Skip to content
Sadra Raadfar
System design

A system, drawn one decision at a time.

Scroll, and the diagram builds itself: a raw signal becomes a shaped record, a scored decision, an action in every tool, and finally a loop that improves its own rules.

Scroll to begin ↓

SIGNALINTAKESCHEMADEDUPEENRICHCLASSIFYSCOREGATEHUMANCRMROUTEREPLYLEDGERINSIGHTLOOP
00

A signal arrives

Every system starts as an event: a form, a message, a webhook, a row. Unstructured until you name it.

Design principles

What separates a system from a set of automations.

01

Idempotence

Every action can run twice without doing damage. Retries are the normal case, not the exception.

02

Explicit state

A record is always in a named state. Nothing lives in an inbox or in someone's memory.

03

Confidence gates

Models propose, thresholds decide, humans handle the tail. Uncertainty is routed, not hidden.

04

Observability

If you can't see volume, latency and failure per node, you don't have a system yet.

05

Reversibility

Anything automated can be undone: a ledger entry, a compensating action, an audit trail.

06

Feedback

Flagged edge cases rewrite upstream rules. The diagram is a loop, never a line.

The seven stages
  1. 00

    A signal arrives

    Every system starts as an event: a form, a message, a webhook, a row. Unstructured until you name it.

  2. 01

    Give it a shape

    Schema and identity come first. Validation and de-duplication decide what counts as one real thing.

  3. 02

    Add what's missing

    Enrichment, classification and scoring turn a record into something a rule can reason about.

  4. 03

    Decide, or ask

    A gate is where the system commits. Below the confidence threshold, a human stays in the loop.

  5. 04

    Act in every tool

    CRM upserts, routing and replies fire in parallel — idempotent, so a retry never doubles the work.

  6. 05

    Write it down

    A ledger of what happened and why. Without it there is automation, but no system.

  7. 06

    Feed it back

    Insight rewrites the rules upstream. The diagram closes on itself and starts improving.

Want your process drawn like this — then built?