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Gregg brune system designer code#

Now you just need to get everyone on board. So inevitably you reach the point where you think you have something you’re happy with. “You need to create the scaffolding for how you want your stakeholders to interrogate the system design” You want to figure all that out at the very start. You don’t want to realize you’ve all been singing from different hymn sheets several months into building something, and then take on an expensive course correction. The goal is to hammer out these differences early on, while doing so is still cheap. It’s difficult because it forces you to resolve ambiguity, ferret out unknown unknowns, get super-specific about how the system will work, and agree on it all. All of the things that make a canonical system design difficult to nail down are the reasons it’s worth doing. Herein lies the very point of doing this work. Once people start thinking in systems, they see how everything’s connected, which naturally leads them to add more and more scope “because, like, everything’s connected, man!” *exhales, coughs* Scope creep: We expect too much of the system and believe that it should resolve all product problems.

Gregg brune system designer code#

Divergent mental models: Designers may naturally tend towards thinking in terms of layouts or user flows, Engineers in terms of code architecture, PMs in terms of value delivered.Pursuit of a “perfect” system: You lose yourself in designing the system as an end in itself, where the goal becomes inherent elegance or cleverness rather than practical value.Subjective preferences: Everyone disagrees over whose personal vision of the system represents the best or truest version.Here are some common challenges you might encounter:

Getting to that point, however, can be tough. And most importantly, the team needs to get aligned on what we’re building. So you need to be able to diagram those ideas out. It can also be hard just holding a clear picture of a complex system in your head. What’s more, most products that require this level of mapping can get complicated quickly. But language can be slippery: what I’m thinking and what you’re thinking may be significantly different, even though we’re using similar language. You might think you can dodge this hard bit and just quickly talk it through instead. But the ultimate output is almost always the same: a clear diagram illustrating objects and the relationships between them.Īn example of system design for part of Intercom Given that it might be another while until any of us sees a whiteboard again, tools like Miro are a great digital alternative.

Interconnections: How are the elements connected? What are the relationships? What are their inputs and outputs?Ĭreating this map is often an emergent process that happens collaboratively at a whiteboard (still the best tool there is for creating system designs: quick and dirty, modifiable, collaborative, and impossible to get lost in details).

Elements: What are the core elements or objects in the system?.

As we’ve written before, a good system design defines the following: In practice, system design work usually takes the form of a diagram: boxes and arrows describing the main parts of the product, and how they all connect to each other. However, I think you can break it down into relatively simple terms. This is why many of us struggle with this stage. Maybe I’m asking for trouble here: I’ve chosen to write about what is probably the most abstract part of the entire design process, that of forming conceptual ideas and trying to inject a picture of those ideas into a colleague’s brain. But it’s also incredibly valuable: it forces everyone into a shared common understanding before embarking on the process of building. System design, then, is an act of creative cartography – it is like creating a map in advance of creating the territory. “System design forces everyone into a shared common understanding before embarking on the process of building” After all, how do you go about mapping something that doesn’t even exist yet? This sounds simple, but can be incredibly challenging in practice. What you need to create is a clear overview of the system you’re all about to build – you need system design (not to be confused with a design system). Mess it up, and you could find yourself quickly marching your team off a cliff. The start of any journey begins with consulting a map.īut if you’re a product designer starting out on a new project, you might find yourself with a blank page, and the job of drawing the map: of defining the high-level design direction that your team is going to use to chart their course.