where a design breaks.
Choose the right database and defend it with trade-offs
Pick between relational, document, key-value, or specialist stores and give a real recommendation, not "it depends."
Match architectural style to team size and product stage
Identify whether monolith, microservices, or event-driven fits this context, and explain why the alternatives are worse
Why this topic matters
Most senior engineers are blocked not by what they know — but by what they can't articulate. They make good design decisions intuitively, but can't document the reasoning, lead the review, or defend the trade-offs to a VP. That gap is exactly what keeps people at Senior. Architecture isn't a knowledge test. It's a communication and decision-making discipline — and it's learnable.
