and How to Avoid Them…
Why this matters:
Good solution design isn’t about how technical or clever a system is – it’s about solving the right problem, the right way, with clarity, maintainability, and business value at the core.
But even smart teams make painful (and often expensive) design mistakes.
In this post, I’ll break down the most common solution design mistakes, based on real experiences – and show you how to avoid them, with practical advice and battle-tested lessons.
Mistake 1 – Solving the Wrong Problem
The Mistake:
Jumping to solutions before clearly understanding what the business or user truly needs.
Real Example:
In a financial services project, the business insisted on building a data lake for advanced analytics. Architects scoped the storage, pipelines, and dashboards.
Months later, after tens of thousands were spent – the actual user need?
“We just wanted cleaner reports for our monthly compliance meeting.”
A structured data warehouse and improved SQL models would’ve sufficed.
How to Avoid It:
- Spend time in discovery and requirements gathering.
- Ask why repeatedly.
- Map business outcomes to technical solutions — not the other way around.
Mistake 2 – Overengineering for an Imaginary Future
The Mistake:
Designing for scale or complexity you might need in 5 years, but that adds friction today.
Real Example:
One team built a microservices architecture with container orchestration… for a product that had under 500 users.
The maintenance overhead, deployment complexity, and cost outpaced any value for years.
How to Avoid It:
- Build for where you are, with an eye on the future – but don’t design for “Amazon scale” on day one.
- Use scalable patterns, not overkill tools.
- Document where you might scale later and make that part of the roadmap, not today’s design.
Mistake 3 – Bad Assumptions in Integration
The Mistake:
Assuming third-party systems behave a certain way – and designing based on those guesses.
Real Example:
A payments platform integrated with a bank assuming their API returned instant confirmations.
In reality, responses were delayed and batched, leading to failed real-time status updates and angry customers.
How to Avoid It:
- Always test and verify external system behaviour.
- Mock integrations and simulate failure modes.
- Treat integrations like contracts – include assumptions, timeouts, retries, and fallbacks in your design.
Mistake 4 – No Design Handoff or Ownership
The Mistake:
Solution diagrams and architecture decisions live in one person’s head – or worse, get lost in Slack or a whiteboard photo.
Real Example:
In one handover, the dev team had to reverse-engineer architecture because there was:
- No updated diagram
- No documentation on design choices
- No access to the architect who had moved to another team
It delayed delivery by 6 weeks.
How to Avoid It:
- Document early and often – decisions, diagrams, constraints.
- Use collaborative tools like Lucidchart, Miro, or Whimsical.
- Make the design a shared artifact, not a siloed file.
Mistake 5 – Ignoring Non-Functional Requirements
The Mistake:
Focusing on features and forgetting performance, availability, security, and maintainability.
Real Example:
An e-commerce app crashed during its first big sale because no one planned for load or caching. Devs were fixing outages while customers churned.
How to Avoid It:
- Include NFRs in your initial design scope.
- Ask: “How secure? How fast? How reliable?”
- Document and prioritize trade-offs – not every app needs 99.999% uptime, but if it does, design for it.
Final Checklist: Design Smarter
Here’s a quick design checklist to keep your next solution on track:
- Have I validated the problem with the right stakeholders?
- Am I designing for today’s needs – not fantasy scale?
- Have I tested assumptions (especially integrations)?
- Is my design documented, accessible, and explained? Have I covered security, performance, and reliability?
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