Name: System Design Series: Taro Playlists [Part 8] - Breaking Down The Work And Timeline
Uploaded: 2022-10-25T07:11:29+00:00
Duration: 4 min 58 s
Description: You can find the full system design doc here - Feel free to use it as a template for when you are doing a system design

System Design Series: Taro Playlists [Part 8] - Breaking Down The Work And Timeline

You can find the full [system design doc here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15WaM8Ojan82g0m2mtz6kC2Hiyj0Q6VbjfqRmVNDI3qw/edit?usp=sharing) - Feel free to use it as a template for when you are doing a system design at your job!

The tactics are covered in the doc linked above, so this summary will focus on the "meta" context behind this part and additional commentary:

- Something Alex forgot to mention in this video is the "POCs" section, where POC = "Point of Contact".
  - Big projects will usually have a lot of stakeholders, so having this "people map" is very helpful for any project stakeholder to know who to direct their questions to for a certain aspect of the project (which are often about the timeline/milestones).
  - This small, humble section is *especially* relevant at FAANG/Big Tech where the range of responsibility holders is almost always huge for major projects.
- Decomposing work and breaking big projects down into smaller tasks is helpful for so many reasons:
  - It allows you to estimate the project far more accurately by increasing clarity.
  - It creates "swim-lanes" for more junior engineers as they now have smaller, clearer chunks of work as opposed to this giant, hulking ambiguous cloud of a project.
  - It makes it easy to understand project as you can now break clusters of tasks into groups and attach a milestone to each group.
- Don't just decompose the work: Try to sequence it into a logical order as well. For example, if you're building a CRUD feature, you probably want to prioritize the "Create" part as that's what everything stems from.

You can find the full system design doc here - Feel free to use it as a template for when you are doing a system design 

Alex worked at PayPal and then as a tech lead across Course Hero, Meta, and Robinhood. He's now building Taro, empowering software engineers to be happier and more effective.

System design is the process of determining the optimal high-level technical approach to a problem. It's a staple in both the interview process and actually doing your job as a software engineer. We have created a video series to act as a system design primer for software engineers.

Taro has a video series which serves as a system design primer for people new to system design

System design is a necessary process at software companies to design architectures that can be compatible with different requirements.