Design Enterprise Software

Use this skill when requirements include long-lived ownership, multiple teams, stable contracts, compatibility, migrations, SLOs, compliance, deployment safety, customization, or materially constrained scale. A small production CLI or one-team service does not activate it.

Start with concrete quality-attribute scenarios: stimulus, environment, measurable response, owner, and priority. Quantify users, requests/messages per second, data, writes, tenants, regions, deployments, and team boundaries when they matter. Identify authoritative owners, trust boundaries, consumers, compatibility window, and failure/recovery behavior. Compare the smallest structure with a more distributed/extensible alternative, including operating, migration, and cognitive costs.