System Design Basics for PMs

Summary

A light version of what engineers study deeply — knowing terms like load balancer, cache, and database replica well enough to follow (and question) an architecture discussion.

How to Learn This

1Watch a beginner-friendly system design explainer video (many free ones exist).
2Learn what a cache is for, in plain language, and why it can serve stale data.
3Practice asking 'what happens if this fails?' in an architecture conversation.

Databases 101 for PMs

Technical Debt

More topics in Technical Fluency for PMs

How APIs Work Client-Server Basics Databases 101 for PMs Technical Debt Working Effectively With Engineers Estimation & Trade-off Conversations Cloud & Infra Basics Latency, Scalability & Reliability Basics Reading a Technical Spec No-Code / Low-Code Tools for PMs

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