🧭 Scenario · Make the call
The checkout that waits on slow side-jobs
The situation
When a shopper hits 'Buy', the checkout server does everything in one go: it charges the card, then sends a confirmation email, then tells a warehouse service to update inventory. The email and inventory services are slow and sometimes overloaded, so the shopper's request sits there waiting on them — and during busy sales the whole checkout times out, even though the payment itself already succeeded.
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?