[linkage]

Generally sound advice, if elementary.

However, making money is not an engineering problem. My previous employer 5x’ed their revenue with a largely feature-complete Rails application by hiring a kick-ass marketing team and actually looking at the usage analytics to tweak small things like form structure, the on-boarding flow, etc. The system design solves problems like scaling performance, avoiding tech debt, scaling headcount (microservices let multiple teams work on the code in parallel), and providing resilience, all of which have business value that is harder to quantify as easily.

[belZaah]

The function of a system is what adds value to someone. The form is what incurs costs. These both are part of your system architecture. Thus, if your architecture is badly done, there is nothing left over between value added and cost and the organization cannot make money.

It is of course true, that the whole organization is the money-making system. Thus I find it jarring people talking about system design and assuming software by default.