Enough of a systems mental model to know which requests are cheap, which are expensive, and why, without pretending to be an engineer. Deliberately stops at the point where understanding stops changing your decisions.
| # | Lesson | The question it answers | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | How a Request Actually Travels | Client, API, service, database, cache: what is the mental model? | ✅ |
| 02 | APIs for Product Managers | How does the shape of an API constrain the product you can build on it? | ✅ |
| 03 | Data Models: Why Schema Is Product | What does a schema permit, and what does it permanently forbid? | |
| 04 | Latency and Where Time Goes | Which fixes are cheap, and which are architecture? | |
| 05 | Caching, and What It Breaks | What does a cache buy, and what does it cost in correctness? | |
| 06 | Auth, Identity and Permissions | Why are the features enterprise asks for so expensive? | |
| 07 | Jobs, Queues and Things That Happen Later | What changes when work is asynchronous? | |
| 08 | Scale, and When It Actually Matters | Which scale conversations are real at your size? | |
| 09 | Reliability, Incidents and Error Budgets | What should a product manager do during an outage? | |
| 10 | Data Pipelines and Why Your Numbers Disagree | Where do the two dashboards diverge? | |
| 11 | Security Basics You Are Expected to Know | What do you need to understand to not be dangerous? | |
| 12 | What “It Is Hard” Means | What are the five reasons engineers say no, and which are negotiable? |