🧭 Scenario · Make the call
The profile page that everyone loads
The situation
A celebrity's public profile page gets opened millions of times an hour. Building that page runs the same heavy database query every single time — joining posts, follower counts, and badges — and it always produces the exact same result, because the profile barely changes. The servers are melting under the load, even though almost everyone is asking for the identical page.
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?