🧭 Scenario · Make the call
Two apps, one broken network link
The situation
A company runs its data on several machines in different cities. One day the network link between two of them breaks, so the machines can't talk to each other for a while — but users keep sending requests. The company runs two products on this setup: a BANK that shows account balances, and a SOCIAL FEED that shows friends' posts. The team has to decide how each product should behave while the machines are out of contact.
You haven't read about this exact system. That's the point — walk the three questions a designer asks: what's really wrong, what fixes it, and what does the fix cost?
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Diagnose
Read past the story. What's the REAL problem — not what the feature does, but what's actually going wrong?
Look past the story. What's the REAL problem here?